Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Offline music on Apple Music has gotten a lot better, almost 100% happy with the service now.

What would you say is missing at this point, Jeff?

If you own a track and upload it to Apple Music where it's matched with their library, and you play it, does the artist / label get paid?

The matching is lacking, e.g. the wrong versions of songs being matched. But it's been lacking since iTunes match was released, so not sure when that will be fixed. I can live with it.

i definitely can't live with that. the only reason i want to upload my own music is to listen to that exact music, not a 7" single remix or a studio version or a clean version.

moodles: that's great, but the spotify cap still exists. so i'd have all the uploaded music i want to upload + 3,333 spotify tracks and i'd have to sign up to a second service anyway. (deezer' playback quality on ios has issues btw, so that's out.)

if spotify lifted its offline limit and/or apple music/icml ~worked~ i'd be sorted.

jeff how often do you use spotify to listen to music outside of the stuff you've "matched/synched"? most people just use it as a music library. it's really not ideally built for matching/synching/stuff, no matter what the developers tell you. it's like ordering a burger at Red Lobster or something

you know what i mean.. ordering something outside the establishment's specialty
not trying to sound condescending..

I really don't know since it is all combined, I can't remember what's mine and what's theirs. I mostly listen to giant randomized playlists, so the matching isn't as jarring because it's just another random song that comes up and not part of an album.

Really digging my DWP this week.

Even tunes I had designated as old warhorses and long ago tired of

Spotify buys 2 startups to boost music discovery and content experiences
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/01/20/spotify-buys-2-startups-to-boost-music-discovery-and-content-experiences/

Spotify has acquired two startups in a bid to boost its product and engineering chops. Dublin-based music discovery company Soundwave and the New York-based Cord Project are both joining the streaming giant.

You really require more than 3,300 songs to be available offline? That's ~20gb of music approximately or 330 albums at 10 tracks/album average. Seems...excessive?

but this board is not called "i don't mind music"

But what is a reasonable amount of music to rent for $10 per month?

you can rent as much as you like, it's what's storable offline that's the sticking point here. no competing service limits offline storage afaik.

the point of having a music library in your pocket (and the reason ipod classics existed) is to be able to listen to what you want to listen to, not to plan your day before you leave the house. the discogs of five of my favourite artists constitute about 25% of spotify's offline limit, not including a handful of updated playlists for ~discovery~ (which is at least half the point of having spotify).

Do you have a job/lifestyle that makes it difficult to stream music over wifi/cellular? I have very little of what I listen to saved locally but I have unlimited data so I don't feel restricted in what I have to listen to. The only time I ever sync music is when I'm flying.

only cellular data during the day. i do occasionally d/l some things i wasn't expecting to listen to, but ultimately i want to be able to store enough that i don't need a separate music database. apple music would be The Perfect Solution if it worked.

How much space do you have on your phone is a better question I suppose? Cheapest current iPhone ships with 16GB of space of which maybe half is usable. Costs exponentially more to add GBs (and then only up to 64...) I'm not saying the limit is annoying, I just think your use case is definitely an edge case.

that's not the point though. afaict no other major service imposes a limit on offline storage.

a 200 GB micro sd card is a hundred bucks these days.

apple music would be The Perfect Solution

What about a third party library eg mediamonkey? Can organise things on yr computer and transfer them to the phone to play through the apple music app, without signing up to apple music or suffering with itunes.

that's pretty much what i do now. it's fine but i'd really rather just use one app, especially to combine with newer stuff that i never bought/ripped.

there is basically the same issue with TV - there is not one single box (that i'm aware of) that gracefully allows me to stream OTT services, play local files, and tune in digital free-to-air broadcasts

Is Discover Weekly supposed to be tracks I've never played on Spotify? If so, it's broken.

No

Ok.

I can see it's sort of tailored to my listening (or at least my Spotify listening which is about 10% of it) but it's badly named if I'm supposed to discover something from hearing 'Release the Bats' or 'O Superman' for the thousandth time.

discover weekly SHOULD be tracks you have never listened to before, otherwise it's using a very columbusy interpretation of "discover"

could be that you are supposed to discover how good a song is and not just that the song exists

how would Spotify know what tracks you spent your pre-Spotify years listening to?

algorithms. extrapolation algorithms.

Spotify should really supply me with a playlist of original music that I'll love

maybe you are meant to discover something new about yourself

FYI according to a thing I read somewhere, it was originally meant to be purely new music but they found 30 tracks of novelty was too daunting, having a few familiar numbers in there made it a more attractive prospect.

Yeah, it's a mix. And yeah, we haven't tried to guess whether you're likely to have heard something out of (or before) Spotify.

I wasn't talking about pre-Spotify.

I don't mind a bunch of familiar songs (most of which are familiar from pre-Spotify) but I think a discovery list shouldn't include songs I stream regularly.

Has 'Notifications' been disabled? Have had nothing for ages (a couple of months at least).

I just got one. Sometimes you need to close and reopen though.

No, but we stopped triggering them when a track is added to a playlist you follow, which was the single biggest source (and the one most frequently ignored).

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release, but I still usually don't ever seem them until I open the app fresh.

i really love it when dw drops in the occasional song i know. it keeps me invested and i'm more likely to play the whole thing.

They're awesome for knowing when artists you follow add a new release

^this

still wish you could follow labels too

oh that would be great

Still waiting on smart playlists (auto-updating playlists based on search criteria)!

I depend on notifications for keeping up with new releases from artists I follow, but I don't feel like it's consistent. I'll often check in on an artist's page and find there was a recent single, EP, or album that didn't trigger a notification. That happened most recently with a new Travis single and a recent collaborative EP from Koen Holtkamp.

Podcasts (or whatever generic audio programming name) are available on spotify now. I really like that it marks where you leave off so you can go listen to something else and go back to the podcast and resume immediately. Selection right now is okay but not great, lots of the big ones are available but no serial, no you must remember this, basically none of the ones I listen to. Spotify is making a big deal about how curated their selection is with their "partners" so idk if the plan is to keep it limited? Hopefully not...

Okay so Spotify finally thoroughly won me over today by including a super obscure jab song in my Discover Weekly (as well as some afrobeats stuff I wasn't familiar with but liked). I've played it quite a lot in GPM but never in Spotify. So kudos, Spotify. You're obviously doing something right.

My Discover Weekly Playlist has really been hitting the sweet spot these past few weeks.