Spotify - anyone heard of it?

yeah i have to wonder if the goal is maintaining a set of songs i'll enjoy more than actually making me discover anything - increasingly i'm seeing songs - not just artists - that I KNOW i've already played plenty on spotify. i feel like the text would often be "you played World Party's second biggest hit last week, care to discover their biggest hit?" & "you clearly like 'black metallic' by catherine wheel, wanna hear 'black metallic' by catherine wheel"?

that said there ARE some "artist like artist you've played"s between the "other songs by artists you've played" and "songs you've played." I just wish it didn't come off so timid about leaving my safety zone, if it's gonna be sold as DISCOVER rather than ENJOY.

it's not unlike the bit in The Ten with bobby canavale and ad miles

"wanna hear roberta flack?"

"hey, how about Killing Me Softly?"

"eh, that's a little Roberta 101. Here, let's try Greatest Hits, track 2..."

it's possible the average spotify listener blasting early alt-rock on the reg doesn't wanna be pushed any further than "mind if we slip some guadacanal diary in with your cure and depeche?" though

This week I got Brenton Wood's Oogum Boogum Song on my playlist, which I may have heard before but couldn't identify, and I found it delightful. Though now I've just learned that's apparently been used in a KIA ad, so that makes me a little disapppointed.

wish there was a "I am familiar with this artist already, please exclude from future discover playlists" ticker

as much as I love Charli XCX I think I am all discovered on that front

It's true that DW is not really attempting, at the moment, to aggressively push your boundaries. Think of it as just the beginning. If it's getting the kind of thing you like, it's proving that the basic personalization approach is working. Then we can start to apply that personalization to other sources of material, like Fresh Finds or new releases...

I'm pretty cool with it just coughing up more 70s AM gold nuggets not currently in my playlists. The only real problem, as with all things of this nature (Netflix being the worst at this in my experience) is that you can't ever really tell it ''no, I know about that, I just think it sucks'' or ''i only want to listen to that artist in the context of their albums'' or ''i only dig their rambling story-songs, not their stabs at political relevancy'' or w/e. Like if there's any opportunty to low-rate things, I avoid it because I know the machine will never know *why* I'm hitting that button, and the distortions will pile up from there. So it goes.

I'm pretty cool with it just coughing up more 70s AM gold nuggets not currently in my playlists

yeah i'd just like to not see stuff from my playlists

xpost Yes, me too. Which is why we're trying to mostly rely on listening, not "tuning", so you don't waste your time trying to pre-second-guess the robots.

I'd like to convince it I'm not the incarnation of the part of idolator that reads like popjustice

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out

i spent last week making a huge '80s playlist so my discover weekly this week is amazing lol

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out

― balls, Monday, September 14, 2015 2:22 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's the thing though, no matter how hard I try to influence it, it does not budge.

Maybe try a couple solid weeks of Turkish hip hop and reggaeton.

Beck, Bjork, The Smiths, JAMC, MBV, Cocteau Twins, Belle and Sebastian, Super Furries, Broadcast, plus a side order of The Fall, Talking Heads, Gang of Four, Durutti Column. I haven't escaped the male-centric indie spiral but it's finally figured out when my tastes formed.

Also, does the algorithm for the Discovery Playlist put any thought into order and flow of the playlist, or does it just find a bunch of random songs you might like and puts them in no particular order?

At the moment there's no particular internal order to the tracks, but this is an obvious area for future work...

Maybe try a couple solid weeks of Turkish hip hop and reggaeton.

My Recent Artists over the last two weeks have been mostly metallic (Electric Wizard, Uncle Acid, Earth, Black Sabbath, Candlemass, Cirith Ungol, Enslaved, Myrkyr, Ulver, Opeth, Tribulation) but this week's Discovery Playlist remains much in the vein of the earlier ones I've received, strong on jazz and neo-soul ... the main change this time appears to be less soul and more old post-punk (always welcome) and current indie (somewhat less so). There's one Sabbath track (the atypical"Planet Caravan"), otherwise zero metal.

