Spotify - anyone heard of it?

xpost
Re: the central question raised by the author of that piece – about how/why community & commercial "standards" are different for lyrics than other forms of mass media – obviously, there are "clean" versions of songs/albums released for radio play, and when (uncensored) Spotify playlists are used in place of the radio, there is a possibility for the standards set by radio to be exceeded (I say this without taking anything away from the awfulness of the employees being fired, of course). I guess a rough analogy would be if a cafe were playing uncut R-rated movies on a TV, instead of a cable network like USA or Lifetime.

This “pushback” is unexpected (not by the artists themselves, I expected that, but by others): http://variety.com/2018/biz/news/spotifys-ban-on-hateful-content-and-conduct-is-too-subjective-and-concerning-experts-say-1202807394/

I guess Spotify must have screwed up the messaging... but it’s clear that, in the current climate, they simply don’t want to feature artists on their playlists who are the subject of active controversies involving mistreatment of women. All the “Whatabout... (X) artist from the past? Who gets to be judge & jury?” etc. questions seem disingenuous to me.

at the end of the day this is really just a PR win for Spotify. I have to imagine the revenue cut to the artists is minimal.

I agree — and I guess that’s partly why I’m surprised there’s “OMG censorship”–type pushback. It’s about as mild an action as Spotify could possibly take.

Reading over the article again, it seems like an obvious attempt to stir up a controversy (they even contacted the ACLU for comment!).

It also states no system of policing content or behavior beyond content monitoring, “expert partners” and “Your Help,” the latter via an online form

Those three pillars don’t constitute a “system”(?)

But Variety’s agenda aside, the “experts” quoted do seem legit, and their assessments are more what surprise me.

Been noticing some odd behavior not exactly the same as the shuffle problems discussed recently, but not completely different either. My main New Music list has about 1000 tracks, and I periodically add new albums as they get released. When I play on shuffle, tracks from the most recently added albums don't show up in queue. It seems like it takes a while, weeks maybe, for those tracks to come up in regular rotation when I shuffle. Quite possibly they start to turn up more when I add newer albums, but I'm not sure. Anyone else see stuff like this?

they reversed the xxxtentacion demotion

https://www.stereogum.com/1997996/spotify-to-promote-xxxtentacion-again-after-backlash/news/

iirc both kendrick and xxxtentacion are on universal subsidiaries

Just noticed that on Spotify the tracks (all but one) on the first two Chaka Khan albums are now credited to a 'Lew Hahn' as well. Turns out he was an additional recording engineer on the Chaka album, who also did remixing for it, and is credited for recording and mixing on Naughty (on Discogs, not on the original album sleeve, fairly or unfairly). In other words, he didn’t even write, produce or play on any of the tracks. But every time songs like “I’m Every Woman” or “Clouds” are streamed (including when it’s from some compilation), it’s not just added to Chaka’s tally but to his as well. That seems like some bullshit. Anyone know what this is about? Is it related to the equal billing producers now get for remixes they make for tracks by other artists (which is fair), and did this guy jump retroactively on this opportunity or something?

(I guess I could have started a "Studio hands that are NOW on Spotify" thread, but decided against it)

Only just noticed Peter Gabriel's catalogue is finally up in UK.
https://www.udiscovermusic.com/news/peter-gabriel-solo-catalogue-spotify/

xp

To partly answer my own question, I strongly suspect it’s connected to the remixing aspect. I now see that Hahn also has an artist tag with Hall & Oates’ “She’s Gone”, this time along with Arif Mardin, Chris Bond and Jimmy Douglass, and lo and behold, (on Discogs) these four are all credited as “re-mix engineers”, presumably for the song’s re-issue in 1976, because they are not tagged in the original 1973 album version.

I guess the question is now: do these “remixers” actively have to request this kind of equal billing with Spotify (which would get them a cut of the performing artist’s steaming money, right?), does the record label take care of this, or are these tags automatically generated through Spotify’s data systems?

(btw, the same thing might be happening on Apple Music and other streaming services, but I’m not familiar with those)

Either way, this seems an unintended (I would hope) and undesirable (in my opinion) side effect of giving remixers their due. I mean, remixing tracks during the recording process of an album or tweaking an existing recording for rerelease is a totally different beast from remixing in the modern sense, where an existing recording is reconstructed by an outside source.

What makes the Chaka Khan example extra jarring, is that none of the people who made the actual remixes for her 1989 Life Is A Dance Remix Project album are credited on Spotify, but Lew Hahn is.

Sorry for carrying on like this, but this is an absolute travesty:

Chaka (1978):
https://open.spotify.com/album/2lvaLIoEg3hwL2dybu6zTC?si=jSHjbmOnR86Qf9NA_CAPPg

Naughty (1980):
https://open.spotify.com/album/0LPZFn25Bxg4zIT47SYVNC?si=8lROL0xZRwy-gof-juD-og

Life Is A Dance (The Remix Project) (1989):
https://open.spotify.com/album/696qPuTacarWTyvMwofbXp?si=damSKTVPShW8AKG7ip4abA

Yes, I suspect you're exactly right, and that this is a result of shifting meanings for the role "remixing" over time, leading to Hahn being treated as if he were Felix Jaehn. I'm not actually sure whether this is in the class of things we (Spotify) can fix, or if the label has to correct the metadata and resubmit, but I've reported it to the team that is responsible for both kinds of fixes. Thanks for the report!

