Are you cool with forks making Spotify playlists out of every rolling thread without permission?

I hate Spotify, I hate the Spotify playlists (and fwiw I generally dislike the rolling threads). I'm voting 'no.'

I feel excluded from the threads that have Spotify playlists because of my opposition to streaming services that rip off artists, and I certainly don't like the idea of checking my conscience at the door and becoming part of what I see is the problem just to participate in a thread. Sorry if that sounds sanctimonious, it's just how I feel about it.

That said, I predict a landslide for the pro-Spotify people, and may not even check back in with this thread because there's no shortage of more important things to get bummed out about in an election year.

for some context as to the history of this grade c beef

spotify blows, will spend 2016 giving money to artists i care about
― trigger warning: your mom (mattresslessness), Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:27 PM

in exchange for something that won't disappear overnight in a merger.
― trigger warning: your mom (mattresslessness), Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:30 PM

i'm gonna do both but i'm crazy like that
― lute bro (brimstead), Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:33 PM

me too! also as noted above:
Spotify is hardly the be-all-end-all of music indices ... but it has the added benefit of being very easy to search and manage, free and/or cheap, available in multiple countries and it just happens to be the service I lean on for at least 75% of my listening. It is also a service that makes subscription to playlists (and auto-updating/downloading tracks to a mobile playlist) easy. I'm under no illusions that Spotify may well not exist in five years but something similar will almost certainly fill the vacuum.
― ulysses, Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:44 PM

oh and hey, it's forks. I got tired of having eight gazillion thread bookmarks so in honor of primarily holing up in this little corner of ILX and to slim down and focus on just listening, I'm trying on a new login. The reference, if it's not obvious, is to the arduousness of the quest ahead as we ride into the Sirens' path.
― ulysses, Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:47 PM

have fun in your video game
― trigger warning: your mom (mattresslessness), Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:49 PM

interesting to me that in making an attempt to be less engaged on ilx, i am now the subject of a poll! probably my own fault somehow.

anyway, more recently from one of our many rolling genre threads, the following straw that broke a fragile camel's back:

Don't wanna reopen a can of worms here but I really wish we could leave Spotify out of this. 95% of the artists (and labels) here are exactly the sort than need all the help they can get, and while I realize most of us are the type who 'audition' albums on Youtube, Spotify, etc and then do our best to support the artist either by purchasing records or attending shows, I still feel a Spotify playlist sets a really bad example.
― Jimmywine Dyspeptic, Wednesday, February 3, 2016 11:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the larger economic and ethical consumer questions of music streaming are very personal, so i respect your opinion. if it's not something you want to interact with, that's cool, no one's forcing you.
― ulysses, Thursday, February 4, 2016 12:33 AM

fuck you dude! how about showing you respect that opinion instead of paying lip service to it and doing what you want anyway.
― bicyclescope (mattresslessness), Thursday, February 4, 2016 12:38 AM

... then, ten minutes later, this thread.

Spotify is hardly the be-all-end-all of music indices ... but it has the added benefit of being very easy to search and manage, free and/or cheap, available in multiple countries and it just happens to be the service I lean on for at least 75% of my listening. It is also a service that makes subscription to playlists (and auto-updating/downloading tracks to a mobile playlist) easy. I'm under no illusions that Spotify may well not exist in five years but something similar will almost certainly fill the vacuum.
― ulysses, Thursday, January 21, 2016 9:44 PM

I think this entire argument is unfortunately indicative of a much larger problem: in weighing the pros and cons, you don't once consider the 'content creators' and Spotify's effect on their livelihood (or, if you don't give a shit about their ability to clothe, feed themselves, their ability to continue creating the art you enjoy enough to get "free and/or cheap.").

you should just take all the songs, mix them, upload them to soundcloud and post them on DJs post your mixes for download instead

i mean... the rolling threads are basically wall-to-wall youtube embeds right? like people have already provided a one-stop shop for listening to the music they recommend... i'm not sure i get why that same lineup being transposed to some other format is suddenly weird and makes you not want to post things. is it that it divorces the songs from who picked them and makes the whole thing more anonymous/less visibly a collective effort? i don't really hang out on rolling threads tbh but i gather that those who do kinda "know" each other's tastes, "oh man, that is such a 'lex' song" or whatever... and i could see where making it easy to get the music but not the people/conversation might rub someone the wrong way...?

