Spotify - anyone heard of it?

To put this another way ...

Right now we're still sort of at the “Hey you like Kraftwerk, have you heard Devo?” side of things. Fresh Finds and Discover Weekly sound like they're operating more at the "You like the sparse little classical melodies and dislocation in Kraftwerk’s music -- there’s this other band that kind of does that that’s getting a ton of buzz on Pitchfork and Soundcloud you should check out” phase.

It would be cool to see the buzz factor brought to life somehow.

What would be great is a website where people could talk about loving music, maybe post about the reasons they love specific music or recommend things to you based on your own past verbal characterizations of your tastes and preferences. Not sure how you'd measure what music they like most... some kind of voting-based mechanism would be good but I suspect only obsessed weirdos would actually put in the time. Ideally it would have a really minimal, low-impact interface (maybe even just text on a white background?) for those of us using it on older devices. I'm not a technical guy though and it seems like that kinda thing might be beyond the technical capabilities of Spotify. Advertisers might not go for it either, I dunno.

would never work

Yeah, most people would tire over discussing music and instead talk about their love of everything else.

you guys

Steve Hoffman forums

Glenn - point EN's computer at ILM. ;)

Actually, I'm sure you could get great recommendations/correlations from the ILM archives. Sell the datamining rights off to Spotify and ILX could be funded for decades.

Then everyone will complain that Paris Hilton or Big N Rich are being recommended to them

New data reinforcing that old T Swift pain

hey guys my inside algorithmic sources indicate that this band 'radiohead' is going to be big big big - don't know about you but i'm getting in on the ground floor

Listening to ILX Listen - 2015 Spotify Genre Playlists
still waiting on my check tbh

(some of those playlists have 90 subscribers now btw)

One thing I wonder is if music recommendation engines could do a better job going forward of unpacking WHY a song is recommended to you in some way -- beyond "you listened to X, you should try Y" which is a pretty shitty corollary.

pandora used to (maybe still does but i haven't used it in a long time) have a little note on each song saying why they decided to play it based on the parameters of your song/album/artist playlist; "we chose this song for you because it's a power ballad in a minor key" or something. it doesn't seem like too much work to add some more factual info on the artists, and maybe why they're trending, to pop up as well.

re: Glenn - point EN's computer at ILM. ;)

forksclovetofu is OTM, i was just about to mention this !

note, ILM data for 2015 music is ALREADY in the spotify data mining sets i.e the ILM Rolling spotify playlists that forksclovetofu collates. Those playlists will be compared to similar playlists that will influence the discover weekly playlists for many other spotify listeners. So if your already listening to the ILM spotify playlists regularly your benefiting from the existing collective intelligence of ilm and other likeminded / similar curated playlists.

going back to Fresh Finds,

I found this

The Firehose
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0/playlist/3mZgwuBZqoRWIQqQB7IsTb
Fresh Finds Pro Edition

only 24 followers of this hidden away playlist. Probably most of these are internal spotify employees, but anyone can follow.

over 400 tracks in the last 4 weeks - tracks added regularly - 32 tracks were added thursday morning.

so, this is like a spotify rolling recent version of the Hype Machine for new tracks for new / emerging artists

hype machine
http://hypem.com/

there is also this playlist:

Blogmergence
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0/playlist/0L5QOqPKhNaYOx1IlUdjH6

this looks like a unfiltered data dump of recent tracks crawled from music blogs. 47 tracks were added on thursday morning.

this is the spotify R&D account:

predict0
https://open.spotify.com/user/predict0
useful to follow

as refereed by Brian Whitman, in the link i mentioned upthread

http://notes.variogr.am/post/125515460365/fresh-finds

they have created human filtered best finds for july / june / may

regarding what spotify need to do next, they need a proper blogging / content strategy outside of the spotify platform. i.e to start a new music discovery blog. They have content curators i.e playlist makers & data scientists but spotify are underutilizing their knowledge and enthusiasm.

http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/87588

President Obama uploads his own personal playlists on Spotify

thanks obama

lol reminds me of this - https://mobile.twitter.com/blippoblappo/status/460194112142979075

surprised he's so into death grips, but hey

tbrr finding out that michelle and barack's getting it on mix is fairly close to my own is kinda awesome

maybe you can use that along with the knowledge of his murders to delay orgasm /morbs

i don't think i read that the way you meant it

i HOPE i didn't read that the way you meant it

this thread took a disturbing turn

why does spotify (ios) burn off so much mobile data when playing saved tracks? what's it downloading? 45 mb today and i've only played ~two hours' worth.

two hours of all saved tracks? that seems very high. I would switch to offline mode in that case.

thing is i shouldn't have to keep doing that. hoping it's just a bug and not album covers or something.

a distinctly dancey playlist this week. i approve!

So I'm normally pretty blasé about internet privacy policy shenanigans but this does sound pretty extreme:

“With your permission, we may collect information stored on your mobile device, such as contacts, photos, or media files.

What does that mean, "with your permission"? Have I given permission by accepting this policy? What on earth do they want with my contacts or photos anyway?

on ios you need to give explicit permission. if you're on android i think they can mine everything. really though i think it's just spotify covering off all likelihoods before you do any of the things that might fire off a scrape of your address book etc.

android M will make the permissions more granular.

but yes, why does this synthesizer app need my wifi details and my contacts?

https://news.spotify.com/us/2015/08/21/sorry-2/

Let me be crystal clear here: If you don’t want to share this kind of information, you don’t have to. We will ask for your express permission before accessing any of this data – and we will only use it for specific purposes that will allow you to customize your Spotify experience.

https://twitter.com/SpotifyUSA/status/634125633501556736

Charles Manson is on this week's Discover playlist :/

However many weeks later, the Discover playlist may have led finally to a discovery, I think mostly due to the avalanche of Wilco I'd been playing a couple of weeks ago - Israel Nash, who I've never heard of before. Very Neil Young & Crazy Horse. Not sure if I'll dig a whole album of this or not, but I think this is the first new-to-me artist I've come across via Discover where I actually want to try and hear more.

Happened to me with On An On this week...

Manson showed up on a bunch of people's lists this week. Not a problem we had anticipated, but steps will be taken...

hopefully not by him

lol

i have been enjoying the weekly discovery much to my surprise

This entry has been known to cause some problems at a few music services... not naming names

https://musicbrainz.org/artist/8530d70e-778c-4eba-b08d-831d16783c03

lol:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/41366462-ff3a-45a8-91d9-c40c259b5637

http://everynoise.com/engenremap-oratory.html

what governs the positioning there, glenn? quality of recording?

This week on Discover Weekly: Ten (count 'em) songs I already know, and songs by Dr. Dog and Slightly Stoopid (gag). I'm beginning to think Spotify doesn't think very highly of me.

it's ok, Spotify A) gave me a kate bush song B) made it "deeper understanding"

"you seem like you'd like kate bush, and of all the hundreds of kate bush songs, we feel this will best resonate with your personality"

mine is great this week!

Fizzles: the positioning is atmospheric-vs-bouncy and organic-vs-mechanistic, same as on the big overall genre map, but within a genre like oratory you're basically seeing large magnifications of small differences, so it isn't necessarily telling you much.

Spotify seems desperate to make me listen to Lloyd Cole, every single Discover Weekly playlist I've had so far includes at least one of his songs