Spotify - anyone heard of it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk

this is probably a good idea re music hoarding in general. i wish i were enlightened enough to act on my common sense but it's obv that 99.9% of the music i have on hard drives i'm never going to listen to again so why do i have it exactly?

If you're gonna pay, 10 bucks isn't too expensive, imo. It's the allure of something being free that keeps people from signing up for a plan.

IFTTT do a bunch of things that allow you to export playlists which will update as you create more or add to extant ones. I export everything to Google Drive.

I do wish they'd stop recommending me Doug Hream Blunt. Every bloody Discover Weekky playlist.

I think the authors of the article should have suggested a "everything but country music and rap" subscription. Either way, I'm sure it would be completely trivial to implement.

Lol

i don't want to be dramatic but re-recordings are the worst thing in the universe, ban them from spotify and stop them from infiltrating our oldies playlists

i have been copying my playlists to a notepad file once every six months, seems appropriately careful

http://joellehman.com/playlist/

nice, but it only pulls my first 20 playlists?

Same here

I've had to give up on the Release Radar thing because it wouldn't show up properly in my Playlist folder on my Marantz box (in fact, it would either show up as "By" and be empty or be missing entirely and cause the box to pause for 30sec when accessing Playlists). I'm sure it's a Marantz shortcoming - it's an old bit of hardware now (there's a newer device which supports Spotify Connect for example) and maybe there's something about dynamic updates to Release Radar (as opposed to Discover Weekly, which is fine) which locks it up. I do 90% of my Spotify listening on the Marantz service as AirPlay from my phone can be glitchy and I don't have unlimited data on my mobile plan (so I stick to offline stuff outside of the house).

Doug Hream Blunt - yep, all the time. Good Jan Hammer Group track this week, mind.

Got all excited about Roy Montgomery in my Release Radar but then it turned out to be: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MC_rBBAiC2Y/maxresdefault.jpg

Recent Release Radar Repeat Recommendations:
The Chills
The Monkees
The Moles
The Rationals
Dinosaur Jr.

And just for good measure this Friday they recommended a song called "Chills" by The Moles.

Yeah, Release Radar had a new song by Keith Hudson with a picture of buds as the cover. Turned out to be another guy named Keith Hudson who is awful. There aughta be a law!

Actually the first song in mine this week was by a ringer too, a group called Patto that was not the bluesy prog rock band featuring Ollie Halsall and John Halsey.

"Release Radar" is the first recommender that is working for me. Unsurprisingly, I have literally thousands of 'starred' songs, so spotify has a good sense of which artists I've listened to quite a bit and it also knows what music by those artists I haven't listened to on Spotify. The result is a playlist with music from TI, Young Thug, Carly Rae, Wara from the NBHD, St Paul and the Broken Bones, Alkaline, Bibio, Zomby, De La, Sevyn Streeter, Z-Ro, Against Me, Dolly Parton and Dawn. Can't argue with this. Only thing I take issue with is that I can't remove tracks so I gotta make a separate list to edit.

Got all excited about Roy Montgomery in my Release Radar but then it turned out to be: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MC_rBBAiC2Y/maxresdefault.jpg🔗

What is happening here? Spotify is advertising Spotify Film, which doesn't exist? https://www.reddit.com/r/spotify/comments/50yv45/i_found_an_advertisement_on_the_app_promoting/

Note: To send something direct to someone’s Spotify inbox on mobile, you must each have your accounts connected to, and be friends on, Facebook. Here’s how.

wtf, facebook is eating everything in its path. i'm sure i remember sending playlists to friends before, maybe it was on desktop. either way it's garbage. I presume spotify want everyone connected to facebook so everyone else on facebook can see how cool and popular spotify is.

sharing with non-Facebook friends in Spotify has always been at least partially broken

Can't you just copy the link and send it by whatever non Facebook means you choose?

you can (and i do) but it would be nice to have it all in-app

speaking of this sort of thing, apple music doesn't allow any means i'm aware of to share a song AT ALL via email, twitter or within apple music, which in 2016 is a little o_O

Fucking facebook. I had to create an account to even get spotify in the first place. Would love to decouple them now that's no longer required, but suspect it's impossible.

brother and I text playlists to each other and that works well. (He is not on facebook).

