Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

wtf 2 adverts in a row (the 2nd was for that White Lies album)

See what I mean about them? The Killers meet Editors big wowz!

can i get a spotify invite

thanks Chewshabadoo but I need an invitation code.

Please!

― kaiser, Tuesday, January 20, 2009 7:55 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

can i get a spotify invite

― dugong.jpg (jabba hands), Tuesday, January 20, 2009 11:03 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

Have any of you actually tried the link posted? Quite a few of my friends in the UK have used the link and joined today. Maybe it doesn't work in other countries...

\o.0/

I'm in the US and that link asks for one of two things:

1)an invite code

or

2)your email address so they can notify you when it goes "public"

I wonder what their excuse is. Don't they want more people to hear their stupid ads?

is it UK only?

mr bimble check your email

It's odd and a fucking pain how Spotify often doesn't specify that tracks are remixes in any way.

i'm in the US and unless something changed in the last few days, we can't use spotify and all the workarounds have been blocked

2)your email address so they can notify you when it goes "public"

I selected this a couple of weeks ago, and got an invite from them within the same day. May not be the case now, of course.

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/ gets you straight in without an invite.

I went in on that link above, no trouble at all. I'm in the UK tho - maybe there's a problem with the US, I dunno.

It's awesome, btw. Nearest thing to the "universal jukebox" I've seen for a long time.

Yeah I am not a Swedish lawyer, but I wouldn't assume it would necessarily be illegal for Spotify to make $$ deals for playlist placement...

haha irl lol Austin

also beautiful work by table and Keyes

tbc I was lolling bcz of yr description being delectably otm

Each week, more and more of Discover Weekly being cluttered up with bullshit forgettable winsome little 2-minute tracks that credit (and maybe sample, minutely?) 6 different artists, 1 of which I follow, and that nobody ever needs to listen to, called things like 'Sip and Groove'.

Even worse, mine has Catatonia songs on it

yeah I stopped using mine a long time ago, kinda sad since in the beginning it was quite useful

I hesitate to use the term enshittification, but all the same it seems like there's a big algorithm supported move towards unobtrusive mellow vibe music, not necessarily ambient, but very functional

Curious if anyone else has noticed Spotify pushing the same artist to them on autoplay over and over again recently? Regardless of what I play, when it ends, they seem to throw a Beck song on for me. I have nothing against Beck but rarely listen to him and don't know why the algorithm thinks I am constantly in the mood for more Beck.

turn autoplay off maybe

Despite having a multi-billion-dollar net worth, you decided to stop paying artists for songs with less than 1,000 streams (months before giving Joe Rogan $250,000,000). So I made a playlist of 300+ great songs with less than 1,000 streams to give them more visibility and plays. https://t.co/IwLJ8lgT01

— Micro-Chop (@micro_chop) March 29, 2024

xp I have, and I have verified it's off! It just autoplays anyway.

yeah same

the spotify interface has become a nightmare that actively discourages me from doing what I want to do (listen to full albums at once), should I just switch to Apple Music?

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) April 16, 2024

Spotify is absolutely desperate for me to never seek out the thing I want to listen to specifically and instead just take one of its recommendations or play something again that I played recently. This is the "music" tab pic.twitter.com/bfEFuaDj4t

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) April 16, 2024

I don't think it's too much to say that this algorithmic interface is absolutely wrecking our relationship to culture and turning us into passive consumers who don't pay real attention to anything. I wrote this in 2021 but it's so much worse now https://t.co/c5E6KpyzmK

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) April 16, 2024

I don't get it. Did Spotify get rid of search?

Is he asking for there to be a menu of albums to choose from like when you pull up Netflix?

sounds like a skill issue

i think it's a complaint about the way you _browse_ (not search) for albums being a moving target that is increasingly hard to find and difficult to use.

I guess the idea of Spotify as a browsing service is foreign to me, but I suppose now that record stores are gone it's what's left.

Yeah, I'm not getting his complaint either. Is Spotify supposed to know what he specifically wants to listen to?

And my music tab/home page/whatever will often have recommended albums based on my listening history, which seems like a good thing to me 🤷‍♂️

I see people complaining that it's getting harder to discover new music on Spotify. I don't know if that's true. I mean sure it can be annoying that anytime I listen to an electronic album I can tell it's over because "Xtal" starts auto-playing.

