Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Two of my students found me on Spotify during class yesterday, and when I expressed some mild horror at this they told me it was okay because I had good taste in music.

https://helsing.ai/newsroom/helsing-unveils-intelligent-strike-drone-for-mass-and-precision

Totally recognise this, Lily! I'm a college teacher now (UK) so often play music in class. Kids are adamant I only have stuff like Chappell Roan, Tems and Charli on my playlists because I'm trying to impress them. I mean, I've got two kids who are deeply into all sorts of music for one, and, well, I have ilx as my main tastemaker so...

The most New Jersey 2024 scandal ever: Rep. Josh Gottheimer, running for governor, faked his Spotify wrapped list so he appeared to be a Springsteen super fan, h/t @Taniel - https://t.co/u260MRwF18

— Reid Wilson (@PoliticsReid) December 11, 2024

he wasn’t born to run

Another Eric Adams in the making.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

great reporting from liz pelly

sad state of affairs, dystopian times

reminds me of something nick cave said on the colbert show:

I think there's forces out there expressly designed to take the creative act away from us. Especially with AI as it's coming up. To create music as simply a product. The creative experience is seen as a sort of impediment on the road to the product itself.

Background playlists encourage anonymous music, which enourages anonymous musicians, which will probably and logically lead to AI music. Stock photograhy leads to anonymous imagery, which leads to anonymous imagists, which leads to AI images. Spotify can be rightfully blamed for facilitating this, but nobody has to listen to those playlists in the first place. It's neoliberally reductive to expect everybody to individual-choice us out of this collective sludge, but it's better than sitting in it.

Great to see you here glenn, i hope all is well with you.

I used to like some of the genre playlists on Spotify, but now that so many of them say they are "made for" me personally, I'm no longer interested. I don't want to listen to an algorithmically generated playlist based on my listening history, I want to listen to an expert's curated selections.

I agree, the more that generated playlists have my own stuff in them, the less interesting they are because that's the stuff I was already listening to anyway and I'm trying to hear something new. I assume people generally appreciate the familiarity or something.

how Spotify’s “Ambient Chill” playlist had largely been wiped of well-known artists like Brian Eno, Bibio, and Jon Hopkins, whose music was replaced by tracks from Epidemic Sound, a Swedish company that offers a subscription-based library of production music—the kind of stock material often used in the background of advertisements, TV programs, and assorted video content

i mean, this is definitely kind of funny in a dark way

pretty sure this is the future Eno was aiming for

when you've already reduced music to furniture, perhaps it's only a matter of time before the Swedish find a way to turn it from something painstakingly crafted by artists into mass-produced junk

nobody has to listen to those playlists in the first place

Sorry, but this is naive. The point is that if people did want music to study to or lo-fi beats for chilling out or whatever there are thousands of real artists who can provide that. Instead those artists are being replaced and erased, especially given that spotify is more or less the only game in town for most people. As if the insulting royalty rates weren't already outrageously bad, now artists are even being screwed out of that (and yes, I get that this is the equivalent of the "and such small portions" joke).

yeah that betrays a real lack of understanding about how users interact with these services.

Background music becoming background music isn't a shock but isn't that part nefarious also because of the way the entire Spotify royalty pot is split? If they can siphon off a few pennies from the coffee house ambient playlist, isn't that diluting the share paid to non-ambient artists?

Oh, I understand how people interact with "these services". I want the services to change. But if/while they don't, we can change.

And yes, as the piece points out, the idea that there was ever a shortage of anything of this stuff is ridiculous.

related:

"Back in 2023, Spotify redesigned its app to, and I quote The Verge, be “part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube,” which in practice meant replacing a relatively clean and straightforward user interface with one made up of full-screen cards (like TikTok) and autoplaying video podcasts (like TikTok), which CEO Daniel Ek claimed would, to quote Sky News, make the platform “come alive” with different content on a platform built and sold as a place to listen to music.

The tech media waved off the redesign without really considering the significance of the fact that at the drop of a hat, hundreds of millions of people’s experience of listening to music would change based on the whims of a multi-billionaire, with the express purpose being to force these people to engage with completely different content as a means of increasing engagement metrics and revenue. By all means try and pretend this is “just an app,” but people’s relationships with music and entertainment are deeply important to their moods and motivations, and adding layers of frustration in an app they interact with for hours a day is consistently grating.

And no matter how you feel, this design was never for the customer. Nobody using Spotify was saying “ah man, I wish I could watch videos on this,” but that doesn’t matter because engagement and revenue must increase. It’s clear that Spotify, a company best-known for exploiting the artists on its platform, treats its customers (both paying and otherwise) with a similar level of contempt."

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

is anyone using that stuff? I have it all turned off

nothing pisses me off quite like when i'm playing a track on spotify and it tries to play a music video. fuck off!

i currently use it as a means to an end but will probably jump off at some point. i hate that Daniel Ek fucker so much. loser!

Everything I read about Spotify makes me feel as though my own way of using it is utterly abnormal. People are weird.

I understand but don’t really get the Zitron/Kyle Chayka critique. The Tiktokky bits don’t get in the way for me; I find it’s still very easy to navigate and create a music-only experience.

Also not (yet) having any of my pop or ambient playlists taken over by AI slop. The curating still seems pretty sturdy and helpful.

xp yeah I agree. I open the app and there is still a search button that is prominently displayed and easy to access.

And it never tries to put on videos for me.

