Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

Me too. Maybe it,s a paid-for promo thing? Loads of stuff I did not like.

songs:

meet me in the hallway
late for the sky
prohibited permissions
when youre near me i have difficulty
baby

artists:

r stevie moore
richard dawson
mac demarco
thundercat
sleaford mods

baby by tei shi

My top genre is "chamber psych" which I had also never heard of but gives me a pretty neat and specific answer the next time someone asks what kind of music I like

mine is "neo-psychedelic" apparently

when asked to guess whether my fav genre this year was freak folk, noise pop, anti-folk, uk post punk or escape room I could only sigh

the genres in spotify are an embarrassment but they are at least joyfully demented

indietronica

I also got Indietronica. My top songs were all from Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.

Top artists:

18 Carat Affair
Kendrick Lamar
Oneohtrix Point Never
Mastodon
Nite Jewel

LOL, my 2018 goal is "refuse to act your age", i.e., "you have the musical taste of an elderly person".

I listened to 55K minutes of music, although I'm sure none of this counts time on the Spotify Roku app, which doesn't seem to tie to any Spotify activity.

LOL, my 2018 goal is "refuse to act your age", i.e., "you have the musical taste of an elderly person".

I listened to 55K minutes of music, although I'm sure none of this counts time on the Spotify Roku app, which doesn't seem to tie to any Spotify activity.

I also got "refuse to act my age".

I got this despite my number one artist being Katy Perry, which is listened to exclusively by my four year old daughter.

I genuinely like "meet me in the hallway" but no way is it one of my most listened song in 2017

I assume "chamber psych" is a glenn-coined genre, and it's an awesome one.

I think "refuse to act your age" means continue to refuse to act your age, ie you get it if you listen to music that skews algorhythmically younger than you

"unfortunately we don't have enough data about how you listened this year to serve you the full experience"?
GLEEEENNNNNNNNN

lol you broke it

The song that I'm pretty is my actual most listened to song this year doesn't even seem to be on my list of top 100 songs, which seems odd.

Anyways, my Top Artists are
GAS
Stars of the Lid
Moby
Steve Roach
Sigur Ros

Because this was the year that I listened to a lot of music while asleep.

I figured people were posting in this thread to discuss this thing:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-muzak-pelly

Points include:
- Branded playlists from the likes of Nike featuring songs from artists without their permission and with no additional artist compensation
- Their interface purposely dissuading users away from albums and how they consider playlists their "product"
- Quid pro quo between spotify liasons and major labels
- Joining forces with Vinyl Me Please

The company could be worth $20 billion by next year, when it will likely be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. According to Reuters, Spotify plans to file its intention of a public offering with U.S. regulators before the end of this calendar year and to go public in the first or second quarter of 2018. Bloomberg reports that it recently hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, and Allen & Co. to “assess its options.”

the thing about that piece is, everyone uses metrics. it isn't just a Spotify thing. terrestrial radio has had terrifying amounts of fine-grained metrics for a long time now.

(plus, there's the parallel problem -- metrics don't come out of nowhere. a skip rate means people genuinely do not want to hear a song. and just about every study corroborates what shows up in the metrics: listeners dislike unfamiliar music and will take active steps not to listen to it. (there's a parallel here with pageviews -- you can build your blog posts on your favorite artist with 50 youtube views, but they will likely not come.)

which, obviously, is very bleak if you care about this sort of thing. but it also happens consistently.

Correct, and for similar reasons this is why radio sounds so terrible now (more so than usual).

It was not uncommon 10-20 years ago for radio stations to sneak in their own local hits that music directors felt strongly about even if they weren't charting and emphasis on data-based curation leaves no room for good songs chosen by humans. The best example I can think of at the moment is <i>EMOTION</i>, which afaict is a phenomenon within my extended circle. Seems kind of unacceptable for an album like that to not generate multiple charting hits. It also makes no sense that hiphop songs hitting #1 no longer indicate whether they'll crossover to Top 40 stations.

ok, but you're making the same mistake I just mentioned. "data-based curation" is an aggregate of decisions made by humans. it was humans that decided to turn off Carly Rae Jepsen when she showed up on the radio or playlist or whatever. nor is it a simple payola thing -- clear channel, for instance, has promoted plenty of songs via "On the Verge" payola, only to find those songs basically plummet off the charts once they stop forcing them.

hip-hop songs hitting #1 is a separate, but related phenomenon -- it turns out that when you aggregate the unconscious decisions made by humans, a lot of them are racist, and then you get stations cutting the Snoop verse off "California Gurls."