so... given the youtube thing - --- while i would believe that spotify is more problematic or evil than youtube, it's not like without the forks playlists, the music would only be heard in some kind of unmediated free-love manner. also all those embeds tend to make it impossible to load the threads or conveniently listen to the music IME. like you really have to perch at the computer, daintily click play on a single youtube embed, sit there and listen to it and consider your response (or if you liked the song, painstakingly save it to your itunes wishlist [is that a thing?] or more likely, your own spotify playlist) before scrolling down to click play on the next single youtube embed.... seems like just getting them into your regular listening regime makes a fuck of a lot more sense. also for those who make EOY ballots or just generally want to stay current with things, seems like a massive massive resource. i'm kind of a curmudgeon and generally just wait for the EOY results to catch up on what i should have been adding to my playlists all year but maybe this will change.

typed most of that before forks's explanatory post. hrm. i guess it makes a LITTLE more sense to me now. like i don't want to dismiss people having misgivings or ambivalent feelings even though the wording of some of their reactions is kinda offputting to me. hmm.

I'm against it, fuck Spotify and fuck sending them business

ah, february, the month of internet arguing

I mean the cheap counterargument is, those artists should not be on Spotify then! - - - but obviously it is not at all that simple. Still, it kinda feels like telling everyone else on ILM who uses Spotify at all (the ones listening to forks's playlists or not) that they're bad for using it. Which I would accept as your opinion, but maybe I don't get why forks's rolling thread playlists are inherently worse than there being playlists for the EOY poll results, or other ballot polls, or like, or playlists people make of their individual ballots for things, or really any playlists ILMers share here, all of which have been going on for a number of years at this point. They would all involve the same kind of thing, right? And if you do believe that ILMers are particularly inclined to buy music after streaming it, then at least some of that exposure is turning into sales for those artists (though even as I type that I recognize all kinds of potential holes there).

I also think it's creepy that we have our own Spotify sales rep now, dude should be banned

Huh? Do you mean Glenn?

This is a perfectly reasonable objection to have, ppl need to not take things so personally (says a person who takes things too personally)

xxp yah fuck that

oh my god i've spent the last ten years of my life on a forum full of wackos

JWD, as you're not coming off as, let's say, dyspeptic as mattress, I'm happy to talk this through a bit more with you if you'd like.

As I understand it, your concern is that taking part in a thread where one of the people who read the thread is publically cataloguing music recommendations (admittedly, using a service that you find ethically questionable) is tantamount to condoning the service in question? That POV is confusing to me.

I have no ownership, vested interest or control over how ILX or Spotify works outside of the fact that I use both as communication, entertainment and learning tools. I'm a private, unpaid individual putting these playlists together using resources that are freely available online. They're first and foremost for my own listening usage but it seemed a waste to put so much obsessive effort into something that would likely be useful and helpful to a larger number of people, so organizing them into a codex seemed like a more reasonable (if completely cockamamie) way to focus my energy. Again, Spotify is not "sponsoring" the thread... or me! If YouTube had better portability, I'd prefer to use that service instead tbh; they have a much more comprehensive catalogue as it's user-generated.

Just to play devil's advocate though: are you okay with posting on a thread where people post YouTube videos? Do you think that the shoddy payrate-per-view to the artist provided by Alphabet is not comparable to Spotify's pay model?

Feel weird about posting pix all over ILX that are hosted by Imgur, since that's the same site all the Reddit weirdos use.

Yes I mean dedicated Spotify employee Glenn MacDonald. Can't imagine pal here would be cool with any other company having a rep shilling users.

Ppl

Glenn has been posting to ILM since before I have though! Like at least a decade. I can see why people get frustrated with the line he toes on the Spotify thread specifically but banning him from the whole rest of the site seems idk, excessive?

meanwhile Οὖτις has been posting here for less than a year (unless s/he changed display names)

permission? From who exactly?

Oh, okay, it's just about moral objections to spotify. Part of the reason why I don't use it is b/c I do prefer to give my money direct via bandcamps/purchases at shows, but yeah, sorry, having a moral objection to a platform that so many people use isn't anywhere near enough to warrant a policy banning forks from creating his playlists.