The weird thing is that he has a book about how algorithms are flattening us into passive consumers, yet he's looking for a streaming service to offer up recommendations rather than actively seeking out new music.

But given that his listening history is all Vampire Weekend albums, he probably does need some help.

Lol

And yeah xp

The algorithms occasionally throw up something interesting but most of the new music I discover is the same way it's always been: recommendations from friends, threads on here or other forums, magazine and website reviews/features etc etc

I use Tidal myself, but do keep a (free) Spotify acct, and I think he's putting his thumb on the scale by visiting the "Music" tab... the "All" tab seems to have what I assume he's looking for (Recently Played, Popular Albums, Your Favorite Artists, etc.). The "Music" tab is weirdly anemic for me – it has nine different selections (a grab-bag of playlists and albums, only a few related to what I've liked / listened to). Not a tab I would visit!

also might be "putting his thumb on the scale" by cropping out the search bar and then saying "Spotify is absolutely desperate for me to never seek out the thing I want to listen to"

"I want to listen to a specific album. Why doesn't it magically get suggested to me on the home page?"

The people who don't care that much are the passive consumers, and a minority of people are actively seeking/curating, and I think that's fine? Most people over 25 don't care that much about music.

Also in what imagined past was this situation better? Does this guy miss the monoculture?

I basically only ever use Spotify to listen to specific entire albums, and I'm pretty sure I've never felt "discouraged" in my quest.

performative stupidity, he’s just doing that passive aggressive thing, yknow like people who say “hmmm what does gratuity fee mean? where’s the line for me to put the tip?”

“should I just switch to Apple Music?”

The people who don't care that much are the passive consumers, and a minority of people are actively seeking/curating, and I think that's fine? Most people over 25 don't care that much about music.

Yeah, in the past most people just listened to the radio, how much has really changed? (On the consumption side, as opposed to the remuneration side, of course).

They did finally add the thing to tell you what playlist(s) a song is already in at least.

That's been a big improvement for me. It also makes it much easier to remove an entire album from a playlist when I'm using the mobile app.

keep having thumbnails for shows I listen to a lot not connecting. being told oops can't find that page. rotten set up.

this isn't even the first time that Kyle Chayka had vern

muscle memory that builds up when you use a piece of software every day, like your thumb going directly to the Instagram app button on your phone screen. Spotify had updated its interface and suddenly I was lost. I couldn’t put on the jazz record by Yusef Lateef that I play every morning when I start writing and I couldn’t figure out where to find the songs I had saved by pressing the heart-shaped like button. The sudden lack of spatial logic was like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. Spotify’s new “Your Library” tab, which implied everything I was looking for, opened up a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense.

oops...posted too soon

this isn't even the first time that Kyle Chayka has been disoriented by Spotify.

an excerpt from his book:
https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting


"I opened the Spotify app on my laptop a few weeks ago and found that everything I had saved was in disarray. The albums weren’t where I thought they were. I couldn’t flip through them with my usual clicks, the kind of subconscious muscle memory that builds up when you use a piece of software every day, like your thumb going directly to the Instagram app button on your phone screen. Spotify had updated its interface and suddenly I was lost. I couldn’t put on the jazz record by Yusef Lateef that I play every morning when I start writing and I couldn’t figure out where to find the songs I had saved by pressing the heart-shaped like button. The sudden lack of spatial logic was like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. Spotify’s new “Your Library” tab, which implied everything I was looking for, opened up a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense."

I like Chayka generally, though I think he's overstating the degree of bewilderment here to make his broader point about how algorithms shape our experience. The book is unfortunately kind of lazy in its argumentation, even as his contentions *feel* right if you are, like him, a longtime internet user who's become recently disenchanted with it.

I really don't understand his thing about these services turning us into passive consumers if even a small app update throws him into an existential crisis. It's like someone throwing themself on the floor at Tower Records because they have to walk past the magazine section to get to the CDs.

I do get that Spotify emphasizing playlists might make some people less likely to play full albums, but to complain so hard about app feng shui is weird.