Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I just read about this. Apparently some kind of streaming iTunes looking service with rights to all the majors cleared. Could be interesting? If nothing else just to see it fail miserably...

trying this now. blatant rip of itunes design-wise but looks better in many ways. all i really want to do with it is listen to whole albums easily and it seems to let you do that very well (i haven't heard the ads yet tho).

20 second xbox ad came in after 5 songs. not bad really.

needs last.fm support asap

the ads don't bother me that much either, haven't noticed if 5 songs is always the limit? in any case it's 5 songs of any length, and you can listen to "In C" for example straight through which is cool.

I love it!

I think there is progress towards spotify scrobbling happening here:

http://www.last.fm/group/Scrobble+for+Spotify

carsmile sent this link: http://code.google.com/p/scrobblify/

scrobbles perfectly

for Windows maybe!

Yeah this looks terrific, I like how easy it makes it to dip into artists with huge discographies.

Although I haven't actually listened yet, just been browsing so far.

i am so in love with this thing <3

some artist tag crapness tho

the radio is fun for discovering things totally insane and cheesy

Oh wow the quality is actually pretty good.

The radio thing is indeed cool. I'm trying to get it to find me some techno from the 50s.

the quality is good, the range not so much, but this could well prove useful.

Presumably the range will increase as they agree deals with more record companies? It seems fine for major label stuff and a quick search for eg Kompakt pulls up a lot.

does it pass the melt banana test?

the range seems identical to what's on 7digital (and therefore itunes i think). eg they have trina's first and third albums but inexplicably not her second or fourth. i dunno how much use i'll have for spotify but kudos for how well it works, the quality of the tracks etc - the tags need ironing out but i'm sure they'll do this in time.

actually it'll be most useful for stuff like the goldfrapp album this year - i didn't really expect to love it but i wanted to hear it, so obv i wouldn't buy it but couldn't be arsed blagging it. that's a ton of consumer laziness in there.

oh god i should've said i was american! fuck. could've got access to all the hip-hop and r&b which never makes it over to this godforsaken, miserable island.

Do they have a license for the US now? I don't think they did a couple of weeks ago...

Four MB albums, Deano: Teeny Shiny, Bambi's Dilemma, Charlie and Scratch or Stitch.

does not work in australia yet

Just searched for The Recession and that shows up in its entirety, and it hasn't been released here at all right?

It's really good for the one-album playback when you've no idea if you'll like it or not and can't be arsed downloading.

yeah i'm basically going through albums i've been wondering about checking out but didn't have the hd space for.

no the recession was released here, but the label didn't bother telling the pr - she only realised when she looked on amazon and found it had been there for a fortnight

"80s funk house disco" radio suggests Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers!

> Four MB albums, Deano

thanks. we don't have any, amazon.co.uk mp3 store has scratch n stitch and a couple of tracks from compilations, emusic had a lot... all these people seem to be getting their info from the same places though, they all make the same mistakes (search for broadcast on amazon - details are about duophonic / warp broadcast but the listed albums aren't)

One detail I like: when it gets to the end of what I've queued up, it just continues with the current album without me needing to ask it to. (I suppose I can see how someone might not like this, though.)

Finally got round to sorting scrobbling for this (there's a windows messenger box ticked by default in the last.fm client that somehow stops Scrobblify from working). So far I'm really liking Spotify - handy for hearng stuff you randomly think on that you haven't got in your library or for legal trying before you buy. The adverts don't annoy me in the slightest.

fails Boredoms test :(

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

anyone got a spotfiy INVITE?

If not, try the "oooh ask me please!" option on the website ("Get started" -> email in "Not invited?" field). Took about five days for me, was surprised to get it at all actually.

jordan, webmail me an email address to send an invite to.

didn't get asked for an invite here, just got straight in

This is amazing! You type in what you want to listen to, and then you are listening to it. all this needs is to work on an iphone, and then i'll buy an iphone, and then i will have achieved bliss.

