Spotify - anyone heard of it?

It has a mixture of things you've played and things from your youth (assuming you were honest about your birthdate) that are disproportionately popular with people of your age-group...

― glenn mcdonald, Friday, September 29, 2017

Ah, thanks

Mine is a very weird jumble of my songs and my wife's songs

my Spotify listening is very random so I was very curious about this.

Instead, I got a-ha, Bon Jovi, Kansas, Def Leppard, Wham!, "Bohemian Rhapsody", ad nauseum

uh, no thanks. more like "terrible high school flashbacks"

Mine's too McCartney-heavy, but it picked my favorite (by a mile) Heart song without me ever having played Heart on Spotify, so it gets points there. Range of 1968-1986, but heaviest on my high school years.

I lied about my birthday, so I'm curious what I'm going to get.

mine is actually pretty great! some of these are like...hmmm (two tracks from bubba sparxxx). i was born in 86 so a lot of 90s altrock and rap classics on it, but it does a pretty good job of getting my tastes from elementary school (selena and sheryl crow) to middle school (metallica and nirvana) to high school (radiohead) through college (kraftwerk and daft punk). the only real blind spot was the years i was pretty obsessed with my bloody valentine.

mine is like the biggest most obvious commercial 80s pop ever, which is kind of otm? but leaves out all the faith no more and minor threat and sinead o'connor and robyn hitchcock and stuff like that. and all the techno and house. i don't use spotify to listen to that stuff, so i guess there's no way it could know.. but then again it did stick the cure in there and i NEVER listen to the cure so there is a bit of triangulation going on

Mine has Bronski Beat, EPMD and Tears for Fears, so it's all good.

Is the Time Capsule a one shot thing or does it update regularly?

― WilliamC, Friday, September 29, 2017 10:41 AM (yesterday)

I got a collection of "songs you have listened to on Spotify that are from the past". Only artist I actually listened to at the time is Ash - who appear twice, so good job there I guess.

still kind of amazed at how terrible mine was

It's a one-time thing.

Mine is utter nonsense, especially considering I left school in 1999 and only one song dates from prior to then. Also, they are all terrible

mine was full of 90s rap and alt rock + "four horsemen" by metallica *thumb up*

Mine is an oil and vinegar mix of super-famous classic rock FM staples like "Hey Nineteen" and "Born To Run" mixed with New Wave/No Wave/Punk Rock songs I have listened to in the past few years. Something about this playlist algorithm bugs me more than any of the others, all of which I have found useful or rather figured out what was useful about them. It's like when someone who should know you better makes you into a low-dimensional caricature and won't let you defend yourself.

actually i do listen to a shitload of grime and house on spotify. it's hard imagining the algorithm that would identify what 80s music that would translate to. impossible, maybe. but that is the task. in my case it's whodini and madonna and quiet riot and men without hats and bonnie tyler and lords of acid and ll cool j and guns n roses and ozzy osbourne and terence trent d'arby and huey lewis and lionel ritchie &&&&. madonna's the only one of that group to make the list.

my adolescence resists algorithms, feel so punk

Mine is great, but I've already playlisted 99% of it. It's a very nice mix of late 80s-early 90's, though. The only song on it I never sought is Corona by MInutemen - not my favorite genre, but cool song. May have heard it on a Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtrack or something.

I'm guessing this algorithm is more accurate the more nostalgic a person is.

The first half of mine looks a lot like my classic rock-flavored Daily Mixes -- a few deeper cuts, some I've pulled up/played before. The second half is a bunch of '70s AOR warhorses that I never need to hear again (I'm 56). Having said that, my Discover Weekly continues to get better and more interesting each week.

in contrast to the Time Capsule, my weekly Discover list is dead on as usual - Michael Hurley, Moondog, Wire, and a bunch of older soul stuff that def reflects my Spotify usage

It's almost like they tried to mod out the other playlist algorithms such as DW and go in an orthogonal direction, but there were no more eigenvalues left.

My Time Capsule is an entertaining mix but not representative of what I listened to in my teens or early 20s. It's heavy on Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Talking Heads and a variety of 70s classic rock singles, with a strong infusion of 60s jazz. Of these I only listened frequently to Talking Heads as a youngster, and I rarely play them now (though I did go through their discography on Spotify prior to the ILM poll).

What I assumed this would try to do is find music that you don't play much these days but might have played when younger. Obviously this is really hard to infer! But "music you listen to that is old" is kind of pointless.

Not sure how people think this thing's going to literally hop in a time machine to see what you were actually listening to as a teenager. Obviously it can only infer based on your spotify listening habits (I mean, if you, like me were a teen before spotify existed).

