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

and ranking fast food menu items?

i.e. the expanded version of bill's podcast?

The fuck you talking about?

please read the first 30 words if you don't wish to see this content itt in the future

lol

Glenn, what on earth is the rationale behind the 'RECOMMENDED SONGS Based on the songs in this playlist' thing? It seems to be entirely based on the song/artist names (ie recommending the Frozen soundtrack if you listen to Ben Frost) which seems a fairly unhelpful guide to what someone might want to listen to.

Ha - I don't think that's usually the way it works. It comes up with reasonably sensible suggestions on mine. Maybe Ben Frost gets a lot of listens from kids trying to type Frozen

I started a playlist with the "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" theme and all the recommended songs were Christmas music

and bad boys ost

lol playlist "Snow" by Ben Frost
recommended songs:
Snow Patrol "You're All I Have"
Miike Snow- "Faker"
Hank Snow- "Rockin' Rollin' Ocean"
THe Reindeer Section- "Cartwheels"

Belle & Sebastian- "Fox in the Snow"
Nick Cave- "Fifteen Feet of Pure White"
RHCP- "Snow (Hey)"
Phoebe Snow- "Isn't It a Shame"

clicking refresh until I get "Informer"

Recommended Songs recommends songs based on the playlist title if you don't have any songs in it yet. And it's supposed to switch to recommendations based on the songs as soon as there are any songs, but at the moment it seems to only switch once there are at least 6 of them. But if you add at least 6 and then hit Refresh a couple times to clear out the title-based recommendations, you should get some that make more sense. It works by looking at what other people tend to put on playlists with the songs you have so far, so if you're making a playlist with a strong theme based on something outside of your own head, the recs can be downright uncanny. For that matter, even the title-based recs are sometimes terrific. If you're going for something more personal or particular, though, there's no guarantee it will match what other people have collectively done before.

5 seems like enough, actually. If I add Deaf Center, Forest Swords, Grouper and Oneohtrix Point Never to that Ben Frost song, refreshing gets me recs for Taylor Deuprae, Anna Thorvalsdottir, Bersarin Quartett, Lawrence English, Sarah Davachi and Fennesz, none of those songs involving snow...

I've found so much good stuff from the playlist radio function - that thing that arrives after a playlist/album has finished. It's a great feature.

Cheers, glenn--it's always interesting learning how it all works.

https://pitchfork.com/news/spotify-lifts-10000-song-library-limit/

About damn time

nice. hope it doesn’t bork things too much.

Good thing they did that after I cleaned up my Liked Playlist. Really,

fucking finally

yeeeeeeesssssss

though this feels a bit like the programming meme where you insert pauses in the code to remove later.

how is spotify with local files these days? i’m so sick of apple music forgetting where in a 3-hour DJ mix i was.

My general sense is that it is not as good as it once was, but I don't have specific problems I'm grappling with at the moment

hmm. Might make a bigger library. Is it just my crap phone or does having a large library make the Android app slower? Even when not much of it is downloaded.

Blessed day

So a week or two back something changed again and instead of showing the most recent "appears on" features, the iphone app now shows the most popular "appears on" albums/playlists instead, which i guess is all fine and dandy if you're looking for the most heavily anthologized Elton John tracks or whatever, but a total disaster for anyone (me) trying to keep track of new dancehall riddims, which are now basically unsearchable unless you already know the name of the riddim. No more "oh hey, that's i-octane singing, let me check if i can find out the name of the riddim through looking at his artist page." Sigh.

I had prepared this very same post. It’s the same on desktop btw, but it’s worse on mobile because it only shows you 25 releases - which was sort of okay when it was the 25 most recent ones, but now it’s a disaster, especially when you’re following genres like dancehall or Afropop or rap or any other genre where people do lots of features on other people’s tracks or albums, and that’s actually most genres these days, I’d think. So no, I don’t get this decision at all.

Case in point: a couple of days ago maura posted a song on the rolling r&b thread, it was Miguel on someone else’s track. It had slipped my mind who the main artist was, so I checked Miguel’s Spotify page for his latest collaboration - but it was not to be found among the 25 that were shown. How is that helping the user at all - or the artist for that matter? “Hey, I’ve done a new thing, but guess what, you don’t get to see it!”