Mine appears to have made it through an album without giving me any adverts. Maybe they've bumped me up to a pro account without realising it.

you can now scrobble to last.fm from within spotify (it's in 'preferences')

That's handy, saves me running that scrobblify thing at the same time.

Spotify lists 'The Prodigy' as 'Prodigy' and makes last.fm think this guy sings Smack My Bitch Up and Out of Space
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/252/17704623.jpg

can someone please send me an invite?

thanks!!

Er....

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/

Think there's still a waiting list though.

<3 this service btw.

Got in straight away with the link I posted.

Aha they've obviously opened it up!

Downside is loads more ads (I've heard two during the same album), but you can hear them coming after a while and tune out. Still great.

thanks Chewshabadoo but I need an invitation code.

Please!

If i hear gareth jones from cardiff reciting pi again i'll scream

(advert)

And I'm not buying that White Lies record either.

At least it doesn't scrobble the adverts

jonathan from spotify sounds remarkably like Michael Vaughan

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Now-Playing-bar-missing-on-Android/idi-p/5364978

anyone else bitten by this one?

I've had it happen briefly, restarting the app helped

same

the UX on the desktop app is rough with the new changes. having to constantly change the view options just to see 'albums'.

xps yeh, restarting does the job

yep, been happening a lot lately. just restart the app. it's annoying, but a ten second fix at most.

death by 1 thousand cuts

THis thing of albums bei9ng listed as a list with the tracklist between lp titles instead of thumbnails is more annoying than before since you used to be able to choose which one you used and now it seems to be doing th choosing and keeps reverting to the track by track thing. So I have to keep hitting the thumbnails option.
bloomin bloom

Every time I use this garbage app I have to learn new UI navigations

I could never quite make out the words...

https://i.imgur.com/NvzQ7ya.png

Lol.

But I came to post that I just got an interesting recommendation for a new release by “John Cale.”

Spotify leavesa lot of data on my phone or at least once my phone has played several podcasts it is taking up a lot of data storage. So I have up til now run ccleaner to get rid of it every day. So I don't run out of space which has happened before. For some reason when I went to check ccleaner to highlight the data storage there is no Spotify visible on the app. So whatever storage is being taken up is presumably just going to continue accumulating. Not sure how you get around that. Do I just reinstall both ccleaner and Spotify or is there anything else i can do.

You can just go into settings on the Spotify app and select 'Clear Cache'

I have many times found it necessary to uninstall and reinstall Spotify to get it to truly delete downloaded music. Hasn't been an issue yet with my current phone so maybe it's somewhat fixed or maybe I just haven't been using it as much.

unknown to google artist/track claiming to feature PJ Harvey and Bat for Lashes. Hmmmm. https://open.spotify.com/album/5xOAZ1sDrCZjfc320v8JV0?si=DpTyUMOjS3iR6xuktxlMHA

Minor quibble and I guess the algorithms aren't perfect but I listen to The Beths quite a lot yet only found out about their new track from the thread on ILX, rather than through my Release Radar playlist.

The new “Deerhunter” single in my new release playlist is interesting

There are a handful of things I miss from Spotify since I switched to Tidal, but not having (so far) any fake bands polluting my "new arrivals" playlist is reason enough to make me very happy with my decision to switch.

The new “Deerhunter” single in my new release playlist is interesting

This one popped up in my Release Radar:

I had to listen to it. Was surprised to find that it was not trap stuff, but kind of an unremarkable home studio produced shoegaze-y pop rock thing. I wonder how/why it got uploaded with these tags.

oops.. https://i.imgur.com/89qZSke.png

i hate that false tag shit. got a new release notification for david axelrod a while back and it turns out it was just some dunce who used a david axelrod sample in a song.

Disappointing it wasn’t a least a speech by the former Obama aide.

heardle doesn't work for me anymore, thanks Spotify

If you makes you guys feel any better, that false tag stuff also happens on Amazon Music – plus the UI totally sucks.

anyone tried https://earth.fm/

i use the queue feature very often and something that i would find extremely useful is a "play last in queue" option. i like to put on three or four albums in a row and sometimes add on to that in the middle, so a "play last" option would be ideal. the way the queue works now is functional, but kind of clunky. anyone have any insights?