Kind of proud of mine, weirdly. It's a good bunch of songs!
https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZF1E4ZLmqw0AeGxr

Feel like it did hop in a time machine but went back to some other person's distorted conception of me- What Mad Universe-style- instead of the actual me.

i think we can all agree that discover weekly remains a wonder of modern music listening. for real

^^^^ real talk

cosign

Hahaha mine is both fun and terrible but also otm... I think they pick songs that were hits in your country from age 10 to 15.

Mine has Ace of Base, Paradisio, Fey, a song from Shakira’s 1995 album, Cardigans - Lovefool, basket case, pretty fly dor a white guy, santeria, gettin jiggy wit it, short dick man, vengaboys, ode to my family, closing time... I don’t know how they do it but I do have very vivid memories with all of those terrible songs growing up.

Other than some Maiden stuff that my kid has been listening to/learning on guitar, my Time Capsule list was pretty good. I've engaged in some nostalgic listening, though, so the algorithms probably had more to go on.

regarding what i posted up-thread. edited my card on-flie to the Quicksilver card and got a $5 credit, so getting it now for half off.

50% Credit for Spotify Pr

Transaction Date
Saturday, 9/30/2017

Posted Date
Tuesday, 10/03/2017

Details
N/A

Appears on your statement as: 50% Credit for Spotify Pr omo on 09/30/ 17

How wondrous to live in the age of the celestial jukebox!

Huh, honestly had no clue until now that that phrase was commonly used--thought Mark S. made it up!

This isn't a huge deal but recently I've noticed that the track timer sometimes stops working. Track plays fine but timer stays at at 0:00.

Does anyone else experience songs randomly getting removed from their library? It's been happening so long that I just take if for granted now, but it is a persistent mystery. I've got an IFTTT set up to save every song I manually add to the main "Songs" library while listening to a separate playlist (e.g. "Saved on Spotify")--so logically every song in that playlist should also appear in my "Songs", right? And they do, at first, but sooner or later a not-insignificant number of songs (at least 10%) in that "Saved on Spotify" playlist become unchecked, meaning that they've been removed from my "Songs" library--and I'm definitely not manually unchecking them.

I had assumed for a long time that this occurred because my "Songs" library had hit the 10,000 track limit, but it hasn't (it's at ~8,900), and anyway I have heard that when you do hit the 10k limit you get a pop-up message explicitly saying so, which I've never received.

It's not really a complaint, and I know opening a support request for this kind of thing would be fruitless anyway, I'm just wondering if this is a common thing that other people have experienced, or if I'm just some kinda weirdo

I see albums, especially from smaller indie labels, go unavailable all the time, and just assume it's that the track licensing goes wonky for a few months until someone pays up.

There is a setting, at least in the Windows and Android versions (with different wordings for some reason), where you can choose whether unavailable tracks should be hidden or visible (and grayed out).

Yeah, that's not what's happening to me. For example, I saved La Bouche - Be My Lover (yeah, yeah, I know) four times over the last year, and three times it has become unchecked. I saved it an hour ago and it became unchecked just since then. It's not unavailable.

Ah right sorry, I see now that's what you were saying. (It didn't quite register because I don't use that save functionality myself.)

https://www.spotify-strangerthings.com/

also cool easter egg if you play on the website or desktop app and just let the playlist play for a few without touching the mouse

At the weekend I was trying to add to the queue mid-play & no matter how hard I tried, more than one time in ten I started playing the track instead of adding it. So much for being mr cool dj.

I realise I'm probably the only person here who uses Spotify a lot but still uses the free service, but has anyone else noticed recently the soundtrack to the ad that sits at the bottom of the page playing over the top of the track you're listening to? It's happened a couple of times to me in the last week.

That's definitely not supposed to happen! I've reported it to the ads team, I expect it will get fixed quickly...

So the 2017 summaries are happening: 2017wrapped.com

Apparently my favourite genre is "mandible", which I had never heard of.
82000 minutes of music listened to in 2017, which feels like some sort of achievement to put on the gravestone.

What is this "The Ones That Got Away" playlist that has appeared? It literally seems to be made of music I find revolting -- Fleet Foxes, Morrissey, Grizzly Bear etc.

Haha me too! Same artists. There's a reason I skipped these!!

Top Artists: Future, XTC, Talking Heads, Young Thug, Future Islands
Top Song: Future - I'm So Groovy; Future Ooooooh (Instrumental); Young Thug - Family Don't Matter; Christine And The Queens - Tilted; Future - Coming Out Strong
Top Genre - Indie Rock