Spotify - anyone heard of it?

i thought this was really good:

http://omnifeed.com/article/motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-a-subtle-power-struggle-for-control-of-music-metadata

not specific to spotify but wasn't sure where else to post it

This is driving me absolutely crazy because I want to be able to listen to this album and have it scrobble correctly on last.fm.

If you listen to both tracks does it matter which order they're scrobbled in? If you want to hear the tracks in the right order swap then in a playlist.

swap *them*

THE SCROBBLES ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE ROOM

we scrobbled in its subtle brume

what is the point of scrobbling, exactly? Does anyone actually care enough to read lists of what other people listen to?

lol you are asking that question on ILM, of course we do!

fair dos.

i thought this was really good:

http://omnifeed.com/article/motherboard.vice.com/read/there-is-a-subtle-power-struggle-for-control-of-music-metadata

not specific to spotify but wasn't sure where else to post it

― Karl Malone, Wednesday, March 23, 2016 1:43 PM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://wtf.tw/ref/bardzell.pdf

^this paper is really dry but it's a starting point for "feminist hci" which says self-disclosure is important in these systems among other things.

what is the point of scrobbling, exactly? Does anyone actually care enough to read lists of what other people listen to?

Apart from the lists/stats/OCD thing, scrobbling means last.fm can recommend you music based on artists you listen to. But now last.fm has gone to shit so it's kind of pointless (their recommendations now include stuff you already listen to and you can't even delete them, also they don't recommend you "neighbours" (= people with similar taste) anymore either)

Finally got access to our "Fan Insights" page, and it's pretty neat. You get some basic demographic and location info for listeners, and lots of graphs, etc. Turns out we have a lot of fans in Stockholm (??)

Maybe you have as many or more fans elsewhere, but more of your Swedish fans have Spotify since it's a Swedish company? Sounds potentially really helpful in terms of deciding where to tour, though.

Font changes on iPad app, now kinda small and high contrast and hard to read.

Is there any reason why I'm getting so few notifications this week? I kind of rely on them! Music is dropping left and right but searching through the 1500 or so artists I follow just takes too much time.

I can see it's sort of tailored to my listening (or at least my Spotify listening which is about 10% of it) but it's badly named if I'm supposed to discover something from hearing 'Release the Bats' or 'O Superman' for the thousandth time.

― ilxors ananimus (onimo), Friday, January 22, 2016 4:14 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'O Superman' in my Discover playlist yet again this week.

So... is there ANY way of getting notifications back once they've dried up? It's been five days since I got my last one now and it's very frustrating to miss out on new music. I need to know.

jfc the Beatles are on Spotify

who let them on?

https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/spotifys-billion-dollar-challenge/

I can see it's sort of tailored to my listening (or at least my Spotify listening which is about 10% of it) but it's badly named if I'm supposed to discover something from hearing 'Release the Bats' or 'O Superman' for the thousandth time.

― ilxors ananimus (onimo), Friday, January 22, 2016 4:14 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'O Superman' in my Discover playlist yet again this week.

― Don't opine. Dead inside. (onimo), Saturday, April 9, 2016 8:03 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and this week it has 'Release the Bats' again ffs

What's your Spotify username? I can tell the team responsible.

The handful of misfires and repeats that show up on my DW can all be forgiven every time it digs up a barely remembered nugget like Translator's "Everywhere That I'm Not" (warning, do not watch video if you hate the 80s)

K-major & Basmo on this week's Fresh Finds! Nice!

I had no idea until today that my Spotify library had a maximum capacity but according to the Android app it does and I've just hit it.

^ is the reason i routinely check to see whether apple music is working properly yet (it's not) and end up deleting downloads from spotify instead. this offline limit is the only thing that will push me away from spotify one day, perhaps in 2019 when apple gets its shit together.

It's not just an offline limit - even if you don't have a saved album available offline it still counts toward your Your Music 10k limit (I had maybe 5 albums that I had made available offline when I got the notification). Seems that play lists don't count towards this limit so I ended up moving lots of albums from Your Music to play lists.

