Spotify - anyone heard of it?

My latest spotify gripe/workaround is the way that the "Song Radio" feature functions. I would have expected that "Song Radio" would play songs similar to the one I've selected. What it seems to actually do is pick the midpoint between the selected song and Spotify's music taste profile it's magic'd togetherfor me, which usually means I get songs that I already have Liked or music that sounds nothing like what I seeded. I've found to get the behaviour I expect is to create a new playlist containing just that song, and then the Recommended Songs actually do seem all to be closely related. I found some incredible stuff this way that I would otherwise have had to wait for Discover Weekly to dredge up.

The perfect solution here would be for there to be some kind of Algorithm Personalisation slider somewhere, but as discussed upthread somewhere, Spotify aren't really into giving users control of their experience in that way.

this annoys me as well, I used to love the autoplay feature but these days it tends to just always play the same stuff. Everything even vaguely electronic always gets me:

- something from the latest autechre albums
- Leaves Against The Sky by Actress
- I Don't Love Me Anymore by Oneohtrix Point Never
- Dismantle by Andy Stott
- after that other tracks from these same albums with a couple of other more random artists mixed in

It used to be much more varied than this

A less varied autoplay list might have come from the algorithm becoming more conservative over time (Algorithm Personalisation slider set to high), or it could be that since Spotify knows more about someone the more they use it, the personalised data might "drag" the autoplay selections towards stuff Spotify already knows you like. Either way, it's a weird quirk and it would be nice if the spotify boffins would sort out.

I find Spotify does a great job surfacing new music but once you start going back in time even a couple years you often get the same stale popular tracks.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the algorithms are trained. For new songs, there is little to no previous engagement (the "cold start" problem) and recommendations are made based on underlying track attributes (see https://medium.com/cuepoint/visualizing-hundreds-of-my-favorite-songs-on-spotify-fe50c94b8af3 for some examples - Loudness, Danceability, Valence, Energy, etc). For old songs, there is years of data and success labels may be created based on engagement - i.e. a customer listening to a song for a certain amount of time. These labels are used to train supervised recommendation models where the content-based features are used only as part of the prediction. You end up with a situation where the tracks that are most broadly appealing to the largest number of people get promoted, creating a feedback loop that turns off power users who want more diversity.

There are some extremely smart people at Spotify working on this issue but it is a difficult balance to strike between recommending new and interesting songs and giving people stuff that has been successfully recommended in the past.

Yeah, a more discovery-oriented radio option would be nice. I don’t think It’s that much down to personalization as if I start the same song as radio on my wife’s account I get similar results (though I guess our listening patterns aren’t wildly dissimilar in the grand scheme of things).

I got frustrated with this recently doing some disco/hi-NRG artists' radio playlists on a road trip. It seems like what's going on underneath the surface is the algorithm 1) finds similar artists, probably a mix of Netflix-style collaborative filtering and musical content analysis and then 2) recommends some of the most popular tracks from those similar artists. (Alternately, they could be doing it at the track level and then applying a diversification or ranking scheme to ensure both similarity and variety at the artist level, but the result is similar.)

Discover Weekly seems to do a really good job if you are listening to a lot of new music.

It keeps dumping my recent activity and recent searches recently. So I have to look things up instead of having the links already populated.
Or last week it had the images for links up but wouldn't connect with tehm and just gave me a message saying something went wrong.
What is up with this device

this is definitely a frustration with dance music, it is difficult to get it to recommend something outside of a closed loop of artists and tracks. Like if you've already dug a little bit, it isn't going to get you down any further.

wtf is this "my episodes" bullshit and why can i not just download a podcast without it becoming one of "my episodes" ??? they are two separate buttons!!!

I have to start and stop the app and or WiFi and of mobile data multiple times to open a single podcast episode every time

yeah, sometime in the last year it shifted into this thing where even opening the "downloads" tab, it's spinning around looking for signal/connection and i'm like, this is why i downloaded the goddamn podcasts in the first place.

I'd totally switch to using Spotify as my podcast app if there weren't free alternatives that are both more reliable and feature-rich. Surprises me that polishing up the app to best in class is considered a less effective way of getting market penetration than spending a fortune on sclusies.

I can't say I'm a fan of this new build at all. Where's the search bar? And why can't I drag and drop albums into a folder any more?

"mesh cinereaL" by autechre is missing the last 38 seconds on spotify. It's all there on Youtube Music, so this looks like an issue specific to Spotify. It's a couple of extra bleeps and bloops on a 24 minute track, but this is very important.

wait, are you saying they've tried to remove the search bar again? Which platform?

if you listen to 'Deceit' all the way through, spotify will say 'ALBUM RADIO BASED ON Deceit' at the top. feels like an admission of sorts.

