Spotify - anyone heard of it?

it's spending 5,000,000 years dragging & dropping a song to a different place in a playlist that bothers me

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Is there a thread for this style of breathless brand-identity snake oil?

i think there was one that included the famous pepsi logo documents

If only they had curated 12 perfect colors for their marketing materials, I would have signed up for Spotify years ago!

http://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf

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Is there a thread for this style of breathless brand-identity snake oil?

― schwantz, Thursday, June 18, 2015 3:05 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not really snake-oil oriented, but maybe worth a peek: Design Crimes: corporations ditching classic logos for newer logos that are duds

whoa that doc is insaneo

ha the old timey pepsi logo looks kinda black metalish

If there was an audio version, it would be read by Tom Cruise.

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/pepsigravitationalfield-090413113629-phpapp01/95/breathtaking-pepsi-27-728.jpg%3Fcb%3D1421229359

To count as a play, does it matter whether or not the song is saved for offline use?

In a vacation scenario in which you're offline for a week but listening to tracks -- and then you come home and go back online -- does the app upload all the usage information at that point?

things like that drive me absolutely kookuroo

Yes, offline listening gets logged offline and then reported when you next connect.

:D

http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple-love-taylor

"we don't ask you for free iPhones"

truthbomb.jpg

she must be on a PAYG sim

lol

http://time.com/3929784/taylor-swift-apple-open-letter-eddy-cue/

Oh to be a fly on the wall of Apple's accounting department right now.

t swift running the music biz

17 hours!

Oh to be a fly on the wall of Apple's accounting department right now.

they won't care. this is a rounding error in their revenue and cash reserves. (which is why it was so shitty that they did it in the first place.)

This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt.

heh

good work Taylor!

I'm have OCD about storage space and my usage on my stupid phone. That's why it kills me that there's no way to clear the cache. No way to remove what you downloaded last week but decided you don't need this week. You're stuck with it until you delete and reinstall!

― calstars, Wednesday, June 17, 2015 8:48 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait this can't be right -- you're telling me if you make an album available offline, it's there until you delete and reinstall Spotify and there's absolutely nothing that can be done about it?

also how fucked is it that you can't view album or track lengths in iOS, what the hell is this shit?

wish taylor had signed off that letter with a p.s., please stream at 320kbps

"or I'm going PONO only"

Stevie - yeah. That's my main sticking point with the app.

Apple backed off and will now pay royalties during trial period.

Those royalties go straight to music execs more or less, so yay

just me or is anyone else getting a FULL 30-second ad every time they play an official video on YouTube?

are they ratcheting it up?

just you i think. everyone else is running an ad blocker.

:(

can I also complain how iOS Spotify doesn't display full track titles if they're more than idk 25 characters or so? And I am still miffed about not displaying album or track lengths anywhere, despite them being displayed in the desktop app.

Why is Spotify's search function now so regularly terrible? I don't particularly care about how it deals with my offline library or whether or not I can star tracks, but I would like to be able to search for a globally famous artist without it just hanging there forever.

At this point in time they really should not be fucking up such basic stuff.

Apple Music launches in 15 minutes. Assuming you can upload your iOS at the time.

I want apple music reports from y'all.

My particular bent: I want to upload shit tons of my own library to it, including stuff that already exists in their official cloud but where I want to be able to listen to my own rips either because I prefer a prior remastering or because the official streaming versions are marred by universal music group watermarks. E.g. The steely dan catalog. Will I have to retag my versions as "steely dan jl" or some shit or will it just let me do this?

Also, will cached content be playable using apps like can opener which can see my phone's iTunes music library? I'm assuming not but it would be amazing if yes since can opener has customizable eq and crossfeed.

Also, can you upload your own library stuff from several computers (e.g. home MacBook, work PC)?

official streaming versions are marred by universal music group watermarks. E.g. The steely dan catalog

wait what is this? I have never heard of this

Should there be a dedicated thread for Apple music? This one feels dirty with all my spotify complaining.