I never read spotify mail, so this actually works better.

I've been really liking the Release Radar list lately, it does a good job of letting me know when artists I like have new stuff available

Anyone else spotted the Daily Mix? Mine's just chucked Stroke it Noel and Crosby & Nash's Southbound Train at me. Auspicious beginnings...

yeah, I've liked this feature so far. It basically gives a bunch of playlists, each one focused on one of my favorite genres and associated artists plus some new stuff. There are a couple lists that I'd love to swap out for something a little different, but in general it's a nice, easy way to jump into a particular vibe that I enjoy without going to far into a bunch of stuff that I'm unfamiliar with.

Just played around with this: https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/29/pacemaker-editable-mixtapes-dj/

Very cool, but the UI is confusing to me so far (as with many Apple Design Award-winners!).

in general, it seems like spotify is doing a better job of lining up lists that are well targeted at the music I actually want to hear. I think a big part of that for me is focusing on familiar music from my own playlists and then sprinkling in a few new things here and there.

haven't gotten it yet but am skeptical of "like shuffling your winamp, with a few random tracks thrown in"

Yeah, it depends what you want out of it. I don't enjoy lists of all new to me stuff, I still want to hear all my favorites.

Wait is the Daily Mix a new algorithm? I searched and find a few playlists with that name or similar compiled by individuals.

I only see it on my android app, not on the desktop app so far. I do Home, then Your Library, and it appears right at the top of the screen above Playlists.

Ah, I just updated iPhone app and see. I see five such Daily Mixes, numbered 1 to 5, a rock one with Big Star, The Velvets, The Modern Lovers, The Band, a funk/R&B one, a jazz one, and two others I don't know the theme of, one featuring Jane Weaver's "The Silver Globe" and one with all tracks and artists completely unfamiliar to me.

Ah, so today, all the playlists have pretty much exactly the same artists as far as I can tell but different tunes.

nobody feels like talkin about the mooted SoundCloud takeover?

something like this feels sort of inevitable - despite the vast amounts of money poured into human and algorithmic playlist-making, Spotify is at heart a reseller. A box store. Like Netflix. Where the playlist discovery mechanisms are Spotify's equivalents of Netflix originals. But both services are basically resellers. SoundCloud is the opposite, it's the YouTube of audio. if Spotify can sort out the rights issues (SoundCloud basically gave up on this several years ago afaict) it's not hard to imagine Spotify suddenly becoming one of the biggest indie "labels" overnight.

But if it's not that, then I'm not sure that an extra layer of artist connectivity schmear / demo areas is going to set them apart? Apple Connect has been abysmal. Maybe I'm not seeing what they're seeing tho

This was the most sensible thing I read about it: http://www.recode.net/2016/9/28/13101740/spotify-sound-cloud-deal-makes-sense

it all seems to boil down to "spotify buys a bunch of MAUs" which doesn't seem that "strategic" imo

Pop stat nerd question for Glenn: what are the artist's 'top five' songs based on? I assumed it was number of plays, but over in songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller , we're talking about the Pretenders... the top five seem to be ranked in order of plays, with the #5 song ("Holy Commotion") reports around 44,000 plays, but if you expand it out to the top 10, or scroll down to the albums and start mousing over stats, it becomes apparent there are many with more views, like "2000 Miles" with 6,220,016, or "middle of the Road" with 1,581,639.

So just out of curiosity - - - is the 'top five' algorithm designed to bake in some kind of variety, pushing lesser-heard songs to the fore? Recently-trending stuff? Stuff Spotify is delivering in Discover Weekly or other playlists? Countless ILM stat-nerd threads could depend on this information!

it's absurd for spotify to recommend me things i've already listened to

Maybe you didn't listen the right way

The "Popular" songs show raw play-counts in the UI, but are actually ranked based on an internal score that measures, roughly, "current" popularity...

Brimstead: where are you getting recs for things you've already played?

Glenn, thanks! That makes sense.

I moved to another country for a year and just tried to start a family account but it's not working. My geo-sniffed country and the credit card country aren't the same, and it's blocking my family members from signing up. I was so ready to give Spotify another £5 a month!

Tracer, SpotifyCares can fix that for you...