Argh, this new version is barely usable. What is going on?

Which build are you talking about, on what platform?

spotifythread.biz

Just the latest update to my Mac. Not sure on the version. They've taken away the search bar at the top so now you have to click search. Editing playlists is all fiddly and unresponsive. And I can't seem to drag albums into folder playlists any more; instead I have to make a new playlist in the folder, title it, then drag it in

1.1.54 apparently.

I have the search bar and I can still drag albums into playlists. I'm on Mac 1.1.55.498.gf9a83c60 so maybe update?

ah i can see it says an update is available (thought i had just updated). damn, that means talking to a company admin

having seen the update but not downloaded, it looks terrible and appears to hamstring various usabilities, every change seems user hostile

I gave up struggling with the Windows desktop app about three months ago. It had become agonisingly slow, with 90% of searches searches taking over a minute, and sometimes up to 10 minutes. I tried switching off hardware acceleration, and I even - with great reluctance - switched off the ability to incorporate local files. Neither made the slightest difference. So I just use the web version within Chrome now; it has its downsides (no standardisation of volume betweeen tracks, no scrobbling etc), but it's better than the alternative.

I had something like that on the Windows desktop app a few months ago (but I think quite a bit more than three months ago), but now searches are fine. Might try a full remove and install, unless you already have done so?

it keeps popping up on my girlfriends computer but we did not add it and it is not in programs to get rid of so how do you delete it?

ok boomer

Holy shit. Spotify just invented radio. pic.twitter.com/qTReMyeY7J

— Thom Ashworth (@thomashworth) March 31, 2021

that is the standard snark, but it's more than that - it's IP-distributed & potentially interactive, with analytics and data that broadcast radio can only dream of

Is there a way to request Freebird through the app?

it's IP-distributed & potentially interactive

o shit Spotify just invented Shoutcast and love song dedications

look i'm not saying it's going to be any good. Apple had - and still has - all the pieces to do this right with Beats 1 integrating with their catalogue but they (imo) half-assed the execution, have barely marketed it, and don't appear to care much about changing that. turns out 1) radio is hard! 2) day-parting matters! 3) audiences can tell when content only exists to upsell you into different parts of a product

They added listening history (“recently played”)! That‘s been long desired, I think. Looks like it goes back to 2021-01-01

I joined Spotify in 2014 when they acquired The Echo Nest, where I was working. I was an Rdio user at the time, because The Echo Nest powered Rdio's recommendation and radio things. Most of what I liked better about Rdio was a) stuff we powered and thus would be responsible for making just as good on Spotify, b) white-background graphic-design stuff that was obviously never going to happen in black-background-committed Spotify, and c) Rdio things that only worked because Rdio never had more than a small and selective audience, like public comment threads on albums.

The one exception was Rdio's play-history feature, which was simple but great. It synched across clients, it showed you everything you had listened to by day, and it grouped the individual tracks by the context in which you listened to them. I've missed it for 7 years. Now Spotify finally has it, and it's just as great as I remember it. I didn't work on it, and the fact that it took 7 years to get it suggests that even my persistent personal lobbying for it over that period was not particularly instrumental, but whatever. Yay!

ha every now and then I remember Spotify tried to do light theme UI for a while

I've updated my iOS app but I'm not seeing any three-month history - just a recently played thing that I think was there before that lets me scroll through about 30 things.

Oh, ignore me – I've relaunched and now I see it.

imma still scrobble tho

Hmmm 🤔
https://open.spotify.com/track/5xPzqMr972jKwurq5CHZHz?si=kzkhEx1qTOqJb732PEN0Vg

that’s what you get for nicking the name of a French football club

not a bad amapiano track tho

Kids convinced me to get Spotify, so ... fine. Done. I've never used the service, though, and have a dumb question. If I'm looking for a boxed set or compilation, say something from Rhino or Soul Jazz, and I can't find that collection but I can find a playlist recreation of the collection, does that mean the "official" collection is not available?

Probably, yeah.

Yeah, that"s pretty common.

Kids convinced me to get Spotify, so ... fine. Done. I've never used the service, though, and have a dumb question. If I'm looking for a boxed set or compilation, say something from Rhino or Soul Jazz, and I can't find that collection but I can find a playlist recreation of the collection, does that mean the "official" collection is not available?

There's still a bunch of Soul Jazz comps that are on Spotify in an official capacity. Or at least they are in Canada. Just search up "Label: Soul Jazz" in the search function.

Ah! There they are.

Or, you know, a handful at least.

hey just an fyi for anyone who checks this for anecdotal evidence: this update is terrible and making me strongly consider switching to a new service.

Desktop or mobile?