I just use playlists for everything. I always have multiple listening plans going, so the one queue isn't useful.

I use playlists for organizing albums - feels kind of weird since... well, they're albums. But works fine.

It seems like there are a lot of multiple instances of the same album on Spotify as observed only when re-adding a track to a playlist that's already in it and the app failing to detect the duplication (despite only one instance of the album appearing in search results and being navigable to). I'm frequently adding tracks to large playlists, realising later they're already in (same version btw) and then removing them manually.

I've never head that tbh - always get the 'Already in playlist' message

You can drag songs to the top of your queue once they've been added (both on desktop and phone clients) xps

It seems like there are a lot of multiple instances of the same album on Spotify

Yeah, there are, see e.g. the albums list near the top of this page from Glenn's site. In most cases, however, it seems that various instances are simply used for different sets of countries, in which case a single given user would rarely add the same track from two different instances of an album.

Actually, I thought cross-instance same-track-ness was (supposed to be) caught by the mechanism – further down on the page, a given track is clearly associated with various releases and instances, so I thought this info might be used for duplicate warnings as well as e.g. for the (very useful) play count harmonization, but a simple test (adding a song from a single and an album) gives no warning, so I guess it isn't.

not important or interesting whatsoever but-

why does the #1 song have so many fewer plays than the ones below it?

https://i.imgur.com/aFyevwp_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

does it have to do with recent trends?

(hope that works. imgur seems to not want anyone to post photos off-site anymore. here's the link in case)

yeah, it has to be current popularity. Beyonce's entire top ten is from the new album, even though those songs have much lower play counts than her huge hits.

Yeah, Glenn's addressed this before - ranking is a secret algorithmic sauce, presumably meant to address both current and lifetime popularity. I imagine they want you to quickly see the songs that possibly led you towards that artist, which could be something trending recently as opposed to their biggest catalog classics.

I just wish there were a separate page that just shows you every single track ranked with play count, but I concede that this is a niche use which would used primarily by ILM posters.

I'm glad there isn't, Dr Casino. That would probably depress me.

yeah i figured- it just seemed like the gap in that one i posted is *especially* big so i started to wonder. thx everyone for new answers

also would appreciate seeing alltime stats, but simultaneously understand it's a silly thing.

the search bar on desktop version is baccccck!

Spotify's search function sucks. You can't use " to do an exact search, which makes finding some songs with common words in the titles a total pain in the butt.

yes but the search being embedded back in the top bar is good

Barry Adamson's 'Oedipus Schmoedipus' LP is listed as from 1993 when it's actually 1995. That's a weird error if it came from the label's own metadata as usually the year of release is given as later when incorrect.

('96 really, promos and the like aside)

Spotify is massively inconsistent with the release years it lists. Some artists will have albums listed by initial release year; others by year of reissue/remaster; and others a combo of both. It can make it pretty hard to track an established artists' career path without external references.

The normalcy of all that was part of nashwan's point as I read it?

All the dates come from the licensors, but this is one of the few bits of album-level metadata that we are allowed to override for manual corrections, instead of having to send the complaints back to the licensors. So I just fixed those Adamson albums. We have four copies of that, two from a former licensor with the correct dates but no streaming availability, and two from a newer licensor with the wrong release-dates despite having 1996 in the copyright info. Sigh.

As for exact-match searching, that was the original sole function of what eventually became a slightly more involved research wing of everynoise:

https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=track

The other day I put 86'd by Subcircus on a playlist, when I came round to playing it it was a completely different song. It seems like the track titles on their album Carousel are completely mixed up - the titles match the order shown in discogs but the actual songs are in a completely different order - which matches the tracklist shown by google, I don't know where their information comes from.

We got the same wrong tracklists from two different licensors in two different countries for that Subcircus album, so the data was probably mis-entered way back at the dawn of digital time...

Thanks for the everynoise link! Really useful.