Spotify - anyone heard of it?

nice! i'm a fan, honestly. agree that it seems more accurate, and foregrounds the role of the listener to boot.

i'm into anything on the platform that highlights the idea of "fans" tbh

i wish i could "engage" with the little feed that shows you what your Spotify friends are listening to. just a thumbs up, or a comment would be cool. i imagine that opens up a can of worms Spotify doesn't want opened but still.

https://i.imgur.com/2AbMp2C.png

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Downloading for me on iPad is now getting totally out of hand. I left it downloading 800+ tracks overnight, when i got up in the morning it had completed 50. At Extreme quality tbf, but I have fast internet.

Currently writing a research proposal about psychological ownership of music in physical vs. digital form and what it means for self expression, identity etc. and I'm trying to identify a research gap that extends the current literature. Was thinking about what the generational gap here could mean in what relationships people form with their digital "collection".

Does anyone recognize a meaningful difference between people that have also previously owned or currently owns a physical collection and people who have only ever really known a digital collection? The implicit hypothesis is, that if digital is all you've ever known, you're more easily disposed to grant your collection meaning and make it a part of your self. Any response is appreciated.

More easily disposed to do that compared to people who did it with physical but feel less inclined to with digital you mean?

I could easily imagine the opposite: people who started with a physical collection are more inclined to view their digital files as a collection as well, whereas people who've only known digital don't visualise it as such and more easily take the "access to" view that streaming brings.

Yeah, my initial intuition is that people who have had physical collections and move to digital experience a loss of relationship to the music.

Partly caused by the lack of de-materialization of a tangible object, herein that with digital music, the file you have access to is the same exact file as anyone else. The patina on the cover or scratches in the record which makes you come to know intimately the object are erased.

And partly because of the lack of legal ownership of the target object, although there is also research that suggests that "sharing" ownership with others can induce a sense of communal belonging with other fans for example.

So if you were to move to digital from physical, you would experience a loss of something. If you never had these emotive relationships, then you would form new bonds to the music more easily. But I might be wrong. The important part is if there's a difference.

* not the lack of de-materialization. just the de-materialization.

Ah right, makes sense.

By “digital collection,” do you mean the (already somewhat outdated) paradigm of digital files, iTunes, etc.; or the current idea of just making playlists in Spotify or Apple Music?

As someone who has moved from digital to physical I've definitely experienced that loss, though it was a long slow process. In the ipod age [wistful glance to that ancient era] I more or less replicated my cd collection in itunes, and the idea of a digital collection held great promise but aside from some year/decade playlists and half hearted attempts at genre classification not much came of that. Then as I slowly moved to almost exclusively listening through spotify (and the discover playlist in particular) I lost touch with my collection, though it was still on my pc and mostly on my phone, to the point where i never listened to anything I used to own or could even remember half of it, nor did I build up another collection of new discoveries. This really did have a detrimental impact on my music enjoyment for quite some time, I felt like I was constantly searching for the thrill of the new and rarely finding it, and not spending the time to get into anything that didn't have immediate impact. I'm still working my way back from this tbh, but I think the idea of a collection is long gone for me.

check out the maintaining a digital music collection thread imo

Transitioning from physical to digital has been the opposite of a loss, it's been a huge weight off my shoulders.

xp yeah maybe. half of my collection wasn't really worth remembering though, and part of the appeal of the celestial jukebox is liberating yourself from a self-imposed canon. maybe that's what you mean wmc...

Is there any way on the app to bookmark your place in a song? Say you're listening to some long classical piece and you stop listening to it halfway through, then you turn it off and listen to some other piece. Is it possible to save your place in the first piece so that when you return to it you can pick up where you left off?

part of the appeal of the celestial jukebox is liberating yourself from a self-imposed canon. maybe that's what you mean wmc...

Yeah, that's a big part of it. The same thing from another angle is that having immediate access to (most of) the canon as collectively agreed upon by a few million faceless others frees me up to explore at my own pace and listen to the recommendations of trusted individuals or intriguing strangers without Conventional Wisdom pestering me.

