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

I refused to use Spotify for years because I felt it was part of a general movement against people owning music - my MP3s may not be physical artifacts, but often they are a different version to the one on Spotify, or I edited them, and I'm easily able to make mixes with them. Spotify has a lot of music missing, and sometimes tracks get pulled for no obvious reason.

...but even I think this thread is ridiculous. If you don't like the links then don't click them, problem solved surely?

I don't want to read the whole thing, is this an actually serious thread? Why?

Are we discussing Spotify's evil empire? There's another thread for that.

Leave forks alone

scott williams

mattresslessness is a complete clown, ban him instead. seriously

forks i have no beef with you and ultimately i'm not hugely concerned about issues of ownership around words on the internet but

there is maybe something a shade careless about co-opting people into a private game gone public without some kind of "asking if they're OK with it first" approach. imo

obv tho this is the internet so my moral reservation is tempered with caution, and is coloured by my general antagonism to aggregation of data/transfiguration of cultural product into same

also, a lot of the least helpful posts on this thread have not been from yourself or matt but from people dorkishly refusing to accept that anybody might have qualms about their idea of fun

Co-opting people? Am I co-opting people in the classical thread making my Bach playlist? That makes zero sense.

Yeah I absolutely refuse to accept that creating playlists with artists on a platform where the artists are publically available is offensive to anyone. I'd much rather accept complaints about those offended boarders co-opting artists into their moral grandstanding.

thanks for so lucidly underlining my second point

I do think what you're doing is offensive and you should apologize to forks.

forks i'm sorry for the crazed tirade i just unleashed on you

Wait a sec, I have to put my youtube playlists on private and go around all the internet places where I found music reccomendations the past five years to check if they're ok with me organizing these officially uploaded music videos in a vertical list of links.

t/f: the rap mixtape game on spotify is not strong

t

We have to STOP this enthusiast who's spending hours making the rolling threads more accessible to the people in them.

you are strong spirited

Listening to page after page of illegally uploaded youtube embeds? Great! Music to the people! But a playlist of officially uploaded material? Hang him!

as per rap mixtapes, spotify is.... spotty.
requires some creative exploration and shit disappears randomly.
it's also regularly mislabeled and/or confusingly filed for legal reasons or just out of sheer haphazard cataloguing.
there's dozens of young thug mixtapes for instance but some are labeled as Yung THUGG and plenty show up under the DJs name.
the deep curation is often meh. I've complained about it before but what that service needs imo is regular editors to manage, maintain, recommend and provide greater context than an allmusicguide bio.

nah they need to leave curation up to the users/artists, imo

someone please point me to the spotify playlist for this thread

Why does it make you uncomfortable? He doesn't use your name or any content of posting aside from artists and song titles to make something that everyone can access and listen to if they're interested in the genre.

― emil.y, Thursday, 4 February 2016 01:01 Bookmark

...

After all these years of having a strong artist-centric anti-spotify stance, I finally broke down and subscribed to spotify for the first time last month. The primary reason I did it was to access the rolling thread and eoy nom playlists. I've found that it's really good for sampling music for the purpose of deciding that I like it.

My primary time for listening to music is on my commute and youtube embeds or soundcloud links just don't work there. I've spent thousands of dollars on music from iTunes based on 30-second song samples, only to rack up a playcount of 1 for half the tracks and leaving the rest unplayed when I realized that I actually didn't like it. Using spotify, I've been able explore dozens of albums that I thought I would like, but haven't ended up liking at all. And a handful that I'm really really happy with. For the ones I'm really happy with, I'm totally going to buy something from the bands, whether it's a hard copy of their album, a shirt, a concert ticket, etc.

I know this probably isn't how most people use spotify, and that's why it's so bad for artists right now. But that's how I'm using it and it's working well to help me enjoy music I like while saving money on purchases made by errant recommendations/research.

