Spotify - anyone heard of it?

feel like i only use this on my commute anymore, starting to wonder if i can go without it which would have been unthinkable to me a few years ago

Today my workplace banned Spotify. Well then, that's it.

Why?

Gotta be bandwidth related.

Does that include on a personal device offline?

Ya, it was a bandwidth issue. No Bandcamp as of today either, although soundcloud and (curiously) youtube are still available. But I have little use for Spotify outside of the work environment so will need to rethink my ongoing subscription.

Ya, personal devices are fine. I'll need to load a lot more music on my phone for tomorrow. My point in posting is that this really brought home the limitations of streaming.

Apple Music?

Does Apple Music offer a web interface? We can't download apps to our work laptops

is the youtube music service available where you are, doug? feels like it might come closest to what you need. i don’t believe there is an apple music web app, and the eyes water slightly imagining what such a thing might be like.

wait, can you use the spotify web player?

Nope, spotify.com is now a banned site so the web player is accessible from the office. Thanks for the Youtube Music suggestion, that might be an option.

Can @SpotifyUK explain how these complete strangers were able to upgrade my Spotify plan so I've been paying for them to have Premium for the last few months? Your website has no obvious way of getting in touch with you directly. pic.twitter.com/QKjT3DxwJ3

— Carmen D'Cruz (@carmenego) January 7, 2019

This seems pretty bad - I also just found someone squatting in my Premium account. And not only is there no 2FA on Spotify, they don't even send you emails on new device logins, or when people are added to your plan.

I was trying to see if I had any squatters, but of what page is the tweet a screenshot? Where can I find it? Can't see a list of sorts on https://www.spotify.com/uk/account/overview/

It's in here: https://www.spotify.com/uk/family/overview/ - if you don't have a family plan (and they haven't moved you to one) then you won't see a list. There's no way I know of to see what devices are using your single account (which they were also doing to me) other than noticing your play history filling up with stuff you haven't played.

Security does seem pretty antiquated, tbh: their "how to secure your account" page is basically six different ways of saying "have a good password"

thx just found two accounts on there that i didn't recognize

If you do, kick them off, change your password and then hit the “sign out everywhere” link

Ah I see, thx Stet. Don't have a family plan, so I guess there is no way of knowing if I have some leechers or not.

yeah, I didn't realize I had squatters on my account until I got one of those "You're already listening on device: xxxxx" things and then saw that my recently played was full of latin trap.

almost disappointed that my account is squatter free.

I had this going on, too. I only found out because my last.fm logs looked weird. I changed my password and it looks to be sorted now.

So this new square mobile layout is ruining my day. I went into the app (iphone) to look for the new riddim where Mavado has one of the songs. Previously I would find it under the heading "appears on" on Mavado's artist page. But now the "appears on" section is gone. I can click the discography, but it only gives me the latest release, his albums and singles, with 2013 apparently working as some sort of cut off point for the singles - dancehall artists usually have a lot of them and Mavado's been active for more than a decade. So in order to find the song now, I apparently need to know what the title of the riddim is first. Since I had already playlisted it, I found out. It's the Time Machine Riddim and the song is Me Alright, but the next time a dancehall artist I follo hops on a riddim I probably won't be able to find it. Not alright. Sigh.

That’s terrible. I don’t have that (yet?) but I see there’s an update waiting in the App Store. I did have a scare this morning when on the Now Playing screen, instead of the repeat button, there suddenly was a ‘love this track’ button on the left and a ‘don’t like this track’ button on the right. Do you have that too? It has gone back to normal for me (for now), but all of this has me fearing the update.

On Android I have those two buttons instead of shuffle/repeat when playing from Release Radar, Discover Weekly and Daily Mix 1 etc, but not when playing from other playlists, searches, etc. Makes sense for improving the automatic playlists, I suppose?

No "love" and "dislike" button yet, fortunately, but the save this track button now looks like a heart. Stay away from the update if you can.

Wasn't it a heart way back in the day, too?

it was a star I think

The absence of "Appears On" is a temporary glitch, it will be back soon!

Phew!

yeah, I didn't realize I had squatters on my account until I got one of those "You're already listening on device: xxxxx" things and then saw that my recently played was full of latin trap.

i'm hitting up against the limit of # of tracks you can have saved again for the 3rd time and thsi time i'm running out of things i don't really care about to remove from my library. really wish they would just double the limit or something, that'd give me another 6 or 7 years of not having to worry about it. or else have saving albums work differently than just saving all the tracks as it appears to do, since i only care about albums and would rather be able to just save 2000 albums than 10000 tracks

new version of Android app no longer has Albums, Singles, and EPs available for each artist on separate pages. Instead some of their music is in a single row called Releases that you can scroll through horizontally. Presumably there is supposed to be more detail if you click a See More button below Releases, but that button doesn't seem to do anything.

new ios update is some bullshit fyi

how they continue to make the stupidest uncalled for changes just baffles me

I’m now trying out YouTube Music (my 3rd consecutive streaming-service trial; guess I’ll have to actually pay sometime, lol) — I like it a lot, especially the iOS app. (There’s no desktop client, you gotta use https://music.youtube.com on yer computer)

So they just added the ability to mute artists, apparently? Though it's supposed to be available on mobile, I don't see the feature in there yet.

Makes you feel kinda sorry now for Dennis Wilson.

Yes! Goodbye Yo La Tengo, I have no idea why Spotify so insistently believed that I would like you!

I had this happen to me too - and the weird artists have all vanished now. This is WTF territory, this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-46898211

Bergenulo Five could have made about $500 to $600 (about £380 to £460) from 60,000 streams.

Assuming this took more than 40 hours of the l33t haxorz time, that's not even a living wage.

Not if you've created 300 of these artists.

Article suggests it’s about a dozen though.

waze is a virus included in every spotify app on purpose

A new to iPhone-version-of-Spotify user asks: can you only shuffle play everything? Is there no option to listen to albums and playlists in track order? If there is, how?

If you select the track that's playing on the bottom of the screen you can (de)select shuffle play on the left

I think you need to be a premium user to be able to do that.

If you're a premium user tap on the song name at bottom to get the Now Playing view then make sure the shuffle icon at the bottom left is not green. Tap it if it is


Xpost

Thanks, guys. Still a Scrooge here who uses the free version, but I'll probably upgrade now.

Wait what - if you’re not premium you’re forced to isten to everything on shuffle? That seems bizarre and wrong.

Psych ops.

Yes that's right, and it seems fair enough to me. The basic Spotify is, well, basic. You can only listen on shuffle and you get ads every so often. I have no problem paying 10 € a month for unlimited streaming and downloading of pretty much everything I could ever want to listen to, and no ads. Seems like a fab deal to me.