(and yeah, it’s probably worst for dancehall. The other week I wanted to check for riddims an artist was on in 2011 or 2012 and was forced to search 120 or whatever releases sorted in random chronological order)

The Appears On thing involves issues that have nothing to do with what you're seeing. Hopefully it'll be back soon...

I don't know if this helps at all as a workaround but you can add year:2020 to your search to get this year's releases. Doing that with Miguel got me his appearance on Too Much by Ro James as the first track on Songs.

And for new dancehall releases, you could try

http://everynoise.com/new_releases_by_genre.cgi?genre=dancehall®ion=US or https://open.spotify.com/search/genre%3Adancehall%20year%3A2020/tracks but I know Spotify's idea of what's in a genre isn't always the most accurate.

That search-for-year thing is very useful, thanx alba.

Glenn, if you’re hopeful I’m hopeful too, but you do sound awfully mysterious!

“Coming soon to a theater near you: 5G - The Movie - it has nothing to do with what you’re seeing...”

lol,
And thanks, Alba, I'll definitely try that.

i love searching by year look at this amazing time capsule from the early 40s

https://i.imgur.com/ga8TQLq.png

Amazing colorization work!

Track 2 seems a pretty inappropriate tribute to Pearl Harbor but what can you expect from one of those "edgy" swing bands.

Local Oafs is a great name

Am I missing an easy way to remove albums from a playlist?

Or is just a case of doing it track by track from your phone or (slightly easier) highlighting all the tracks on the desktop app?

I love Canvas. I just found out that Kraftwerk have added some neat little animations (taken from their live show, but not in 3D obv) to go with some tracks on The Catalogue on Spotify. Is there any way to browse songs that have Canvas?

what's the deal with this piece of shit clipping off the first half second or more from tracks/albums? particularly bad/noticeable on the MJQ's "versailles", also on "shotgun willie". not OK at all

Dammit, we thought our secret scheme to get rich by shaving .5s off of old jazz and country songs would NEVER be detected. At least not until "Take Five" got whittled down to "Take Four", but by then we would have been long gone.

(I checked every version of "Versailles" available in the US, and none of them were clipped. Got a link to the one you were playing?)

glenn, you are a saint for still actually trying to help

oh I didn’t realise we had an insider on here. thought it was just a bitching thread

this def sounds clipped but it’s pretty minor I guess

https://open.spotify.com/track/24wQ5BTQnckCjNlIdBmL38?si=PDOkcMaxSL-1V_YUA6pepw

Are you listening over bluetooth? I had a cheapo speaker which for some reason missed the first bit of a track, probably not as much as 1/2 second, but enough to notice.

That happens with Airplay too with my AV receiver. I think it has a race condition between the CODEC and the power amp.

Well, I don't know the song well myself, so you could be right, but the versions on Spotify are all consistent, and match the corresponding ones on YouTube, so if there's an issue, I'd have to guess that it's at the label/master end...

Ok it could be my equipment or something but it happens with or without bluetooth. it’s not as catastrophic as I made out I only notice it if I’m previously familiar with CD/mp3 versions. probably is a master issue

More voice query weirdness, via Google and Sonos this time. 'Hey Google, play Dancing Queen' - plays Dancing Queen by the A*Teens. 'Hey Google, play Dancing Queen by Abba' - plays Dancing Queen by the A*Teens. 'Hey Google, play Abba, Dancing Queen' - plays Dancing Queen by the A*Teens.

My latest horror is

"Computer, play Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan on Spotify"

"Playing Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan Tribute Band from Spotify"

Thankfully in this case if I drop the "by Bob Dylan" it plays the right version.

I wonder if it's possible to steal from the tip jar of chancers like Bob Dylan Tribute Band.

On the plus side, the Beatles problem seems to be mainly fixed. If I ask for a track by the Beatles the Beatles tribute acts don't get a look in.

Weirdly, it's the opposite situation to with Lay Lady Lay though – if I don't specify the Beatles then I get cover versions, though not by soundalike tribute acts:

Computer, play Tomorrow Never Knows on Spotfiy. Playing Tomorrow Never Knows by Aso from Spotify
Computer, play You Won't See Me on Spotify. Playing You Won't See by Anne Murray from Spotify.