Spotify - anyone heard of it?

to balance my earlier gripes I want to note my discover weekly has been excellent lately

No idea why but the web player is back to it's old good self today.

Glenn, on the artists page, why do some acts have only 4 related artists and others 6 or 7? Seems totally random as some super obscure acts have 7 links, when mainstream acts have 4 and even similar acts (The Jam - 4:Paul Weller - 7) have this disparity.

hmm... I get 20 related artists for the Jam

I guess you mean the "overview" page?

Yeah, if I click on the related artists link then I get the full whack.

Just a layout thing: If the artist has a Latest Release, the Related Artists section expands to match the combined height of the Latest Release and Popular sections.

Oh yeah, obvious in hindsight. As a listening strategy I like to pick a couple of artists and try to get to them using only the relate artist link and found it frustrating that a lot only had 4 choices.

so after several weeks of my playlists not loading on the Roku App, Spotify "fixed" this by just removing playlists from the app altogether. What the hell is even the point anymore? Each new change has been a progressively worse product. I jumped into a premium subscription as soon as it was available and have been a power user since then, and it's been sad and frustrating to watch it slide downhill.

What the hell is even the point anymore? Each new change has been a progressively worse product.

see also: every computer program or app ever made, it seems

that may be true, but this seems like a particularly egregious case. When it was first released in the US, it worked like a dream. It seems that the changes they've put in place were designed specifically to undermine or remove all of the coolest features. I don't get why they'd do that, is there some kind of money to be saved?

wait is that for real? new versions of Spotify no longer have playlists? holy shit.

new version of the spotify roku app

*slowly puts down gun*

still that's shitty as hell

i'm still sore that they haven't restored good local files functionality to the program. my osx client spotify version is from 2014! that's the last time it worked the way i want it to.

Yes, the local files situation is pretty bad. Also pissed that the Android app removed Play All button from folders. It was the only way to group together playlists in cool configurations or get >10,000 tracks in a list.

new version of the spotify roku app

― Moodles, Tuesday, March 21, 2017 2:05 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the roku app has always sucked

this goes for most roku apps afaict

It's never been great, but I used it a lot. It's pretty much worthless without playlists.

Other roku apps I use, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, YouTube, Twitch, all do pretty much what I'd expect them to. They certainly aren't hopelessly hosed.

Well, I tried to put Spotify on my Roku to see what you were talking about, but I can't even find it in the Channel Store...

update to spotify portion of sonos app seems to have made switching between family plan accounts easier :-)

xp

Which roku do you have?

https://channelstore.roku.com/details/19977/spotify

the roku playlists thread on the spotify community page has been very active, dozens of posts every day, lots of very pissed off people

Forget where the general streaming music thread is, but this story is of interest:

https://gizmodo.com/streaming-music-services-from-most-screwed-to-least-sc-1793612699

Oh no, Pono!

I'd love to see one ranking music services from most fucked up apps to most functional

Deezer is doomed for sure. I've actually got Deezer Premium which comes free with my landline, and as a streaming platform it's no worse than Spotify. The desktop client is better than Spotify's (although local music is still pretty shit), the mobile clients are well-designed and stable, the web player is good, the Flow suggestion-engine is pretty good too. It does the basics right.

Problem is, beside a shitload of Frenchies who get it rammed down their throat with their mobile/landline service, nobody else is on it so the whole social aspect and subscribing to cool curated/collaborative playlists is pretty much a no-go. At the first opportunity I'll drop it for Spotify Premium, and I'm pretty sure everyone else feels the same. Six million subscribers looks impressive, but if your business relies on bundling/force-feeding and nobody would otherwise consider the product, you're doomed, just as much as RealPlayer, Google+ and Hangouts.

I've worked on at least three of those services, two which are already kaput and pono, #1 most likely to die. (And a couple of others they don't mention. Rara for one)

Such things are hard. A lot of companies think they'd like to have their own offering, but getting a big enough foothold to make it pay is difficult, especially given the existence of Spotify.

I was there when they turned off the servers serving pono content. They were switching to 7 digital, I think. Shocked that the website is non functional 8 months later. Would kind of like a pono T-shirt though.

poor pono

is the function letting you share songs via a message in spotify gone? had a lot of long-running threads exchanging tunes with pals on there and can't seem to do it anymore. always seemed like the social elements of spotify were kind of buggy/always changing etc

it is curious how bad the social elements are. they are the market leaders and they cannot figure out how to make it easy for people to find their friends and share music with them, and don't appear to even want to. even though it would increase lock-in. increase playbacks. etc. just weird.

I usually share with sms, and it is easy

i envision a news-feed like thing with listening/charts, comments, collaborative playlists, etc. and last.fm has kinda fallen off a bit since the redesign, one would think they'd hop on that and co-opt most of those features especially as a lot of people migrate to streaming platforms

admittedly spotify sort of has elements of all of these things but they're mostly pretty undercooked or constantly changing/disappearing/etc

I shared via SMS just the other day. Pretty sure it's still there.

A chat function within Spotify where you could share links to songs, playlists, etc with friends would be fucking awesome. Did it used to have that?

I think they want that to be called "Facebook"

how, though? i recall it used to post to FB now and then with what you were listening to but the integration has diminished a lot

and i think sharing songs used to be in the FB messaging feature

I liked that feature, but I'm guessing FB users didn't like their news feeds getting spammed with friends' listening details.

A chat function within Spotify where you could share links to songs, playlists, etc with friends would be fucking awesome. Did it used to have that?

― Position Position, Tuesday, March 28, 2017 4:38 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yes. i didn't use it too often but it ruled in the moments i did

c'mon who would want to share music with their friends

why would you listen to music other than to broadcast your taste to everyone xxp

in reality i know 0 people who broadcast their taste, I only know a few ppl who even discuss/mention things theyve been listening to, so self-consciousness about this is p alien to my real life

It would be good if there was a tab that would let you go directly to singles, albums or Appears On right at the top. Some artists I follow, like Vybz Kartel, release an insane amount of music and just scrolling down to see if there's a new riddim he's on (which would go under «appears on») takes me minutes, lol.

You can get a little closer to that effect if you switch the Albums and Singles displays to the grid style.

I've already done that, lol. Just go to the Vybz Kartel Spotify page to see for yourself. There are others, but his is the worst.

Oh. Yeah, pretend I didn't say anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/04/spotify-universal-albums-premium-subscribers-only