Spotify - anyone heard of it?

One thing I wonder is if music recommendation engines could do a better job going forward of unpacking WHY a song is recommended to you in some way -- beyond "you listened to X, you should try Y" which is a pretty shitty corollary.

pandora used to (maybe still does but i haven't used it in a long time) have a little note on each song saying why they decided to play it based on the parameters of your song/album/artist playlist; "we chose this song for you because it's a power ballad in a minor key" or something. it doesn't seem like too much work to add some more factual info on the artists, and maybe why they're trending, to pop up as well.

re: Glenn - point EN's computer at ILM. ;)

forksclovetofu is OTM, i was just about to mention this !

note, ILM data for 2015 music is ALREADY in the spotify data mining sets i.e the ILM Rolling spotify playlists that forksclovetofu collates. Those playlists will be compared to similar playlists that will influence the discover weekly playlists for many other spotify listeners. So if your already listening to the ILM spotify playlists regularly your benefiting from the existing collective intelligence of ilm and other likeminded / similar curated playlists.

going back to Fresh Finds,

I found this

The Firehose
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0/playlist/3mZgwuBZqoRWIQqQB7IsTb
Fresh Finds Pro Edition

only 24 followers of this hidden away playlist. Probably most of these are internal spotify employees, but anyone can follow.

over 400 tracks in the last 4 weeks - tracks added regularly - 32 tracks were added thursday morning.

so, this is like a spotify rolling recent version of the Hype Machine for new tracks for new / emerging artists

hype machine
http://hypem.com/

there is also this playlist:

Blogmergence
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0/playlist/0L5QOqPKhNaYOx1IlUdjH6

this looks like a unfiltered data dump of recent tracks crawled from music blogs. 47 tracks were added on thursday morning.

this is the spotify R&D account:

predict0
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0
useful to follow

as refereed by Brian Whitman, in the link i mentioned upthread

http://notes.variogr.am/post/125515460365/fresh-finds

they have created human filtered best finds for july / june / may

regarding what spotify need to do next, they need a proper blogging / content strategy outside of the spotify platform. i.e to start a new music discovery blog. They have content curators i.e playlist makers & data scientists but spotify are underutilizing their knowledge and enthusiasm.

http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/87588

President Obama uploads his own personal playlists on Spotify

thanks obama

lol reminds me of this - https://mobile.twitter.com/blippoblappo/status/460194112142979075

surprised he's so into death grips, but hey

tbrr finding out that michelle and barack's getting it on mix is fairly close to my own is kinda awesome

maybe you can use that along with the knowledge of his murders to delay orgasm /morbs

i don't think i read that the way you meant it

i HOPE i didn't read that the way you meant it

this thread took a disturbing turn

why does spotify (ios) burn off so much mobile data when playing saved tracks? what's it downloading? 45 mb today and i've only played ~two hours' worth.

two hours of all saved tracks? that seems very high. I would switch to offline mode in that case.

thing is i shouldn't have to keep doing that. hoping it's just a bug and not album covers or something.

a distinctly dancey playlist this week. i approve!

So I'm normally pretty blasé about internet privacy policy shenanigans but this does sound pretty extreme:

“With your permission, we may collect information stored on your mobile device, such as contacts, photos, or media files.

What does that mean, "with your permission"? Have I given permission by accepting this policy? What on earth do they want with my contacts or photos anyway?

on ios you need to give explicit permission. if you're on android i think they can mine everything. really though i think it's just spotify covering off all likelihoods before you do any of the things that might fire off a scrape of your address book etc.

android M will make the permissions more granular.

but yes, why does this synthesizer app need my wifi details and my contacts?

https://news.spotify.com/us/2015/08/21/sorry-2/

Let me be crystal clear here: If you don’t want to share this kind of information, you don’t have to. We will ask for your express permission before accessing any of this data – and we will only use it for specific purposes that will allow you to customize your Spotify experience.

https://twitter.com/SpotifyUSA/status/634125633501556736

Charles Manson is on this week's Discover playlist :/

However many weeks later, the Discover playlist may have led finally to a discovery, I think mostly due to the avalanche of Wilco I'd been playing a couple of weeks ago - Israel Nash, who I've never heard of before. Very Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Not sure if I'll dig a whole album of this or not, but I think this is the first new-to-me artist I've come across via Discover where I actually want to try and hear more.

Happened to me with On An On this week...

Manson showed up on a bunch of people's lists this week. Not a problem we had anticipated, but steps will be taken...

hopefully not by him

lol

i have been enjoying the weekly discovery much to my surprise

This entry has been known to cause some problems at a few music services... not naming names

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/8530d70e-778c-4eba-b08d-831d16783c03

lol:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/41366462-ff3a-45a8-91d9-c40c259b5637

http://everynoise.com/engenremap-oratory.html

what governs the positioning there, glenn? quality of recording?

This week on Discover Weekly: Ten (count 'em) songs I already know, and songs by Dr. Dog and Slightly Stoopid (gag). I'm beginning to think Spotify doesn't think very highly of me.

it's ok, Spotify A) gave me a kate bush song B) made it "deeper understanding"

"you seem like you'd like kate bush, and of all the hundreds of kate bush songs, we feel this will best resonate with your personality"

mine is great this week!