Ethics aside, it's hard to resist something like Spotify.

ethics aside it's hard to resist fill in the blank

i agree it takes actual thinking, though

ok not wanting to be a dick but i'm Not A Fan either. i don't think spotify is ethically sound but it'd be hypocritical of me to hammer that point home so

- up to forks if he wants to do this for himself + i recognise it's handy for many others but it feels so much like ILX Sponsored By Spotify, it's v hard to ignore! especially when there are these regular bot-like bumps which are v disappointing when you click on a thread hoping for discussion or insight

- feel like it's just giving into the anti-rolling thread whingers and allowing them a means to bypass actually engaging with genre threads and their regulars, genre discussions, the nitty-gritty of what's actually changing or going on. analogous to the wider trend of plucking some cool sound you heard on the internet out of its context and then abdicating any need to learn about that context bc "convenience" "spoonfeeding" whatever. none of the rolling threads move especially fast these days and if you have so little interest in house or r&b or afropop or whatever that you can't even bring yourself to read them...i mean it doesn't matter how little you know, i'm a complete novice/dilettante in the afropop thread but the absolute least i can do when i catch up is to post about what i like and why i like it, not scurry off to the safety bubble of a spotify playlist

i just don't get the whole listening to music as science experiment thing, but w/e floats yr boat.. please stay away from the music 'industry', though, please

cue bitter people obsessed with the elusive "gatekeepers" of good hip music or whatever.

well yeah the entire "listening to music as data dump" concept is completely baffling to me and not how i'd ever want to consume music.

I'm a contributing regular in threads where forks has made playlists and I'm eternally thankful someone does the job for me so I can get a feel for what's being discussed across a year and a reminder of tracks i've forgotten, even when I've discussed through most of it myself.

The idea of someone who would potentially contribute to a thread skipping that because of a playlist is to me absurd and I don't believe it's ever applied to anyone.

The moral stance falls short when the threads are basically a playlist itself except heavier to load and one that doesn't give _anything_ back to the artist. At worst a playlist will keep a person from playing these.

The idea of someone who would potentially contribute to a thread skipping that because of a playlist is to me absurd and I don't believe it's ever applied to anyone.

the entire idea was born out of people whinging on EOY threads that they wanted to "keep up" in the vaguest way with various genres but were too "intimidated" to set foot in rolling threads

forks' playlists led me to discover a ton of music I never would have discovered otherwise. I don't get the complaint.

No cunt here ever made a tape I spose

pottery

― iatee, Thursday, 4 February 2016 05:38 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Classic ref btw

i dont do spotify cos i have an archive full of undiscovered gems i need to listen to,
however, i have absolutely no problem with forks, or glenn, doing their thing on ilm.

xp So those people wouldn't have entered the threads anyway and probably won't listen to a playlist either, but might, possibly. And if they do, if this has any affect on rolling threads, I would assume making it easier for people to hear what's being discussed would bring more people IN, not the other way around. I know some people face their browsers crashing if they try opening up an entire thread of embeds.

Some of you might not like listening to a playlist of music and that's great, but it's convenient for many and an obvious way to discover new sounds. But, ok, this impossibly grouchy attitude is sure to make the act of sharing music more joyful! And accusations of disturbing the holy bond of posters in certain threads and their particular ritual of sharing music will not at all make it scarier to join the clique!

The idea of someone who would potentially contribute to a thread skipping that because of a playlist is to me absurd and I don't believe it's ever applied to anyone.

I don't know if I've ever contributed to a rolling thread but I've been using them to check things out for years.

Exactly.

I'm still going through the ILM 2015 mega-playlist and you could argue this is even "lazier" in that it theoretically pulls all the 'best' stuff from the pigeonhole playlists.

ILM has perhaps plateaued or matured in terms of curation or gatekeeping - whether it's thru YouTube or Spotify or something else doesn't matter. Before these things existed people would scan threads and download whatever people were recommending - with no guarantee of contributing to any discussion on it.

10+ years ago there were things like the CD-Rs per year, Rough Guides To...now we have more easily assembled and shared playlists and I appreciate that to death because of what it took to get there. With every development someone complains it's now too easy or too unfair. All Spotify and ppl like forks and glenn do is change how it's done - eradicating old problems but introducing some new ones in their place. I used to feel overwhelmed going into the biggest HMV stores, now I have 100+ playlists I'd like to hear (when I'm not doing my own...).