Btw speaking of play lists I turned on my phone yesterday on the way to work and all my play lists were gone...I almost had a heart attack. Luckily I restarted spotify a few times and they came back. Is the playlist restore feature on spotifys website any good or should I be backing them up some other way?

It's not just an offline limit - even if you don't have a saved album available offline it still counts toward your Your Music 10k limit

well if that's the case it's pretty ridiculous. on ios it doesn't even tell you about any limit, it just stops downloading, and then you leave the house to find half an album/playlist is not there.

I have an iphone and got the message...tho I got it when i was just saving something (a notification popped up), I wasn't toggling the save offline switch on something I had already saved.

Anyway I can see some reason why they'd decide to cap music saved offline but music that's saved online only is basically a collection of shortcuts, idg why that's capped. Especially since that cap doesn't extend to playlists; so all the functionality did was make me unsave a bunch of albums, then add them back as playlists. Not sure what the point of that is...

caps might have made sense a few years ago when streaming services weren't the centre of the music industry. now that it's ~the way~ so many people use music, the limit is just an archaic pain in the arse, and i'm surprised spotify still has it. i've mentioned this itt before but i'm pretty sure no other major service limits to ~3,300 offline songs.

not sure if it's been brought up here but like three or four years ago they took away the ability to see who is following your playlist and have yet to bring it back. Is there a reason for this? it seems like a fairly obvious social media feature to have available and i used it a lot to find people with like taste.

Showing followers didn't scale. One could imagine showing them only up to some cutoff, but that's kind of arbitrary. I feel the pain, too, as a playlist maker, but it's a tricky design problem...

why not show them all? infinite scroll? paginate? there are options

I haven't had any notifications in 11 days...I restarted Spotify and now the notifications icon (the bell) has disappeared completely...

It's going to hang out with the stars.

hm, same thing

12 days since I got my last one. I contacted Spotify about it and they were very helpful, advising me to reinstall via several emails. After I reinstalled and told them that it still wasn't working I haven't heard from them though. At least the bell is still present, I guess.

I haven't gotten any in a while, either. I'll see if I can find out what's going on.

Hey glenn I'm finding you can no longer drag a track from in-browser spotify straight into a playlist on your desktop version - now it just diverts you to the record the track you've dragged is from. Do you know if this is an intentional change or temporary bug or wha?

i do miss being able to see who was following a playlist

this new 'songs based on the playlist you made' feature is blowing my actual mind. the best feature they've ever done,
a freaking brilliant idea.

omg I was just thinking the other day what a great feature that would be.

It was in rdio 2 years ago iirc

is this the list you get if you select Radio for a playlist or is something different?

App is slower than dripping molasses on iOS 7. Wish they still provided an older version.

A fellow iOS 7 user! *waves*. It does take an age to start up and sometimes can take a frustratingly log time to start playing a track from a new album or playlist - generally it works ok for me though.

maybe spotify on ios is some kind of revenge for itunes on windows...

The "radio" is cool; so far it's mainly helping me remember obvious things that should have been in a playlist, rather than revealing totally unknown things to me. I imagine the algorithm works off of "other people who listened to x..." logic, so that's not so surprising - my playlist full of familiar classic rock radio cuts is logically going to turn up other classic rock radio staples. No worries there.

I do wish it were at least programmed to leave out songs that are already in that playlist, though! Maybe there's some other use for it that I'm overlooking, but it seems like the main value would be to give you new ideas to supplement a playlist, not stuff you're obviously already listening to. Other than that, the only problem is the same as Discover Weekly - the majority of the 'radio' is stuff that I'm very well aware of and have left out of the playlist on purpose, either because I own the album and don't want it to lose its freshness, or because I don't like the song. But I can't imagine how that would be avoided. It's a decent feature. What's the window on it being willing to refresh and give you a new 'radio' lineup for a given playlist, though?

Does the Spotify Discovery playlist take into account everything you've listened to, or only most recent listening activity? Or both, but with a stronger bias towards the most recent?

out of curiosity - does spotify take account of you adding stuff to your own playlist from your discover weekly one?

Does Spotify consider your personal affection for Big Country and Julianna Hatfield, and then factor that into an algorithm that decides how helpful the discover playlist will be?