Jon you should start a separate thread for the Universal watermarks, you have been a great source of info on that

also, yes to a separate Apple Music thread

Apple Music

official streaming versions are marred by universal music group watermarks. E.g. The steely dan catalog

wait what is this? I have never heard of this

― WE WANT FET WAP (Stevie D(eux)), Tuesday, June 30, 2015 11:31 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in a nutshell because I have trouble typing much these days due to repetitive stress injury:

everything supplied to the digital domain (itunes, spotify, emusic, HDTracks, Amazon, etc) by all UMG labels (Decca, ECM, Motown, Arista, Geffen, etc) had this 'watermarking' in it which was supposed to be benign and inaudible but in fact was horribly audible especially on cymbals, acoustic guitars, pianos and backing vocals. Not sure of the exact mechanism but it sounds like a notch on a specific frequency that oscillates on and off. Basically makes certain vulnerable timbres sound underwatery. The tech was supposed to let UMG be able to tell where illegally shared files were originally purchased from. Laughably, the only place you could buy undistorted files was from UMG's own digital store.

Where UMG supplied lossless source files to the digital vendors (some of them work this way, I know emusic would get lossless files from UMG and then encode them), the watermarks were in those lossless files already.

Starting sometime in mid-2013, to my ear anyway, they either stopped this practice or switched to a new setting which really is inaudible. I have not heard the distortion on any UMG stuff added to the digital domain since about june 2013. (This includes new reissue/box set configurations of stuff they'd already put up in the watermark era)

That leaves an immense immense amount of catalog still sounding like shit, though. I have not done a relisten to things like Steely Dan in a while to see if maybe UMG did a mass reup of unwatermarked files. I guess I assumed they have not since it would be such a big task, but I should check.

Anyways, this has never been officially acknowledged by UMG or any digital vendor (I have to think the vendors were really angry), but AFAIC it's a fact. It was driving me crazy just by ear for about a year until I searched around online and found people with better tech skills than me who'd been hearing the same thing who'd figured it out.

just did a relisten to three UMG tracks which were definitely awful last time.

Steely Dan - Countdown to Ecstasy - My Old School - it's still evident on the backing vox and saxes when they have longer notes. Doesn't sound quite as hideous as I remember but it's there. Reminiscent of 128kbps mp3 compression. Unable to stop myself, I compared all the versions of this song on spotify. The ones from the Show Biz Kids and Definitive Steely Dan comps are the same. BUT the Citizen Steely Dan one sounds not watermarked to me...??? Maybe UMG only added the Citizen box set to the digital marketplace in the last 2 years? Moving on to "Your Gold Teeth II" with its exposed piano writing, the Citizen version sounds good, the Katy Lied version sounds horrible, really bad fluttering in the piano decay. I guess Citizen is the way to go for your steely dan needs on spotify!

James Newton Howard - King Kong film score - first track - unbelievably distorted. Sounds like it's being performed through a fan. As bad as I remembered.

Martha Argerich - Schumann: Kinderszenen and Kreisleriana - first track of Kreisleriana - unlistenably fluttery just like before, dear god shut it off please

Conclusion based on tiny sample size: most of the watermarked shit has not been re-upped, maybe none of it (but the Citizen Steely Dan case intrigues -- I need to figure out when it was brought to the digital domain)

it's this kind of confusion that makes me miss the old mp3 days

"Tired of the old green? Try our new shade. Upgrade today."

If you've ever suspected that people in other places know about cool music you've never heard, now you can hear how right you were.

https://insights.spotify.com/us/2015/07/13/musical-map-of-the-world/

Rad!

Discover Weekly

Spotify bites back at Apple Music with weekly ‘mixtape’ playlist for each user
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/20/spotify-apple-music-weekly-mixtape-playlist

Discover Weekly will offer two hours of music based on users’ listening habits and those of similar fans

it's gone live

lol I just noticed that this morning. Saw some objectionable bullshit on there, unfollowed it immediately.