Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Though its attempt to get from Grimes to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan via a comedy bit from Stephen Fry and Catherine Tate doing a Shakespeare soliloquy suggests there are still a few bugs in the mix.

A few months ago ledge asked why "Never Let Me Down Again" was missing from Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses (in the UK). It took a few tries to get the label to fix this, but it finally worked!

Triumphantly: https://open.spotify.com/album/5Yyx661Ksxl2pmRUuGLzw3

Awesome. I knew you wouldn't let me down.

I think this might be a Rick roll

Obviously the alternative was to just tell you to enjoy the silence.

http://www.classicalite.com/articles/28710/20151001/vulfpeck-album-sleepify-spotify-loophole-earn-20000.htm

Everything counts.

This looks cool: https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/08/05/release-radar-your-personalized-playlist-of-the-newest-releases/

Not sure why Elvis showed up on mine this week, though. :P

Man back in the day

I love the 30 discovery

I got Elvis in my Release Radar, too. And Tom Odell, which is even more baffling. That said, 7 out 30 were useful discoveries, which isn't too bad. (Ex-Easter Island Head, yay.) Way too many remixes, though: 12 out of 30.

Yeah, seems like the release radar is going to be full of remixes (or in one case on mine, an instrumental version of a single), re-releases of old material (mine had a 1989 Rose Royce album show up as a 2016 release), and songs by unrelated artists with the same name. But that might just depend on what types of music you listen to as well.. Also my list only had 22 tracks instead of 30.

On the other hand, I'm really digging this new song by The Preatures that showed up on my radar that I didn't know about.

Weird, I was just thinking about The Preatures yesterday. Didn't think to look if there was anything new.

It's an improvement over "get alerts by email" but it's still an inexact instrument - what happens if more than 30 artists I've listened to release something?

I got an acapella version of a Charly Black single, lol. I love the idea of this but it needs some tweaking.

So if I play a song on Spotify that I also have as a local file on my computer, does it stream the song or does it play the local version?

I had some Steve Miller song come up in one of my Weekly Playlists. But it started off with some weird movie audio that a friend had put on a mixtape/mp3-folder I downloaded a few years ago.

I don't think there's some soundtrack where my friend got the track with audio, like how they do that sometimes on movie soundtracks, but maybe he did.

glenn, i notice from some of the 2014 ilx lists that songs that have come and gone from the service are dutifully recatalogued within albums as they are put in the stacks. Is that done by algorithm or does somebody handmatch those as needed?

That happens automatically. We can match the audio across releases, so at least for simple right-changing issues it should work.

nice.

Hey Glenn - Just wanted to say thanks for your everynoise thing. I haven't been DJing for years (turntables in the basement, etc.), but recently got a copy of DJay for iPad (with Spotify integration), and have been fooling around with it. Your site is like a gigantic DJ record store, and the new additions (Edge and Pulse) are a joy to browse!

glenn do u use t-SNE to make the everynoise genre map? it looks familiar

No. It's not a dimensionality reduction, it's a scatter-plot. With a lot of fiddly code that nudges things around until they mostly aren't on top of each other.

schwantz: cool! Thanks, and you're welcome.

encountered my first pair of unrelated artists, but it turns out I like both sweeping French country-folk and late-'90s alt-rock that sounds exactly like "You're Not the One."

Ha. Which pair?

Blanche. (There's at least one other artist by the name I'm ignoring for these purposes.)

Looks like we have stuff by 4 different artists by that name: a couple 90s/2000 albums by a Toronto band, a couple mid-2000s records by the Detroit alt-country band, a Belgian band with an EP and single from a couple years go, and a new one from Italy.

I think I got them disentangled.

if we're reporting multiple artists under one name there's two very confusing cybotrons, aussie proggers and detroit techno lads.

is this where I mention that I perversely almost don't want this fixed because it tricks people into hearing new music

I was going to complain about my band, Bison, have to share an artist page with a shitty metal band with the same name, but it looks like that's been fixed.

Yeah, the other Bison complained about you first.

[JOKE! Just a joke.]

Bear up, Bison!

I fixed the Cybotrons, too.

Not to pile on but there are a few different Bats on the same page.

Is the "library" feature going to become useful at some point? I added some stuff to it over two years ago when it was introduced and eventually I wasn't able to add anything at all to it. Now it gives me an "epic collection, friend!" message whenever I try to add something new to it, even when I delete a few albums first.

it won't be long now before Spotify runs out of tracks on Jim Sullivan's U.F.O. to recommend to me.

Further on the interstellar note, this week it also gave me an intriguing track off Sonny & The Sunsets Antenna to the Afterworld.

And further on the Light In The Attic esoterica tip, I really enjoyed the Donnie and Joe Emerson track it recommended to me last year.

I have been recommended Jim Sullivan and D and J Emerson too.

Spotify loves to recommend me Chris Spedding for some reason. I really don't know why. (But I don't mind.)

haha same here! (Re: spedding)

I got Chris Spedding too!

Ha, had to check but it seems like I only ever got Chris Spedding once, "Video Life." Maybe Spotify knew I had seen him a couple of times live. I did get a couple of Nils Lofgren tracks recently. Wondered if it was related to his "Purple Rain" solo.

I have neither gotten Chris Spedding nor a promising ratio of vowels to band names

Really love the "release radar" playlist - way higher ratio of things I'm interested in than the Discover playlist, likely because it's mostly made up of artists I've made a point to follow, or listen to regularly - not trying to get me into something I don't know, just trying to keep me up with stuff I do know.

I made a point of grabbing everything on the playlist last week, expecting it to change over on Friday... but it didn't. It says it's updated every Friday but as far as I can tell nothing changed.

Know what you mean.

Okay, actually maybe I am more into the DW than the RR, which today repeated at least a half dozen artists from last week.

Don't think my RR just updates on Friday. It seems to add new tracks as they come along, and then loses some older ones at the end, so the number of tracks stays roughly at 30?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-26/spotify-said-to-retaliate-against-artists-with-apple-exclusives

Spotify has been retaliating against musicians who introduce new material exclusively on rival Apple Music by making their songs harder to find, according to people familiar with the strategy. Artists who have given Apple exclusive access to new music have been told they won’t be able to get their tracks on featured playlists once the songs become available on Spotify, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing the steps.

Digital exclusives are ridiculous. For an industry who claims to hate piracy, they do plenty to encourage it.

yeah, and it's a bit hard for apple to claim it's pro-consumer when it uses exclusives to bolster its music service. in no way does that benefit the consumer.

honestly I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner

yeah, balkanization seemed inevitable.