All my Discovery Playlists have been great so far, with very few tracks I wanted to skip, so I am not complaining at all ... it's just interesting to try to figure out how and when listening history affects results.

Oooh, Running!

Charli XCX was a hidden gem until you took notice.

Now see how much your support means by logging into
Found Them First and watching Charli XCX’s exclusive thank you video.

(I am assuming everyone else got this, or close to this)

lol i just got one of those for k. michelle

would watch k michelle's exclusive thank you video

Ron Jeremy was a hidden gem until you took notice.

Now see how much your support means by logging into
Found Them First and watching Ron Jeremy’s exclusive thank you video.

https://www.spotify.com/us/jobs/view/oTes1fwk/

from the "what you'll do" section of above job description:

Identify and substantiate playlist hypotheses.

should be new description of ILM. though maybe it's a little too on-the-nose.

That's good solid Spotify-speak. You will really do that. You will really talk and think about it that way.

Finally clicked on Discover Weekly about an hour ago. Few tunes and even fewer artists I was unfamiliar with, but still a pleasant listening experience. Seems like more than one of us got recommended "Mystic Eyes," by Them.

i liked mine

however it did recommend will young 😱😱😱

would like to congratulate whoever wrote that job ad for their restraint in not asking for a rock star candidate

Mine didn't update this week for some reason.

ditto

Thirded. Guess I didn't need to listen to the whole thing last night.

fourthed

glenn mcdonald to thread!

Had been looking forward to it showing up. Now it is the slight pang of seeing the unopened box of Scholastic Books on the teacher's desk.

I updated my desktop app this weekend and now my Local Files list is completely hosed, it doesn't seem to be able to load properly.

no playlist for me either

DW updating hit a glitch, but feverish repairs are underway. Do not despair, the music is not lost.

I am having to discover stuff all by myself :o

On September 21, 2015, Spotify became self-aware.

http://i.investopedia.com/dimages/graphics/spotify_logo.jpg
glenn, I'm afraid I can't do that

try again
http://evolver.fm/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/spotify-logo.png
I'm sorry, glenn, I'm afraid I can't do that

Gizmodo: Going back to the waves for a second. What are they?
CW: *laughing* I was the first guy to do the logo back in 2006 and we came up with the waves then. It's basically illustrating streaming. Or at least that's what the thought was back then and now. It's supposed to be streaming.
AH: I've read some discussions on Twitter that it's audio waves. But we think of it as streaming. It's good that it could be both.

but the waves in a stream do not diverge, CW! maybe it illustrates estuary-ing!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/Heraclitus_b_4_compressed.jpg/383px-Heraclitus_b_4_compressed.jpg

love his pepsi logo

i got discover weekly for the first time last week and if a human being had put that playlist together and said "here are some songs i think you'd like that you haven't heard before!" i would have been profoundly offended tbh

i'm not gonna type all of them up but this is a good representation:

james brown - i feel good
blondie - heart of glass
rick springfield - jessie's girl
righteous bros - you've lost that lovin feelin
earth wind and fire - september
supremes - reflections
tom jones - delilah
omi - cheerleader (not the rmx version that i've listened to which makes this a lazy ass recommendation)
bananarama - cruel summer
chubby checker - the twist

FIRST of all i think all those were literally #1 songs? you think i need to "discover" these? don't insult me spotify, not after all the time we spend together.

second why are they almost all oldies (only two of my recs were from the last 30 years)? i realize i may be messing up my recommendations by listening to glenn miller and duke ellington for hours on end as my bg study music but i can't draw the line from that to bananarama.

i mean don't get me wrong these are all jamz of the highest order but i didn't need spotify to tell me that.

my playlist this week is an improvement in terms of newer stuff and stuff i haven't heard, but it still has macho man, love will keep us together and never gonna give you up on it so my final grade is

o_O o_O o_O three side-eyes out of four

yeah I think it wd be very nice if, say, it would use number of spotify plays total on a track as an argument against foisting ir on you. maybe even, the more youve listened to whatever is making it think you'll like an extremely popular song, the more likely it is to go, man, this guy is a serious grunge fan, so if he's not listening to 'smells like teen spirit' it's probably by choice.