Definitely interesting thoughts. Much obliged.

Have we talked about how the Android app used to let you sort saved albums by date added, but now it's just alphabetical by artist? This decision is incomprehensible to me. This is an app that gives access to all recorded music, and you're hoping I'll use it for a lifetime ...

Almost given up on Daily Mixes. I appreciate that it's designed to give me the same or similar artists all the time as it's comfort zone stuff but for some artists it never varies the song choice.

If St Etiene pops up it's always "You're in a bad way" - for Spiritualized it's always "Ladies and Gentlemen..." - for The Damned it'd always "Eloise" - for The Fall it's "Repetition" (ikr).

I feel like it's reinforcing itself as it sees that those are my most played songs by those artists - but that's Spotify's fault!

that option is available to me. you have premium, right?

xp

I appreciate that it's designed to give me the same or similar artists all the time as it's comfort zone stuff but for some artists it never varies the song choice.

this is the exact problem I had with pandora ~2007, fwiw -- for me it was every time EBTG showed up it was "No Difference"

There’s a @drake for every mood. #ScorpionSZN is upon us. Listen now on Spotify. https://t.co/EnieG0XGh1 pic.twitter.com/bDBO7dlKwQ

— Spotify (@Spotify) June 29, 2018

this is horrible

lol

Must I pay 10 bucks a month and still have to see fucking drake every time I log in?
*vomits*

You can turn that bit off

https://i.imgur.com/VO1sMd5.jpg

LOL!

spotify isn't recommending drake to me at all so the past day or two of Discourse has been very confusing

You might need a firmware update

nah I'll pass

But it also turns all the songs you choose to play into Drake guest versions, what's not to like?

I’ve never played Drake and don’t buy into his mopey robot schtick so not sure why the inundation

have never been more impatient for a company to fail than Spotify

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5b3a854a8b7610470d0dd7a4/2:1/w_790/drake-spotify-2%20(1)%20(1).jpeg

Yes, once Spotify fails you'll definitely never encounter Drake on Apple or Amazon...

Almost given up on Daily Mixes. I appreciate that it's designed to give me the same or similar artists all the time as it's comfort zone stuff but for some artists it never varies the song choice.

yea it is weird, some of my daily mixes are made up of stuff i haven't listened to in a year, but the stuff i listen to all the time now isn't even there

I still play Daily Mixes because they are convenient but i'm pretty tired of seeing the exact same songs by the same 5-10 artists every day in there for months. For example, i've only ever been served Making Plans for Nigel by XTC.

The "daily" part doesn't really seem to be true. I wish these changed a lot more.

are labels the reason why youtube recommendations are 100x as good as spotify recommendations?

Song Radio >>> Daily Mix I feel but I overlooked the former as an option for too long and maybe there's no substantial difference

lol YouTube recommendations are the worst

Spotify contender for best technology for music listeners since radio

are labels the reason why youtube recommendations are 100x as good as spotify recommendations?

Ah yes, you listened to a song, next here's a man skateboarding nude with razorblades in his scrotum, followed by two girls eating chillis.

That doesn’t happen to me – I get on-point recommendations of other songs.

Lol the best technology for listeners since the radio is crazy talk

Dan Ingram is turning over in his newly dug grave.

youtube has the song mixes and recommends me a lot of foreign out of print records and other obscurities, as well ofc as street guitarists, kids dancing to rap, live recordings and other things outside of spotify's purview, and spotify recommends me blondie, liars, carl craig and paul mccartney

I mean, I like spotify a lot and would pay quite a bit more for it if the money went to artists but in terms of recommendations it can't compete and I'm wondering if this is a user/bottom-up approach beating a labels/top-down one

it isn't that much of a difference, everybody's* music listening and discovering is mediated by labels, directly or indirectly

* with the possible exception of people on a message board