Spotify - anyone heard of it?

what's this dragging things from the desktop?? you people are nuts

U gotta triple-click the icons

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/27153101

Spotify has taken down a album of silence by American funk band Vulfpeck from its streaming site.

Their fourth record, Sleepify, is 10 tracks of silence which they encouraged fans to stream on repeat overnight.

The idea was aimed at generating money so that the band could go on tour and not charge admission fees.

On their Facebook page, they announced that they had been asked to remove the album because it broke Spotify's terms of content.

The band's keyboard player and drummer Jack Stratton says he asked his father for advice when he got the request.

"He said, 'Don't mess with these guys, they're huge.'

"But that's the whole narrative. We're just these little guys in their billion dollar scheme.

"So I get pumped up but then it's like, 'Don't mess with them.'"

Spotify has refused to comment.

The company recently said it pays an average of $0.007 per play, according to figures on its website Spotify Artists which is aimed specifically at musicians.

Explaining its business model, Spotify said it had paid more than $1bn (£612m) in royalties since its 2008 launch.

Vulfpeck's response to Spotify's removal of Sleepify also includes a three-track EP, posted on the streaming site, called Official Statement.

The first track, #Hurt, includes a message from Jack Stratton which says: "About 5 minutes ago I received an email from Spotify.

"The gist of it was that, while they enjoy Sleepify and thought it was funny and clever, it violated their terms of content.

"So I don't know what's going to happen with it - it's very uncertain at the moment.

"And in light of that uncertainly I want to take 30 seconds silence to ponder the uncertainty."

The message is then followed by, #Reflect, which is 31 seconds of silence and Parted Sea (Strong Pesach), which is an instrumental keyboard track.

10 tracks of silence which they encouraged fans their friends to stream on repeat overnight.

"We're just the little guys trying to game the system."

these guys got NPR coverage for this thing weeks ago

Not to mention ILX coverage!

which makes it real imo

Just play any album with the speakers off for fucksake

> these guys got NPR coverage for this thing weeks ago

That was for putting the album up, this is for Spotify issuing a takedown. Which counts as news imo

i meant that the npr stories probably brought their scheme to spotify's attention

ha, that'd be ironic.

i can't believe spotify's 'terms of content' covered this.

> Spotify said it had paid more than $1bn (£612m) in royalties since its 2008 launch.

sounds impressive, but out of how much though?

http://www.spotifyartists.com/spotify-explained/#how-we-pay-royalties-overview

There's lots more detail, but the short answer is that about 70% of Spotify revenue is used to pay for music, and 30% to fund running Spotify.

ty glenn

One interesting bit of Spotify conscience/ego is that they (we, but this predates my arrival) aspire to dominate streaming music, in a future where streaming music is most of music, but totally understand that if that happens, it also means that they become primarily responsible for sustaining the music industry itself, so there's something to stream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D07NsKvi_sU

wow there are a LOT of Velvet Underground bootlegs on Spotify

yeah I just noticed that yesterday!

I think we have ilxor glenn macdonald to thank for that.

Excellent. I will now be credited/blamed here for all changes to Spotify.

Thanks Glenn!

Good evening, thanks for coming out, we're the Velvet Underground, that's my brother Glenn at Spotifyon bass.

We saw the Eagles and "Rhinestone Cowboy" on your My Music. You ought to give other people a little chance, on Spotify anyway.

This is a song about love between man and streaming. It's called "I'm Waiting For My Music."

So after adding a big playlist to Songs in Your Music, I returned to my desktop app to find the list completely empty. I re-added the same list again and just now returned to it to find it blank again.

I've found that my iPod doesn't display album artwork when offline. I thought that meant that Spotify doesn't load artwork to the iPod and just grabs it when online, but then I realized that the artwork shows up fine on my lock screen, just not in the app.

I took your art. Sorry.

Damn you!

glenn mcdonald couldn't be here tonight, he usually sings My Music way way better than I do.

these hyper-masculine advance auto parts ads are really annoying

"SO YOU CAN GET BACK IN THE GARAGE" uh no thanks advance auto parts

Having annoying ads is Spotify's game plan though. Or at least it should be.

No, we don't want to annoy you with ads. Eventually we hope to be able to filter at least the ones with musical content to not play in musically inappropriate contexts. The non-musical ones are a harder problem, but we're aware that it's annoying, and we don't consider that a virtue...

How the fuck anybody could stand listening to spotify with ads is beyond me.

'cos its a small price to pay for all the free music?

There used to be this thing called commercial radio with ads...

It would not surprise me if some executives were taking Spotify payola in exchange for having their companies buy ineffective, irritating Spotify ads to induce Spotify users to go premium. I mean, by far, the most annoying ones have been running the longest and most frequently. Advance Auto Parts, the Home Depot, that thing about a dude making dumb conversation at a meeting (can't even recall what they're advertising). I do wish Spotify would notice that all I listen to is weenie music from the 70s and accept that I am not going to go buy a power drill or get my nonexistent transmission checked anytime soon. Maybe I should scrap this New Country playlist I just started - seems like a recipe for auto parts.

For eleven years, I worked at two radio stations - one right-wing/talk that morphed into complete sportstalk and one classic rock station that added only one song the whole time I was there: Santana's "Smooth".

Those Advanced AUTO. PARTS. spots faze me like the sound of air brakes bothers a trucker.

Some empirical analysis of how often people skip songs on Spotify: http://musicmachinery.com/2014/05/02/the-skip/

Didn't realize they had an analytics API for researchers.

awesome link.

Am I missing something, or does the search drop-down now just get in the way of everything? Particularly the playlists I was hoping to drag my search results into? This is really poor UI.

Yes, the search is terrible and barely functional. Kind of funny in a way. The first thing you need to use to find music on there, and it takes about five goes to get it working. Brilliant.

I have also gotten stuck on the search page with no search window lately and had to kill/restart the app to get it back (on ios)

the UI on this thing is completely the pits. hate it to death. but i still pay and use it every day.

Want stars back.

ya

So looking at the new win/mac apps, they have this plus/check thing that adds songs to "Your Music", which would be a decent substitute for the Starred list, but "Your Music" is already the best place to save Albums (instead of creating playlists for each album). So when you go to Songs under "Your Music," you see all the songs of all the albums you've saved as well. I want my songs to be like a singles list. I could do that if I removed all albums from "Your Music."

I also detest that it is called "Your Music." It's not my music, I'm just renting it until you go out of business.

Also in Windows, lately, sometimes when you Start Radio, it defaults back to the last Radio you Started. Kind of a mess. Also I hate how every Radio you Start is now saved as some kind of station - clutter, clutter, clutter, especially since I start a lot of stations just by clicking on some random thing in a playlist, looking for new stuff of the same kind. I really don't need fifty different similar-sounding stations.

idk how they manage to fuck this up more with every update

I also detest that it is called "Your Music." It's not my music, I'm just renting it until you go out of business.

QFT. This is awesome.

Ha. Hate that term whenever it is used.