Fizzles: the positioning is atmospheric-vs-bouncy and organic-vs-mechanistic, same as on the big overall genre map, but within a genre like oratory you're basically seeing large magnifications of small differences, so it isn't necessarily telling you much.

Spotify seems desperate to make me listen to Lloyd Cole, every single Discover Weekly playlist I've had so far includes at least one of his songs

(this week's playlist, upon actually listening, is decent, I just thought the particular choice of song was hilarious)

Can't fault Spotify for giving you songs you already know unless you listen to them regularly on Spotify. I got a high number of tracks this week that I already knew, but I took that as a sign that it's getting closer to ID'ing my tastes.

thanks glenn.

still yet to try out my discover playlist. seem to be feeling that same aversion that i have when people I don't entitely trust recommend me things. multplied beyond what i would feel if I encountered the same things without any context.

Well, you can look at the thing without listening to it. Is that less scary?

I live in South Africa, and am considering going through the rigmarole to get Spotify up-and-running on my connection here.

Is there something like a ILM playlist on there?

I would really like to see a list of what's currently on that that. Is someone willing to do me a favour and screengrab a list of what's on the ILM playlist at the moment?

I would like to see if it something that would be worth my effort, as that would be my primary reason for getting Spotify.

Somewhere in this thread may be the Spotify mix you are looking for: Rolling Favorite Tracks + Albums 2015

i like the discover playlists and regularly check them out - any time a track choice offends me i can always tell WHY the robot thought i'd like it. but it has put me in an ironic position of feeling like big brother's not doing a good enough job at watching me sometimes. "an exile on guyville track? I KNOW i've played exile on here before...weren't you paying attention, algorithm?"

Also essential for ILX listening: Listening to ILX Listen - 2015 Spotify Genre Playlists

Oh wow I didn't even know that thread existed!

croup i think it knows you've played just maybe not in a while. that could be useful, i'm sure there's plenty of albums/acts i listened to once cuz they were on aquarius records mailing list or whatever and enjoyed but never got around to listening to again and would enjoy 'rediscovering', the problem is spotify is understandably unable to distinguish between those albums vs albums you've only listened to once in the past decade because you wore them out long ago vs albums you listened to once cuz it was on a list and once was enough thx.

Wish Spotify could import my last.fm history to help with recommendations. I'd pay for that.

I also maintain a playlist of the "Your 11 favourite songs of the moment, fuck" thread: http://open.spotify.com/user/miketd/playlist/01h5cX8jtxgfJoaOBgYN4F

an article on Spotify / The Echo Nest / Listener profile Genre Clusters / Discover Weekly

Spotify is getting unbelievably good at picking music — here’s an inside look at how
http://www.techinsider.io/inside-spotify-and-the-future-of-music-streaming

on Discover Weekly

Spotify's work with The Echo Nest has culminated (so far) in this summer's launch of Discover Weekly, that custom playlist that magically predicts what I and every other Spotify listener wants to hear. Even though the feature is barely a month old, the overall reception in reviews and on social media has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Discovery can feel like work, and we wanted it to feel very human and natural like the selections that are powering it,” Matt Ogle, the guy in charge of Discover Weekly, tells TI.

Ogle previously worked at Last.fm, a startup that pioneered a lot of work on analyzing music data, and a now-shuttered startup called This Is My Jam, which let you choose one song a week to share with your friends. Since joining Spotify earlier this year, Ogle has tried to combine both approaches to blend big data with a human touch.

Ogle gives a simple analogy for how Discover Weekly works: You’ve been playing song A and song C a lot, but it turns out that when other people play those songs together in their playlists there’s a song B that you’ve never heard before.

Discover Weekly gives you song B.

“We look at what you’ve been listening to and what are the songs playing around these songs that you’ve been jamming on,” Ogle tells Tech Insider. “We’re trying to find the missing tracks.”

During internal testing, his team realized that if you don’t recognize a single artist in a playlist, you might question if it’s actually geared for you. That’s why the playlist is intended to have a mix of mostly new tracks with a few songs you’ve heard before.

“Having a little bit of familiarity is key to building trust. It can be exhausting to just listen to stuff you’ve never heard of before,” he says.

Now it's true that the songs on Discover Weekly are chosen by algorithm, not humans, but Ogle insists that this misses the point since the whole thing is built on data created by humans — it's just that algorithms are connecting the dots on a massive scale.

“There’s something compelling about this humans versus robots narrative: a lovingly curated playlist versus an algorithm screwing up your sexy time,” says Ogle. "That whole distinction no longer really describes how we work. Discover Weekly is humans all the way down. Every single track that appears in Discover Weekly is because other humans being have said, ‘Hey this is a good song, and here’s why.’"

As popular as the new feature is, it's just the beginning for Spotify.

“We want to make sure that as mainstream or hipster as you are, Spotify can cater to you,” says Ogle. "That will involve humans and machines, and ideally it involves them skipping down the street hand-in-hand, because practically that’s the only way to get things done.”

“I see Discover Weekly as one of the first products from this new era of personalization, but ultimately we’d love for everything you interact with on Spotify to feel like there’s a bit of you in it.”