The thing is that Youtube links have a tendency to expire pretty quickly, go back to a rolling thread from a year or two back and see how many of the links now go nowhere, and people posting on rolling threads don't always put a title or artist name in there when they post. Spotify's availability is patchy, especially in eg dance music, but these playlists are pretty useful nonetheless.

feel like it's just giving into the anti-rolling thread whingers and allowing them a means to bypass actually engaging with genre threads and their regulars, genre discussions, the nitty-gritty of what's actually changing or going on. analogous to the wider trend of plucking some cool sound you heard on the internet out of its context and then abdicating any need to learn about that context bc "convenience" "spoonfeeding" whatever. none of the rolling threads move especially fast these days and if you have so little interest in house or r&b or afropop or whatever that you can't even bring yourself to read them...i mean it doesn't matter how little you know, i'm a complete novice/dilettante in the afropop thread but the absolute least i can do when i catch up is to post about what i like and why i like it, not scurry off to the safety bubble of a spotify playlist

I find Doglatinesque discourse blagging as annoying as the next man, but even assuming there's a sufficient contingent of people like that, they wouldn't be engaging in the first place anyway. Some rolling threads are pretty good in terms of the discursive element, others are woeful. In general I feel like there's a lot more music and a lot less insight on a lot of rolling threads these days, especially compared to, say, the bobbins threads from 10 years ago, and everything being on Youtube is a big part of that. But honestly using words like spoonfeeding is projecting a lot. Like, YOU DON'T KNOW how much effort people are otherwise putting in to understand the genre. I regularly use playlists as a jumping off point, exploring other bits of the artist's discography or related compilations or whatever. They're an enhancement, not a substitute.

In any case, 'effort' (in terms of music discovery at least) is pretty fucking overrated. The effort should be in the listening and the understanding, how you come across it is irrelevant. It's not as if listening to a few Youtube embeds or a podcast or radio show once a week makes you some kind of supreme crate digger, and it won't guarantee you have more of interest to say at the end of it. Valuing one form of digital access above another is essentially the techier equivalent of those middle aged bores who think that not having to get a bus to an Our Price means that young people don't sufficiently appreciate music.

FYI let the record state the Benny B's regular genre mixes are ILM's single greatest resource and possibly its most unappreciated.

matt dc saving all his best posts for his erstwhile fellow site mods huh

i cry nepotism

Nashwan's post goes back to my earlier point that ILM was at its peak in terms of discussion and engagement in the post-Soulseek, pre-Youtube era, where everything in theory accessible but also just inaccessible enough. It meant that people could consume huge amounts of music, but at the same time actually had to make an effort to describe a record, and to think about why people might love it, or go out and seek something out on the basis of a description alone. The difference between this thread and the 2015 bobbins thread is vast.

The afrobeats thread is often one of the best for talking about changing scene dynamics, and wider political issues around the music, but we're in early February and there are already nearly 50 links in there. That's brilliant, there's a shitload of great music in there, but very little actual discussion.

Clicking through hundreds of Youtube embeds is, for me at least, one of the least enjoyable ways to listen to music, so anything that bundles enough of it up for listening on my commute is good with me.

i guess people forget that record stores these days have websites with sound clips and stuff

get the fuck over yourself if you have a problem with this

Basically any argument that festishizes the mode of discovery and makes a direct connection with level of passion/engagement is probably bullshit.

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.

quite possibly the dumbest thing I have ever read on ilx

A bus to Our Price? In my day we'd pass round the score carved on a block of cheese and you'd just have to hope the rats hadn't eaten all the good bits by the time it got to your turn.

i don't listen to the playlists, i don't use spotify, i couldn't give a shit if he stopped doing the playlists tomorrow. but ffs forks is a saint who cares so much about music and does so much for this board. how can anyone in good conscience want to shit on his little playlist thing? ilx is public. youtube is public. spotify is public, QED. leave forks alone

(I suppose the exception to my rule is actual societal engagement and discovery - if you're going to deep tech nights every week then your engagement with the music and the culture is likely to be greater than someone checking a rolling thread or listening to a radio show or playlist. But not everyone has the ability to do that, and one form of solitary engagement is much the same as the rest as far as I'm concerned. Box tickers tend to be box tickers however they approach the music, and passionate partisans the same.)

idk who jimmy dyspeptic wine is but Matt p you are being a fucking nasty self righteous dick to forks about this and it's not cool