Interesting! I've been wondering about Lew Hahn ever since the time I discovered "Clouds" (disco poll iirc?) and started playing it 10 times a day.

Thanks for looking into this, Glenn. Hope it will lead to something. Could I ask you for an update if something interesting should come up?

Seandalai’s comment suggests that these tags have been sitting there for at least a year. I thought it would be more recent than that. I hope it doesn’t mean the label is okay with. Hard to believe otherwise that it would go unchallenged that some random engineer is receiving half of streaming money for a classic like “I’m Every Woman” (which is at 22 million plays, even now).

*okay with it*
*half of the streaming money*

I keep getting new Goldie tracks in my Release Radar but it's some atrocious hard house producer with the same alias somehow.

Oh, the apportioning of actual royalty money is a totally separate topic from which artists get displayed on a track in the UI.

We (Spotify) pay the rights-holders by track according to streaming, and the rights-holders pay the tracks' artists according to whatever their contracts with the artists say. I would guess that Lew Hahn was paid a flat rate for those Chaka Khan sessions decades ago, and is not getting ongoing royalties from these streams any more than he got ongoing royalties from record sales before now, but that's a pure guess based on no specific information. The record-label could be giving all these streaming royalties to Lou Ferrigno for all you or I or Spotify knows.

(I reported the random non-Goldie "Goldie", too.)

TY!

Shout out to this thread's perma-revival making it to the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/29/online-forums-musical-culture-messageboards-social-media-music-essay

I feel a sense of personal failure that nashwan got the "last updated by" on this thread in the screen-capture.

Thanks for clearing up the royalty issue, Glenn, I assumed the tagging played a part in that. Would still like to see poor old Lew’s tags disappear though. Those are not collaborative albums! “Rufus featuring Chaka Khan”, yes, sure; “Chaka Khan x Lew Hahn”, no thank you.

I feel a sense of personal failure that nashwan got the "last updated by" on this thread in the screen-capture.

Not only that but that's the thread title in the picture caption. Time capsule gold though.

Second night of a wake turned into a drunken dance/singalong but the lack of a history in the iOS app means we couldn't piece those hours back together the next day.

Having Spotify linked to last.fm has saved me in a similar situation.

Weirdest shit on my Discover weekly so far https://open.spotify.com/track/22LImJMfhUcPWS4gAAEOzi

that ... is amazing

Check out this sequence of the artist's other 3 tracks(!) --

https://open.spotify.com/album/5oRNoAaBJmSUPCnDpxqztx
https://open.spotify.com/album/0d55AlVPK9OOz9qXAzG3D3
https://open.spotify.com/album/5mOdlmH3t6InGOhxlPZpoP

("Klospülung" translates to "toilet flush"!)

What does one need to listen to to get that in their DW!?

I've had a few tracks where the artist and song names were all completely incomprehensible ASCII characters (but in such a way that it was clear it was intentional for the "aesthetic", not a software error), but they turned out to be pleasant vaporwavey stuff

(The design--y ASCII artist was probably one of the Four Tet side projects...)

Yep, that was it! I guess it was on release radar though, not DW

My Discover Weekly has gotten very boring since I went through a huge R.E.M. binge a couple of month ago. It's almost all indie rock-ish stuff now.

Yeah, you have to be very careful with listening to any US alt-rock. Give the algorithm a sniff of it and your DW swiftly becomes a cess pit.

^^ that happened to me when I listened to a bunch of Tom Petty after he died

Yeah, you have to be very careful with listening to any US alt-rock. Give the algorithm a sniff of it and your DW swiftly becomes a cess pit.

― Alba, Friday, June 1, 2018 11:20 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the same goes for anything vaguely alt-pop

Spotify really, really wants me to like Jonathan Richman. I don't particularly dislike him, just not interested. But he shows up like every other week.

Generally DW has not been great for me lately.

Do you feel like you are being profiled?

Jonathan Richman is great always happy when he shows on my algorithm playlists

this toilet song however...

I might

I might even say

my DW has gone

down the drain :O

niels do you have any clues at all how the aptly-named Klospülung might have gotten into your Discover Weekly? Could you have listened to one of the Related Artists or something?

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5tkfx36V7EUhwTOyXdrAMo/related

also have any Related Artists ever successfully sued for defamation? asking for a friend

don't recognize any of those related artists, nope

noel redding rings a bell, not as a solo artist tho

I've had some odd stuff appear in Discover Weekly, but nothing as improbable as that ... I wonder if someone has developed an exploit for the DW algorithm

my DW really wants me to listen to Laurie Anderson, but it's not going to happen.