Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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?

i fully cop to being biased by my own preference for discovery coming via trusted people in my life or trusted personalities but i don't think i'm alone in this - at all - and it just confounds me that spotify doesn't provide these sorts of avenues. when spotify hired a bunch of radio people last year i assumed there was a recognition that music needs the sort of personal touch that radio can provide and that we'd see something like a better integrated beats 1 but it seems like all those people were just hired to make.. playlists? i mean, they're great playlists! (not to mention the best-in-class algorithmic stuff :)) but they're just playlists.

i didn't like the videos. on the "i'm with the banned" playlist they were redundant (and started with a trailer??) and on both playlists they took up too much screen real estate on mobile.

And of course it's true in a sense that we (Spotify) want control over how things are presented, because that's basically what we do. We're trying to bring more music to listeners and more fans to artists. We're more likely to use our own playlists to do this than random user-made playlists because, circularly, we control our expectations for how those playlists behave. We know that our editors are updating our lists regularly, and responsively, and responsibly. Somebody else's playlist? Who knows?

But at the same time, we have Discover Weekly and Daily Mix and Release Radar and Related Artists and lots of other things that are driven by people's listening, individually or collectively. We control them in the sense that we decide how often they update, and by what exact math, but if you listen to self-released black metal, you're going to get more self-released black metal from us. We don't have any incentive to push Drake or Ed Sheeran on anybody who doesn't want to know about those songs...

right i get that. what i am saying is that i would listen to more music, and become fans of more artists, if i was recommended them by actual people (maura; pete tong; ned raggett) rather than by the browse page or by my weekly playlists. in order for that to happen, the social features in spotify would need the sort of thought that instagram and snapchat put into stories and filters and timelines. what i am pondering - and this isn't really a conspiracy theory, more just a business model question i guess - is to what extent labels are comfortable with spotify being user-driven in an individualized, personal, editorial way, beyond the anonymized mass of data needed to drive playlist algorithms. the evidence so far is: not very

For what it's worth, I don't think anything that has happened with "social" features in Spotify has anything to do with Spotify or labels being uncomfortable. Nobody in the music "industry" loses if your friend tells you about a song.

it always felt like cleaning up to me

well there are issues with UGC sitting alongside your editorial. during the recent UK election there were official live streams on youtube from CNN, iTV etc, with live chat running side-by-side in the browser. without exception the live chats were chockablock with swears, escort service spam, etc

or, if you allowed rich editorial user playlists, and promoted them "fairly" in browse, i.e. v popular playlists at the top, what's to stop a sharply written, frequently updated playlist called "worst pop of 2017" taking deadly aim at the big pushes of the week from labels?

or just on a really simple level, i could send a friend a track and say "AWFUL!!!!!" and maybe everyone else who follows me would see that too?

it's not easy to do. but imo it would be great (for me) if spotify confronted these challenges here and did make the app more user-centric and more social

I want to discover which songs are bad

lol

what prevents money from flipping the "worst pop of 2017" playlist curator? I trust the semi secret algorithms more than I trust strangers. My friends and I SMS playlists and tracks with comments to each other all of the time. That is all of the social stuff that I want. I don't want all of the problems of reddit added to spotify. Things are pretty good. Fix bugs and support hardware, imo.

what prevents "worst pop 2017" is the fact that by definition it eliminates most of its audience

also I'm not sure what you mean by "sharply written" in the context of a playlist, but given the hostility of basically every editorial outlet (spotify qualifies as one now) to even mildly critical writing, and the indifference to "sharply written" vs. "incoherently mean" or "predictably zingy," those also prevent it

My friends and I SMS playlists and tracks with comments to each other all of the time.

I used to be able to do that in Spotify, but for some reason they decided that if you didn't have a Facebook account you wouldn't be able to.

well, mildly critical writing on anyone who is not the industry cycle's current designated target of critical writing

xp you can't copy a link without facebook?

(asking because I don't know how to test this myself, and I am genuinely curious)

You can copy a link without fb.

Didn't explain myself very well. You used to be able to send and receive tracks, playlists etc direct to other users from within Spotify now they need to have a Twitter, fb etc account.

I see. I guess I never liked the in-app messaging very much. I'd rather have fewer messaging interfaces to check, so I am fine with sending links via those. I suppose the value was that you could have a spotify tier of friendship, i.e. a list of people you only cared to share your spotify username with. Now you'd have to share an email address at least.

Just got email confirmation thingy

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-playlisting-fake-artists-so-why-are-all-these-fake-artists-on-its-playlists/

That is interesting. But it seems to be happening only in the "yoga moods" kind of music that one would see as $10 CDs in check out lines named after different biomes. It doesn't seem like the kind of music that requires large investment from actually good labels, and I guess I don't really care if Spotify's practices discourage those kinds of outfits from existing.

https://surveys.spotify.com/affinity

http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/streaming-music-cheat-codes.html

This is somehow both surreal and inevitable.

Good article.
I can forgive and navigate around the "20th C. Schizoid Man" stuff, but the official Spotify playlists being stuffed with artists who don't exist outside the service itself seems particularly anti-working musician, which kind of sucks

http://musically.com/2017/07/11/spotify-fake-artists-traced-back-swedish-producers/

isn't the fake artist thing basically just the musical equivalent of netflix and other video streaming services offering their original content? I'm having a hard time being outraged here

Netflix doesn't automatically play Netflix content, you have to navigate to it and select it yourself. Also, own content is clearly indicated.

The problem is not so much that Spotify commissions filler, but that it hides its origins and feeds it to listerers by stealth to reduce payout to real artists.

On a different note I A/B'd Spotify extreme against a 256 MP3 and the latter won. Just more crisp, even with the Spotify EQ on. Not sure why I never did that before.

more crisp you say

Netflix certainly puts its own content on prominent display on every interface

netflix clearly identifies netflix original content because it attracts users to the service. What spotify does is just add bland filler and hope nobody notices, which is very different. So I guess my comparison upthread is probably not so apt.

(now I'm imagining Netflix inserting random cheaply made episodes of Friends or Planet Earth or whatever within current seasons of those shows and just assuming nobody will notice)

I like the idea that AI will provide these fake filler songs in the future.

(now I'm imagining Netflix inserting random cheaply made episodes of Friends or Planet Earth or whatever within current seasons of those shows and just assuming nobody will notice)

― silverfish, Tuesday, July 11, 2017 8:10 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With C-actors, vaguely familiar looking sets etc. Now I want to see this!

Srsly the Netflix comparison isn't helpful in any way.

I also don't see how this is substantially different than library music, which people love and even collect