I also have a feeling that this thread was started in order to create a clusterfuck, which will no doubt happen.

We got one guy who wants a clusterfuck and a few people who have their own concerns and axes to grind. It seems clusterfuck avoidable.

you don't once consider the 'content creators' and Spotify's effect on their livelihood (or, if you don't give a shit about their ability to clothe, feed themselves, their ability to continue creating the art you enjoy enough to get "free and/or cheap.").
― Jimmywine Dyspeptic, Thursday, February 4, 2016

as it happens, i work in the live performance industry and am acutely aware of the economics involved in being a professional musician or anyone who works tangential to that world. I've also been discussing artist rights issues vs. listener rights issues for at least the past fourteen years.... often on ILX!

I have my misgivings about spotify's financial model but the biggest culprits are almost certainly the major labels who allowed spotify into the ring only if they colluded in perpetuating an outdated business model to keep a dying industry afloat for another decade or two. Here's the thing though: I've come to terms with using spotify for my own personal use and that's my call. You clearly have not and that's your call. But there is a difference between not eating meat and telling other people who are at the party that they shouldn't eat meat. I'm totally okay with this not being something you want to use and (as brimstead said while I was posting this) it's a perfectly reasonable objection to have. I would maybe question why you feel the need to leave the party because I'm having a hamburger but it's fair for you to do so!

Οὖτις is a very well-established poster under a new alias, fwiw.

(that's to maura if that wasn't clear)

glenn has been posting here I think before _I_ got here. he's fairly integral to the board and he's somebody who has also wasted numberless hours arranging our collective dumb thoughts into spreadsheets. It seems a dick move to negatively name check him here for no particular reason.

Not even that new, it's been like 1.5 years.

xp My opposition is to the larger boogieman of Spotify itself, not to its application to / on ILX*. Your own explanation is reasonable and I don't take any more issue with it than I do with my otherwise progressive, farmer's market-shopping friend who likes to eat at McDonalds once in a while.

(* I tend to think, perhaps romantically, that the record nerds and deep diggers of ILX would have many of the same issues with Spotify that I do: that it not only hurts artists ((which is too big an argument for this thread and one I wouldn't mind agreeing to disagree about for now)) but also compromises the listening experience, making the very act of listening superficial and cheap. It's just not a way I interface with music. I realize this is just my own experience, and I'm certainly not trying to speak for anyone else.

I'm not wild about Youtube, either, but the Youtube links seem to come in song-sized embeds, and don't offer the entire discography of an artist at the click of a mouse.

The reason I specifically objected in the post-Takoma thread is that that thread in particular is full of people who are being directly affected by streaming; not a lot of Kanyes or Adeles being discussed in that thread. And I can see certain of those people--label owners, artists, etc--taking exception to it.

you guys do whatever the hell you want but calling out glenn is really fucked up

xp Ha, weird that we used the same meat-eating analogy - I replied before I saw your last post!

can't believe glenn got banned

glenn banzig

http://www.big-t-shirts.com/ProdImages/big/who-gives-a-shit.jpg_1244.jpg

I've never seen Glenn on anything but the Spotify thread, if I've missed something I apologize. Still find that thread gross though.

I've been here since 2001 fwiw.

xp lol, was waiting for it and i got it

if your perspective of the issue is "romantic", by which i take you to mean idealistically principled, what does it matter if it's Adele or the indiest boy in indy folk who is losing some unspecifiable percentage of a penny because someone chose to listen on one service over another?

here is one of many cool things glenn done did:
Mapping All Music

Misgivings about Spotify/YouTube/life aside, everything forks is saying is perfectly reasonable. What's not reasonable is keeping a clusterfuck/witch-hunt poll like this open for three weeks.

I've never seen Glenn on anything but the Spotify thread, if I've missed something I apologize. Still find that thread gross though.

I've been here since 2001 fwiw.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, February 3, 2016 9:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's a regular in the metal thread and has been forever

Doesn't Glenn tabulate Pazz & Jop these days, fwiw?

Misgivings about Spotify/YouTube/life aside, everything forks is saying is perfectly reasonable. What's not reasonable is keeping a clusterfuck/witch-hunt poll like this open for three weeks.

