Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

The 'radio-ifying' of Spotify through the heavy emphasis on Spotify's playlists and DW is actually one of the things that is pulling me out of streaming services back into oldschool local media/downloading. Same with Deezer, I'm off that now.

Yes there's a massive library of music, but it's quite hard to explore/drill down into, or connect to other actual people's lists, and if I let the algorithm (or rather, payola) feed me 'curated playlists' like it desperately wants to, I get a somewhat bland approximation of stuff I like, which at times works fine as pleasant musical wallpaper but finding seriously great new music is actually much harder than just going on ILM or RYM and exploring cross-recommendations, lists, 'Rolling' threads, etc.

I'm genuinely curious about how "oldschool local media/downloading" makes for a better interface for exploration/drilling down into other people's music. Are you saying that the massive library is still lacking? If not, it seems like maybe a longer or less linear exploration using google etc. as an interface is providing a more satisfying context for you. But couldn't streaming still deliver the music in the end?

i'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's not just about the interface, or even primarily about that, but about what kind of connection you build with a track or an artist. a playlist is just a really bone-dry way of encountering music, no matter how great the cover art or how "rich" the associated metadata. but if just one friend, or even one ilxor i know a little bit about, comes out foursquare for something i've already got a stronger foothold into that recommendation than anything spotify is giving me. yes this is an argument for music writing and it's an argument for real radio (with knowledgeable passionate DJs). and it's an argument for friends.

i'll be there for you(r playlist)

really into daily mixes atm, it's like personalized greatest hits genre radio

clicked on rap caviar this morning and track four was... a music video?

also saw videos in this playlist, which is interesting for other reasons
https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX4W90hOiKcOs

There have been videos in a few other big playlists. Were you pleased, angered, surprised, something else?

Since you asked...

I would prefer there was a switch similar to turning off the auto-play after a playlist is over. Video is going to take up more bandwidth and would likely affect the already-sticky performance of the desktop app. Plus, I don't need music videos playing on my screen while I'm working in the office.

I mean, I'm definitely going to have to rethink my Wreckx-n-Effect playlist now.

xp but I have never listened to a spotify playlist that wasn't my own or a friend's. if you want to use Spotify to discover new music, what you do is go to Related Artists and click links until you start finding unfamiliar and interesting albums. this works better for smaller artists, who are not flooded with data (just... ignore the metaphor).

the trick is not expecting similar artists. but some routes that are consistently promising for me are:

a) artists with a fairly close cohort of collaborators, labelmates, fellow regional acts, etc. this is particularly good if you want to find like 25 artists from a specific country that you've never heard before. (of course, you could just look up this stuff yourself, but I assume no one's going to start who doesn't already)
b) artists with so little data that the similar artists algorithm just throws out anything it's got.

this isn't limited to spotify either -- it was probably the best feature last.fm had, you could approximate it with people they followed on MySpace or, these days, people who they follow on SoundCloud (or better yet, people who follow them, some of whom will be musicians). shit, even YouTube is good for this although you may want a dedicated gmail account given how much unrelated stuff you are probably watching

never rethink your wrecks-n-effect playlist, fear is the mindkiller

in other news, I don't see this particular story here but as far as I'm concerned most of these things are... not bad?
some guy recording a song about Randor Township, Pennsylvania and 100 other towns in Pennsylvania isn't devaluing music any more than the past several decades, if not centuries, of novelty artists did http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/streaming-music-cheat-codes.html

When setting up my own playlists, I took the extra time to select songs as they appear with their original album art - so that when the song plays, I can view that album cover as opposed to the album art from some bullshit late 2000s indie romcom soundtrack. In the playlist even when it says the specified album title, it often still defaults to Pirate Radio or Moonrise Kingdom or Garden State or something that I just don't want to look at.

i have to wonder the social features of spotify have been deliberately hobbled so that labels don't lose too much control of how their product is presented. i.e. label playlists and official playlists prioritized over user playlists and unimplemented social features ("top 10 this week from people you follow"; "send a song with a message scribbled on it"; etc). and then wondering why no one just decides to eat spotify's lunch by doing those things.

Nobody's going to eat Spotify's lunch because if you take out the payola playlisting, where will the money come from?

i.. well.. venture capitalists? :)

we'll ramp up to monetization

but we've got a few milestones to hit before then, you know how it is

spotify might have some data on what sort of features eat lunches

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/sZ8Z7kBBEkw/maxresdefault.jpg

"top 10 this week from people you follow" might not make sense when you start to think about how it'd be implemented. maybe they've even tried something similar in house and shelved it for now. There's likely a cost associated with datacenter crunching these playlists, and if that were insignificant, there's likely some value in not throwing every playlist idea out there at once.

my point is that even basic social features would massively improve discovery. that spotify has chosen not to go that route is therefore something of a mystery. the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that spotify and the labels want control over placement promo and presentation. just think about the apps that were killed off, the astonishing blue note app, for instance, that let you drill into any year, or the pitchfork and guardian apps that displayed reviews right next to a playable playlist of the music under discussion. imagine an infinite scroll of tom ewing's popular right next to all the number 1s! all of that killed, replaced with playlists. "browse" used to feature third-party playlists pretty prominently, and had a genuine "most popular playlists" tab that showed exactly that, regardless of who made it and what songs were inside. but that real estate was just too valuable to leave to the users.

Rdio had a "top track from your friends" thing, in fact. My impression was that it worked great for people who had a lot of friends on Rdio with whom they shared musical tastes. But for a lot of people it was basically "here's the 1 song that 2 of your friends have played, and then a bunch of randomly ordered songs that 1 of them likes". And it didn't really offer any tools for building a better social experience if you didn't already have one, nor is it obvious how that ought to work. I have different groups of people with whom I share different parts of my taste. And the recs I get from people I know because of my tastes (e.g. Rolling Metal) are often as good or better than the ones I get from people I was already friends with independent of music...

xp how was the blue note app not a label controlling placement, promo, and presentation?

and payola to third party playlisters sounds scarier than a more open payola tolerated only by those who can't afford or don't want to pay a monthly fee

ha it was i guess a bit! but the main way people used it was via the timeline drilldown, which was utterly user controlled. very little scope for label control and "curation".

glenn: chicken/egg? maybe users would follow friends if there was an actual reason to? i.e. why can't i comment on a song i can see a friend of mine just listened to? why can't i send a song to them inside the app? why do i have jamie oliver in my recommended users? nike run club?