I get a NEW MUSIC FOR YOU popup that has to be dismissed to use the app, that shit sucks.

But Apple does something similar I believe. Enshittification is unavoidable.

If you're interested in an alternate UI to Spotify that is more oriented around, let's say, collecting and listening and data, I have this thing I've been working on:

everynoise.com/curio.html

I tried it but I’m getting some authentication issues once I’ve logged in to curio

Hmm, if you logged in successfully (your name shows up on the login button), then either you missed an API-key step, Spotify is having issues, or...something else. Email me at gmcdonald at furia and I'll figure it out.

Would you be able to provide some use cases or scenarios for Curio, Glenn? I'm sort of staring at a couple of my playlists, sensing there's something I could do that would unlock the universe but not sure what it is. Equally, tell me to clear off if you have better things to do!

Yes, I need to write some docs and make some demo videos.

The general aim is to better coordinate the active collecting functions in Spotify: your playlists, your Library, your listening history. Without any other manipulative or promotional agenda. "Unlock" is the right idea. It's not trying to deliver the universe to you, it's trying to make it less cumbersome to collate and extend your curiosity.

Part of that is just showing what I think is the right information, like being able to tell the difference between the songs on a playlist that come from albums and the ones that are just singles.

UI-wise, generally if you hover over things various little icons will appear. From a track on a playlist you can go to that artist's whole catalog (☰, displayed in a more informative way so you can see the patterns of tracks across releases), or to their neighborhood in related-artist space (», their related artists plus those artists' related artists), or one-click Google search on the artist/track/album for research (†).

You can select tracks (one or multiple) and then move them to another point in the playlist by clicking on the little target arrows, because I make long playlists and drag-and-drop can get awkward (although there's also drag and drop for moving single tracks). You can delete tracks, of course, but you can also designate a "bin" playlist, and then there's a one-click icon to move any track to the bin. So, e.g., I have a playlist of Christmas songs, and I use this to easily move Xmas songs off my weekly new-release playlist onto the Xmas one.

If you have a track from an album on your playlist, you can click the "1/13" track-number bit to pop that album up in the sidebar, because I do a lot of swapping which track from an album I want on a playlist. Those pop-up albums also show which tracks on the album are actually new, as opposed to having already been released on singles or otherwise, because I always want to know that.

And up at the top by the playlist title there's a link to the more-detailed playlist-profile view in everynoise research tools, and a thing for generating the vertical-stripe-style images I like to put on playlists.

You can also A/B compare playlists by selecting (click in the blank space) the B one (or ones) in the playlist list, and then going to the playlist view for the A one.

The other pages are all encrusted similarly. The artist lists give you genre categorization you can sort and filter by. The Listmarks page keeps track of where you were in each playlist or album you've been listening to.

If you download your Extended Streaming History from Spotify, then there's a History page with a bunch of ranking things.

And, for philosophical reasons, all the data Curio gets and creates for you is completely open to you. You can see the underlying data for any page, and there's a full query language for asking your own questions if they aren't the ones for which I've made views.

I post about the project mostly as @everynoise on Bluesky.

"It's the apathy that absolutely does me in. Artists, bands, music industry people, shitposters on Instagram - everyone's been banging on about what a total shitshow Spotify is, has been and continues to be for a while now, and it's largely just been met with an almighty shrugging of shoulders, and carrying on, because 'well yeah, but I've got my playlists on there, and I like my Spotify wrapped!', despite the arms tech investments, despite the meagre royalties, despite the sacking of their editorial team, despite the 1,000 play thing, despite the creaking tech that's full of bugs, despite the adding audiobooks so they could argue for an even *lower* royalty rate, despite the general cheapening and disconnection of music, despite the explosion of shitty AI slop, despite one man masquerading as many different artists being responsible for a huge royalty payout by juicing the system, despite the literal owner of the platform claiming that 'content' doesn't take any money to make these days, despite everything, despite all of that. But people just think it's a bit of fun."

https://blogaboutsatan.blogspot.com/2024/12/what-were-skies-like-when-you-were-young.html

glenn i’m travelling now but will look into it when i can.

coincidentally, just saw this float through my timeline:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/

lol sorry that’s literally the same article

Glenn gets a mention in the current issue of Private Eye:
https://jameshamiltonsdiscopage.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/temppop.jpg

I listen 80% to stuff I have uploaded to my youtube music account. Its very handy and I resent "algorithmic satanics"

The person who sang on the original Snowman soundtrack was NOT Aled Jones - he only recorded the single! It was Peter Auty

Wrong thread!

Still, worth reiterating

I validate this turhful approach

Glenn wrote a blog post about his Curio tool, with some recollections about working on Spotify Wrapped: https://www.furia.com/page.cgi?id=498

https://i.imgur.com/idLdNmx.jpeg

i can never see playlist info. if the curator took the time to write extra info about the playlist, i wanna see what they said dammit.

(yes i'm also bitter that no one can read the stuff i wrote on mine)

https://bsky.app/profile/everynoise.bsky.social/post/3lfzttejtzk2k

Every Noise at Once
Spotify seems to be quietly removing genres from the API now. I'm going to wait and see where this goes before I change the everynoise.com/research.cgi connections. NRbG is not affected.

straw that broke the camel's back for me. i hate this company and have felt like a hypocrite for holding on to my subscription for so long. time to be done

https://pitchfork.com/news/spotify-hosts-trump-inauguration-brunch-and-makes-150000-donation-to-ceremony/

Very on brand to cheap out even on bribery.