― dc, Wednesday, February 3, 2016 9:12 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^^

Glenn's willingness to honestly engage with folks on the spotify thread and his selflessness in transparency of posting there (under his real name yet!) is imo genuinely laudable and provides insight not available elsewhere. You would rather he didn't respond to issues that he actually has the wherewithal to talk about?

i am fighting the urge to start an answer poll of "Are you cool with Mattress starting a clusterfuck thread than ends in three weeks?" and then ending that poll in three weeks.

Just because I got curious and did the searching, Glenn's first ILM post is from Mar. 9, 2001 and his web presence is linked in the rec.music.reviews FAQ from 1996. He is as old-school of an internet music nerd as anybody here, and the strength of this site IMHO is that it still maintains a critical mass of those kind of people (old and new), generous in their musings and their list-making. I think people are allowed to stay on ILM even when their current job is for a company a lot of people don't like. Even when I've disagreed with him on the Spotify thread specifically it's kinda like, I mean, he doesn't have to post anything there. While it seems reasonable to assume there are things he can't say there for reasons of employment (not exactly a unique position among ILXors), I seeeeeeeriously doubt his Spotify overlords are cracking the whip to make sure a couple dozen people on the nerdiest of all message boards hear out their side of the story.

Huh. Live and learn

Can I fp myself?

no but as penance you must start a three-week poll about whether you should be banned from the internet for life, and only glenn can vote

Sounds fair

you should just take all the songs, mix them, upload them to soundcloud and post them on DJs post your mixes for download instead

― mookieproof, Wednesday, February 3, 2016 6:34 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

just in case mookieproof wasn't clear enough, i'm a dj, i post my mixes to soundcloud, and then post the link to the mixes on that thread, where it's available to stream and/or download. soundcloud is a convenient hosting option for this but i'm happy to share my work in other ways.

forks, what bothers me about your project is how exclusive spotify is to it. good metadata is valuable, and you're harvesting it for one organization. do they in turn have an open metadata policy? how exportable are their playlists?

would you be open to modifying your project somewhat to include links to bandcamp, discogs, artist websites, youtube? maybe in a platform-neutral format? or is this really about you riding on a community of experts to put yourself in a good light with a certain organization? because that's sure what it looks like.

... to me, and the reason my tone about all of this has been so dickish, for which i apologize.

the hell? is there something i don't know about forks that would make his/her super involved spare-time project look suspicious in this way to you? fwiw, imho, antagonizing someone and then suggest they do five to six times as much more work for you is maybe not as good a look as offering to help with that, or something. you raise some interesting points that could be interesting fodder for constructive criticism re: metadata and the value for spotify - - --- although let's be honest is spotify really going to see their profit margin leap because of these playlists? moreso than anybody else's, or carly rae jepsen's? or is it your concern that they will turn around and basically rip these off to create a marketable, hypeable product, "check out our new curated playlists, What's Next In Fruity Swag Goon Music 2016 - EDITOR'S PICKS!!!" ...? ----- but the interesting conversation side of it is kind of foreclosed if you're impugning the motives/character of the poster in question.

forks has discussed his/her method and choices a bit, see posts starting at this permalink Listening to ILX Listen - 2015 Spotify Genre Playlists ; i believe that (s)he is sincere. if it looks like a classic internet music lover list-making project, and sounds like a classic internet music lover list-making project...

I'm pretty sure what forks is doing is more benevolent and nerdy and ocd than shilling for spotify or whatever. If you wanna trash spotify, fine, but don't trash forks.

#notallplaylists

"check out our new curated playlists, What's Next In Fruity Swag Goon Music 2016 - EDITOR'S PICKS!!!" ...?

They do do this fwiw. See my last post on the Spotify thread re: stealing my friends' online radio station playlists.

i think rolling threads have a place but it feels like there are more of them every year & people are getting sorted into smaller and smaller buckets. i understand why e.g. the metal and bobbins ones need to exist but some of the more specific ones less so

i've found in recent years that the 'Favorite Tracks + Albums 20XX' thread is the most valuable rolling thread to me since it covers the whole spectrum

I'm not sure who these posters are who apparently only ever engage with genres through ILM playlists through. Like I'm curious as to who you actually think that is?

