Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

I think it's staggering. At least 95% of my track/artist searches to date have returned results. And I like the concept of shared playlists.

Spotify Premium is available in Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Spain and the UK. The Free version is only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain.

It amuses me to see the adverts briefly appear in last.fm (and permanently in your Spotify history).

This is impressive. There's a lot more weird, small stuff on than I thought there would be, thopugh also mystifying gaps too.

Someone should set up a shared ILX playlist for Jan (then we can move to Feb etc to stop it getting unwieldy). I'll do it tonight if no-one else does.

Excellent idea. I was thinking of doing one for the Pazz & Jop Top 50 singles, and maybe the Rocktimists poll tracks as well. But it'll have to wait until tonight.

Gaps spotted so far: no King Crimson, very little UK Funky, no Aeroplane mix of Grace Jones "Williams Blood" (although their mix of Friendly Fires "Paris" is on there). Remixes are generally well represented, though.

Remixes are generally well represented, though.

But not always listed as remixes, I've found. And they don't scrobble as remixes (sorry, I'll take that to the last.fm thread)

I also like the non-bloatiness: the software was running at around 14,000k on my home PC last night - so I could close iTunes for once, and benefit from the faster performance.

I hope this thing a) goes global so the US can use it b) they make a mobile/iphone app c) ushers in a new era of music use.

I confidently predict big 4 will put a stop to it.

All the majors have signed up in europe, though. I suppose it's whether the US ones are far-sighted enough.

It's also notable that most of the big digital music holdout bands aren't represented- no Beatles, Metallica, AC/DC.

Every Stones album is there though, yay!

Another thing I've noticed is that the service avoids any queueing problems, as you occasionally get on, say, last.fm.

Last.fm is screwed unless they can come up with something as wide ranging as this.

The DJ Khaled selection is spotty and Denim aren't on there either.

I do like the way that you get to see all the crummy compilation albums that bands appear on. If you pick someone like The Sweet it takes about 5 mins to scroll through them all.

How on earth are they going to make any money out of this model? I can only imagine that once they've got a critical mass of people using it, they're going to radically increase the amount of advertising.

That and premium subs I guess.

At the moment, the advertising is pretty unobtrusive so I can't see why anyone would want to be a paying subscriber. Which is why I'm guessing they'll up the advertising once they get enough people hooked.

Indeed, at the moment the advertising is infrequent enough not to annoy but I'm sur it'll increase in frequency. Service is good but not quite thorough enough, some bizarre gaps in artist's discographies e.g most of Sparks 70's output and their most recent work but little from the 80s/90s. Once they can plug those gaps, get on board the digital refuseniks and most importantly provide a mobile service then £10 a month would be very tempting.

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.