Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

I think there's a case to be made for the "bottom-up" approach being maybe superior, with Wikipedia (imperfect though it may be) as an obvious use case, given how much it's come to be relied upon / cited. Unlike Wikipedia, though, stuff gets pulled from YouTube all the time. Just look at any years-old ILM thread with a decent number of embeds.

pssst

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1w75GyqYmFc5lvr4hp2vdWK/the-new-bbc-sounds-app

when yr being recommended out of print stuff I think it's safe to assume labels are not involved

https://www.stereogum.com/2004364/spotify-offers-refunds-for-excessive-drake-promotion/news/

vindicated

Seems like much ado over little to me, but I guess Spotify has learned their lesson...

... or they got enough $$$ from the label that a few refunds is trivial

I assume "a few refunds" is trivial in general for most companies

imagine asking for a refund for that.

was more annoyed by spotify's promotion of its own voice control technology

I hope this isn’t coming out of your bonus Glenn

surely glenn has come up with a more interesting name for that pay genre

Every time somebody hits Next on a Drake song before the end, I get $.0001 for each second remaining. People laughed at me when I originally made this deal. "Who are 'Drake' and why would people need to skip them?"

good analysis imo at the FT here (t.co link to get past the paywall, but google "Spotify: Drake-oil salesmen" if the link doesn't work

https://t.co/5PvVMWlO8E

The rogue KING has another new track out.

I laughed when this showed up as "Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark" on my release radar tho:
https://open.spotify.com/track/3EJfmzhb9CNJT43ZGOP88U?si=LNlogGsdS0S-NdOte6Cd4Q

Got both of those too - also a Squeeze that Spotify thinks is that Squeeze but isn't. This is definitely happening more often lately.

I got that "OMD" track too. Guessing those aren't guest bars.

Someone should rap over OMD's 'Sacred Heart' though.

Maddeningly, when I save a playlist on my iPad, it saves as ARTIST - ALBUM, but when I do it on the desktop app it saves as ALBUM - ARTIST

Maddeningly, when I save a playlist on my iPad, it saves as ARTIST - ALBUM, but when I do it on the desktop app it saves as ALBUM - ARTIST

This desktop behaviour appears to be a recent change -- I have an old playlist folder to which I drag albums as playlists on my desktop, and all previous entries are ARTIST – ALBUM, but suddenly now, newly dragged albums are named ALBUM – ARTIST. Grr.

hey uh pretty sure that new Fucked Up song is...a different Fucked Up

i’ve been reporting these mixups when they show up in release radar by clicking the three dots on the right hand side

ah!

Spotify just reminded me it’s fhe weekend and that it’s time to lay back and relax and maybe chill to some jams
No shit bra?

A few weeks ago it offered up a playlist — “Songs to Test Headphones With” (192,347 Followers)

The summer rewind playlist I got this year is really good!

I've seen “Songs to Test Headphones With” before--seems to be mostly "dads who are really into music" stuff iirc? Steely Dan, Roxy Music, etc

Hey, but after checking it out I see that now Spotify has the real recording of Axel F! I think it was some fake 3rd party recreation before...

Glad to see 'Songs to Test Headphones With' includes Happiness Is Easy by Talk Talk, that song was always my go-to for that back in the Discman era.

probably my single biggest gripe about the mobile app is that when it decides you're offline -- which has little or nothing to do with whether you're actually online -- the app is unusable until it decides you're online again, which can take ages

Oh yes, that is bad. It's about my only gripe really, apart from the startup time.

I don't get that - you have premium, right? When it thinks I'm offline it still lets me play tracks I've downloaded.

Smae here

..."downloaded"?

Yeah, I have premium. I'm not talking about tracks I've downloaded but about ones I want to stream.

Which is mostly the way I listen, given that I have unlimited data but only 64GB on my phone.

I get this too: I'm sea Ching and playing from the whole catalogue; my connection drops for whatever reason so the app goes into offline mode; in offline mode I can still search whatever tracks I have downloaded (stuff on my SD card, for instance); my connection is restored, but it takes ages (sometimes not until I've crashed and reopened) to recognise I'm back in online mode and want to search the whole catalogue. It's maddening.

*searching,ffs.

I do have premium but when I use mobile Spotify it's to stream (if a track's downloaded it's probably on my phone anyway)

The app is bad both ways: if you’re online and then lose connection, it will try for ages to load a playlist even if it has it locally. Infuriating behaviour on the Tube. You can fix it by switching to offline mode but they hide that

yes, the "thinks you're offline" problem is the worst. the solution, which seems to be downloading stuff you really want to listen to reliably, also sucks because you end up filling up space to the point where the app needs to be deleted and re-downloaded to ever function properly again.

these two pretty big problems make it extra annoying when the app tries to sell you on using the new voice control feature you will never use and they wasted time on. squashing bugs doesn't dazzle investors, though.

Spotify would probably say "Tube use-case problems" are a tiny percentage of users and not worth dealing with.

Right, tho otoh metro commuting is prime listening hours. And it's make or break stuff: if a service doesn't work on someone's commute and a competitor's does, it doesn't matter how rock solid they are elsewhere.

(And fixing it for the specific case has general benefits for everyone. Mobile connections aren't reliable is true as ever)

i agree with everything you're saying