― Matt DC, Saturday, 4 February 2017 15:15 (two hours ago) Permalink

*looks at poll results*

I don't see how you can compare someone posting an audio link in a thread with someone skimming all the audio links from a thread but that's just me... rolling rap thread has been full of youtubes and audio links from day one

what year is this

1933

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYcK2fwa9dA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aeETEoNfOg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K38xNqZvBJI

YouTube links tend to expire quickly though, that's the whole problem. Theoretically making it easier to hear all the stuff in those threads should actually increase participation so I think there's something else going on here that's distinct from whether or not anyone's making playlists.

I think more generally the group of posters who are really interested in hearing and discussing new music (vs posting lists or making New Jersey facsimiles or 'albums where the first song is the worst' type threads) has been shrinking for some time. And that affects both the rolling threads and the kind of threads that Katherine mentions.

And that pool of posters is spread more and more thinly as tastes diversify. For better or worse there's a much wider range of music covered here in a lot less depth.

Like these was a time where people would post a new thread every time a mix CD came out from a popular DJ and it would get earnestly discussed (or facetiously discussed). Now there's a rolling mixes thread which is mostly a set of links with "nice mix here" written next to it.

I do think the increasing age of the average poster is a big factor, as is the fact that people are less likely to be posting from their computers (and are therefore going to be posting much shorter messages). Short of actively promoting the board to a load of younger people I don't know what the answer is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKg6FDrGW5Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcd1CwPPHIU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6RKp9x_bio

^^^ nice mix here

more like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2W1Wi2U9sQ

i support this threadjacking 100%!

specifically 3'04" if ure asking

all included in the threads playlist tho just in case

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izQB2-Kmiic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Mbxe33BYW8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKU78O7T_fw

seriously though, again, there are whole threads devoted to the meta discussion of theories about whether, how, and why ILM posting style/discourse has changed over time. it's an interesting topic, i have things i'd add, but i think it'd be nice to use one of those rather than one that was started as an ad hominem against one poster. possible starting points:

Any reason why ILM is so quiet these days?
Longtime ILXors - how has this board changed over time?

I for one cannot imagine why younger people would not want to post here

not enough Brony love

lol katherine

where do young people discuss music these days?

on the toilet

Twitter

snapchats of moleskines

and drone filmed facebook live post

and rustic batard

I kind of like that the youtubes disappear, that a record wafts in on the breeze and after a while off it goes again. There are too many records, most of them are bad, and the few good ones lead to serene feelings not speaking. a doff of the cap is its sentence on the page

https://open.spotify.com/user/seaworthyset/playlist/5vo6FnevX854ltBDOsiWqY

so basically, the problem is simultaneously that Spotify playlists will forever draw people away from the thread, but also that YouTube links are impermanent

personally, I

1) get overwhelmed by bombardments of Youtube clips

2) don't use / like Spotify

and

3) prefer the more in-depth discussions found on dedicated album / artist / label threads

ghastly Rate Your Music nostalgia-wank polls

he he

another thread where the decline of the entire internet is discussed can be found here The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

Pssh, 284 posts and no mention of forks's playlists. FAKE NEWS.

i just want to say for the record that tho i'm sympathetic to people who want forks to knock it off with the playlists it's ultimately not something that bothers me personally at all

but i do think it's lame and annoying that forks bumps rolling threads to note only that the playlist has been updated. it does begin to feel like somebody programmed a computer to eat the threads.

if forks has a different way to alert playlist subscribers that the playlist is updated then i think it's fine, and my apologies if this has already been addressed in this thread i didn't read

The reason why he tells you about it is probably that he's not a robot but an actual human bring putting in unpaid work for the benefit of the community so it would be nice if said community notices it, you know. A bumped thread hurts no one.

Spotify playlists on ILM: don't ask, don't tell.

^gets it

plug-in or applet or whatever the fuck that could pull all the music on a page by name seems like something that would catch on big if it was done right. This could be the next hipster puppies ILX success story. Call it "forks" and buy me dinner and I'll give you permission.
― ulysses, Thursday, 4 February 2016 21:52

I have a friend who's supposedly working on such an app at the moment by the way.
― posted with permission by (dog latin), Friday, February 5, 2016 9:01 AM

how did this work out dl?