Spotify - anyone heard of it?

My DW hasn't updated for 15 days, and my Release Radar hasn't updated for 11 days.

How feasible and interested would you say users would be in having invite only collaborative playlists? As it stands right now if a playlist is collaborative everyone on spotify can add tracks -which ruins playlists more often than not- or an asshole can get in and remove every track just for giggles.

I used to send and receive recommendations from a couple of acquaintances who live in the other side of the world via inbox. With that feature gone, having collaborative "private" playlists seems to me like the easiest solution to my problem. We can share songs back and forth within a playlist and even curate and compliment a theme or set of sounds between each other.

Anyways... been wanting this feature for years now but I might be one of the few who want it.

count me in

obviously it's something I've wanted

i think that counts as a "social" feature therefore bewilderingly deprioritized by our spotify overlords

Who did this Salsa Nation playlist? It's meaningless to have a "contemporary salsa" playlist that includes "La Murga" (from 1971). I didn't just click on it to bitch about it either. I was curious to see what new material someone might think is worth highlighting. (Sadly there is almost nothing in the way of truly contemporary, of-the-moment salsa that is worth collecting in a playlist.)

Here's my data-analytical thing that finds new (or nominally new, at least) music by less-known artists that seems to be catching on among Salsa fans:

https://open.spotify.com/user/particledetector/playlist/6yrKLhh8PE0XVCq2LEnlky

There's no explicit editorial presence in this, it's just cohort statistics, so nothing forces the music to BE salsa, and if everybody who usually plays salsa spent the last week listening to nothing but death metal, this list would be death metal. But people never seem to actually do that.

I've never listened to this one before, myself, and I don't know enough about salsa to say anything about the songs in context, but I'm playing it now and it's pretty great whatever it is.

Thanks, that looks potentially interesting. If nothing else it might remind me of some Dominican merengue I've forgotten about, by the looks of it.

Actually, the other similar playlists look like they'd be more useful to me. I'm just too fussy about salsa at this point.

any thoughts on implementing back cover art and booklets in Spotify?

I find it interesting that atm you rarely (unless you still buy physical media) see the back cover art of even the most popular albums

Wait, what do you mean? The back covers are displayed already!

Oh, wait, are you using a device that doesn't have a back screen?

the depreciation of liner notes is my least favorite aspect of the shift to digital

like, across the board. digital promos rarely come with them

The back covers are displayed already!

Wait, what? Where? How?

Whenever I've requested a pdf of a cd booklet after getting a download, the promoter has sent it to me. But no, they don't seem to include them by default. At any rate, I don't mind physical recordings maintaining an advantage as a multimedia object. In a sense, streaming and downloads fill the niche of cassettes, portability over collectibility.

Glenn's joking, but didn't iTunes have some sort of deluxe download offering with a digital "booklet" and such?

iTunes Digital Booklets yeah, that died a quiet death I think?

This is such an irony: we go virtual, removing physical space-constraints, and end up imposing even more limiting virtual ones.

I'd be happy just to consistently have the dates things were originally recorded.

Artists should bundle an edited selection of their twitter feed with their albums.

"On top of this, Spotify will also be removed from LG TV systems as we work on improvements. We hope to have a better version of Spotify on these in future. Watch this space!"

Well, fuck you, spotify

Idiotproofing request: Despite queuing some tracks up these were removed after then accidentally launching a playlist from the browser. Ideally in this situation they would just get pushed to the back of the queue and then you can just remove any tracks accidentally queued manually?

there is an ilm edm 2017 playlist on spotify that i was listening to last night while playing resogun (i am currently 15th in the world on resongun:demolition on ps4) and i can't search for it for some reason. or remember the name. there were 3 (count them 3! yo brooklyn! 2017 year of da bonez!) frankie bones tracks and then this awesome track that i loved and i can't remember who it was by. so hot.

Is it this one?

https://open.spotify.com/user/forksclovetofu/playlist/2U7GYmh1qZ0YteaXhUezhf

https://watt.cashmusic.org/writing/thesecretlivesofplaylists

Tidal is actually very good at including track info on producers, composers & musicians in their tags. Any chance that Spotify might adopts such a policy? I'm trying to quit Tidal but stuff like that keeps me hanging on, paying for a sub I really should not need.

Showing more track info isn't my department, but I know it's a thing people are interested in...

Good article, sleeve. All of this vertical integration and payola (as well as the de-emphasizing of individuals' playlists and other social-networking features) seems like the same short-sighted decision-making that led to radio's irrelevance.

So far, it seems like Spotify has been pretty careful with rolling out some of the most craven of these features. My Discover Weekly playlist is mostly full of pretty obscure bands which don't seem like they are paying to play. This is good, because what I like about Spotify is that the machine-learning-driven playlists don't feel like they are being driven by payola (now, maybe I'm wrong/naive about this).

On the other hand, Spotify does seem to be making it tough to discover individuals' playlists. Even if you have a username, there are no tools to sort by latest-updated playlists, or to see a nice big list view of all of their playlists. This seems short-sighted to me. If Spotify was a place where its users could become tastemakers, organically, without the influence of big-label money, that would be better for the Spotify brand, long-term.

Of course, this stuff probably only matters to a tiny percentage of their userbase. I'm guessing most people are happy to pop on the Rap Caviar playlist and hear what everyone else is listening to. But I don't know. I've definitely shied away from Apple Music due to their feeling like some super-integrated corporate marketing exercise. Spotify has always felt like a much better service for discovering truly unknown (to me) bands.

Basically, if Ed Sheeran shows in my DW, I'm gonna be annoyed.

Yep, good article on Spotify and its various tiers of playlists and how labels get songs on them

lol i know elise. she talks like a seasoned spotify vet in that article but she was a radio producer until last year. these whippersnappers, they learn so annoyingly FAST!

Depressing but also just downright strange looking at Browse overview and a Spotify-made 'This is: Ed Sheeran' playlist being the only artist-specific playlist among the first six visible and out of the 25 presented in total.

Every generation gets the Elvis it deserves.

every time i read this thread i just feel bad for glenn

my last DW playlist for some reason included the a capella version of return of the mack

what do i need to do to convince the algorithm that this is the only song that needs to be associated with my profile

glenn can you personally place a capella versions of mark morrison songs into my DW playlists

my playlist contained return of the mack, but none of my previous playlists contained the mack, please fix this logical inconsistency

O mi gawd

I always get "Return of the Mack", "Revenge of the Mack" and "The Mack Strikes Back" confused, sorry...

Packin' a Mack in the Back of the Ac'

can you search your playlists? as in, if you've squirelled a track away in a playlist but can't recall where/which?

In mobile, you have to scroll up to find the search box.

This Edge of Balearic playlist has been good to me.

I got an email from Spotify asking me to confirm my email, out of the blue after having had the account for what, four years? Can I assume it's a phishing thing or have I been listening to too much Reply All?

I got the same email and wondered the same thing. I didn't respond.

Ditto. Did respond, but felt worried about it.

This is cool news: https://noonpacific.com/#/

We’ve had a good run with Soundcloud, but for various reasons we can't disclose, we feel that Spotify is the right move and more sustainable in the long run.

🤔

Aaaand Spotify now has vanished from my smart TV. That was a worthwhile investment.

life in the fast lane

DW today - merzbow followed by a soft acoustic number. worked okay.