https://i.imgur.com/2sLSeJW.png

lol @ that Hilary Duff song, which I'm actually listening to again right now. I never heard it when it was new, but I'm not surprised it's in my top 2017 listens.

that article is p hilarious

It all appears limitless, a function of the platform’s infinite supply, but in reality it is tightly controlled by Spotify’s staff and dictated by the interests of major labels, brands, and other cash-rich businesses who have gamed the system.
...
Spotify loves “chill” playlists: they’re the purest distillation of its ambition to turn all music into emotional wallpaper.
...
“Piano in the Background” is one of the most aptly titled; “in the background” could be added to the majority of Spotify playlists.
...
It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities, where they just pick a playlist and let it roll: “Chillin’ On a Dirt Road,” “License to Chill,” “Cinematic Chill Out.” They’re all there.
...
These algorithmically designed playlists, in other words, have seized on an audience of distracted, perhaps overworked, or anxious listeners whose stress-filled clicks now generate anesthetized, algorithmically designed playlists. One independent label owner I spoke with has watched his records’ physical and digital sales decline week by week. He’s trying to play ball with the platform by pitching playlists, to varying effect. “The more vanilla the release, the better it works for Spotify. If it’s challenging music? Nah,” he says, telling me about all of the experimental, noise, and comparatively aggressive music on his label that goes unheard on the platform.
...
In the past, if a music shop ordered copies of a record, independent labels could do simple things—like send thank-you notes.
...
In its quest for total power and control, Spotify has prioritized its own content, and it has made it notably more difficult to find albums rather than playlists.
...
And what will become of music criticism in a world without records? Will publications review discovery feeds and write profiles of playlists? What good will criticism be when all of music has coalesced into algorithmically preordained Muzak?

xp Yeah I agree with all of this. "Chosen by humans" was intended as "chosen by human music directors."

Some of the phrases and word choices are unnecessarily dramatic, but I kinda agree with the article although iHeartRadio is a larger threat at the moment.

One who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities

Pure Moods, even.

I agree with much of it, I just don't agree that if Real Humans were magically given the power to choose what they want to listen to, that they would gravitate to something other than 100 repeats of Ed Sheeran. (it's possible, for instance, to use Spotify to discover weird and unusual and experimental music -- I do it all the time. it just requires a lot of effort and false starts.)

and, for that matter, Real Humans can have genuine emotional experiences in response to "fake artists." if you plug any of the artists on whichever list is floating around now into YouTube you find people covering them, making music videos, setting poetry to them. people collect library music; this is not really that different.

I'm sad that Spotify has de-emphasized their customers' playlists. If you browse at this point, there are basically only Spotify-generated playlists. This reinforces the idea that Spotify is trying to be the only gatekeeper for labels/artists, and it's not a good look. I guess there's maybe room for other sites to try and create a more crowdsourced/social side of Spotify (witness noonpacific.com, for example), but it's lame that Spotify itself and the Spotify apps have almost completely hidden user-curated playlists and hasn't tried to leverage all of their users. I'd love to be able to seed the ML algorithms with a set of my friends' play history, for example.

I mean, sure, most people are just looking for chill wallpaper, or music to fall asleep to, but I think they have that shit covered at this point.

OTM katherine. I've spent the year exploring Iranian and Azeri classical music, most of which I can't find from any other source, save ordering directly from those countries.

pvmic i suppose but i've been keeping these up all year if you haven't noticed:
Listening to ILX Listen: 2017 Genre Thread Spotify Playlists

It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities

society is in the gutter

anyway my #1 genre is Chamber Psych which maybe and #2 is Fluxwork which is maybe what Spotify calls techno* albums thread for people who are clearly doing it wrong"

I didn't realise I listened to the HAIM album so much

I've made many playlists that are based more around musical moods than being about particular artist's personalities. Don't know what's objectionable about spotify also doing this, although I'd prefer to listen to my own lists or lists by other ILXors.

It turns out that playlists have spawned a new type of music listener, one who thinks less about the artist or album they are seeking out, and instead connects with emotions, moods and activities

society is in the gutter

― Choco Blavatsky (seandalai), Tuesday, December 5, 2017 12:57 PM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hasnt it always been this way for a while though? Now it's just easier to throw it all on a list. I used to make mix CDs in the mid-late 90s that were for specific moods or w/e.

Yes but also moods/activities are personal individual experiences. A sad song for one person could be a happy song for another. Why do we need so many automated options that remove the experience of putting together a mix of songs?