Spotify - anyone heard of it?

It sounds like a programmatic abuse of your compromised account. There's no bug or feature that would add random playlists to your account...

I should note that there's been no perceptible change to my discover weekly and release radar playlists since I first noticed this happening

i love my release radar playlist. i only wish it were longer.

Follow more artists. Release Radar only cuts off at 30 if you run out of Followed artists before then...

I tried this service: http://parknarrative.com/labellove

Added a couple labels, but so far, the list hasn't updated. Hard to tell if it's just that the labels haven't had new stuff come out, or if the service is broken/abandoned.

Is having an artist in a playlist or having listened to an artist once enough to "follow" it for Release Radar or should I be doing so manually?

Listening to artists is enough to get them in Release Radar normally, but RR only goes past 30 tracks for ones you Follow. It basically has 3 sections: 1) artists you Follow (unlimited), 2) other artists you listen to up to 30 tracks, and 3) Discover-Weekly-style recommended artists to get to 30 tracks if 1 & 2 haven't already gotten you there.

ah, that explains the "wait when did I listen to that" effect

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/spotify-teardown-book-streaming-music-790174/

Much of the book discusses how Spotify is not really Swedish or a music company at all. So why do we all know it as such?
Snickars: Spotify has used the label of the “Swedish cool,” which is sort of exotic, at least in the U.S. market. But it resembles any other company who is dependent on financial capital; the investigation we’ve done clearly shows this.
Eriksson: Spotify is not very different from any other tech company. It relies on investment capital and attracting sponsors of various different kinds. And even though the headquarters are located in Sweden, much of the key areas of the company are located in New York or various other global cities.
Snickars: The old-fashioned music industry was bands producing records and selling them in record stores. Today, because of Spotify and others, it’s just a mess of finance, tech and cultural production. The other day it was announced that Spotify is buying a podcast platform. It’s moving in that direction. When you start looking into it, it starts becoming very apparent that it’s not only about music, even though the company is very keen on branding itself that way.

I would love to read something like this book, but the linked interview makes me think the authors didn't learn very much because this is not groundbreaking stuff.

Aw, man, didn't even get a specific mention of Boston in that piece. "other global cities"...

there's a chapter titled "glenn macdonald". it's about your name not being swedish and how you buy your groceries with money not cool points.

they also suggest a different spelling for your name which is rude

Swedes always spell "glenn" right, though.

Why did you monsters change the way artist pages look?

I can’t see the top tracks or the discography, just links to playlists with the artist on it and another link to “merch”

oh, meant to add, subscriber #s still not visible on my work macbook even when it's maximized

Quit and restart, Treeship. I saw mention of a glitch earlier that was causing parts of the artist page to not appear, sounds like you may be hitting that.

this happened to me as well on mobile actually. tried quitting and restarting and nothing changed. i can work around it for now, but it's sticking for me

Woah there's a new Burial album?! Ah wait.

Got me too.

Reported...

The shit artwork had me ???? WTF.

you'd think new bands would at least check Discogs, but it appears that nobody cares anymore and all names are up for grabs. I blame fake Ghost for this trend (unfairly perhaps, but they deserve it).

That said, there were already four other Burials (with proper albums out & all) before the London one had his first release, difficult to prevent this from happening.

yeah I know, it just bugs me more than it should (although that does surprise me about Burial)

happened to me today with both Burial and Cassie.

Release Radar playlists still really plagued by this phenomenon.

That ‘wrong’ Burial album Divinity Through Eradication also has its release date messed up, it’s a 2009 album not 2019.

fucking different 'Boris' with a new single on my release radar.

same

they even had the cheek to put a pic of Boris (japan) on the email alerting me.
if you scroll down the boris albums on Spotify you see an album by the fake Boris who appear to be german

Yeah, I caught and reported that Boris one, too.

Local Files option seems to have just completely disappeared?

There's a toggle for Local Files in Preferences now...

I'm trying not to be reactionary but the new Android update is kinda shonky. My playlists are all over the place. I'm sure I'll get used to it.

There's a toggle for Local Files in Preferences now...

Thanks for pointing it out - guess I will turn it back on then...honestly thought its sudden absence was a bug from the latest update and whether I would've eventually thought to check Prefs for it or found out thru more googling I don't know but guess it goes without saying what I think of this decision (as a user who never ever clicks on half of the other options under Your Library).

In case anyone else is puzzled by this UI change ... in the iPad version of the app, Browse and Radio no longer appear on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen, but you can find these options on the Search screen if you study it carefully enough.

This was frustrating to me because the majority of my use of Spotify involves the Discover feature, and it took me a long time to discover it again on the Search screen.

Oddly, the UI has stayed the same in the iPhone app, or at least in the version of that app that runs on my antique iPhone.

They changed the Edit UI in the iPhone app which is really irritating me. Before, if you're listening to a playlist and you decide you want to move or delete a song, you just hit the Edit but and then do it. If you want to delete a song a big red button shows up so you know what you're about to do.

Now, when you hit the Edit button, all the color goes away (for instance the song you're currently listening to, which normally is highlighted in green, is now white like everything else. Deleting a song - all white). Also, but hitting Edit you're taken back to the beginning of the playlist. So now I must scroll back to wherever I was and remember the name of the song I'm deleting because all the little bits of guidance the app was giving me have gone away.

This might be no big deal if I were editing a small playlist but I will often do big song dumps (hundreds of songs) and eventually whittle them down to smaller mixes. And sometimes they are a bunch of weirdly titled tracks by, like, Aphex Twin or Autechre. So all of the above is super irritating when you're a hundred songs deep and the song you want to delete is called something like "monoBIX unical++15 terflx".

Yeah, I have the same exact problem with the new playlist-editing method, and have conveyed that feedback to the team. I think the plan is to eventually have a "remove this song from the playlist" command on the inline "..." menu for a song, which would be better than the old way or the new way. Fingers crossed.

What about swipe to delete?

Would be nice if app users could move playlists around and take them in and out of folders too.

While we're at it, might as well bring back shuffle play for folders.

On the plus side I recently noticed (not sure when it was brought back) you could drag tracks from the in-browser version of the app directly into playlists on the desktop app again after a few years of this having not been possible). So great to have that back.

Can you select a bunch of songs at once and move them to a playlist? I've tried to do this for my weekly recommendations, but I have to hold control and select them one by one.

Also, no Eddy Grant's Electric Avenue - this is a CRIME!!

the latest updates for the ios app are so good. kudos to the ux/ui/design teams

You can select multiple tracks on desktop but not on mobile. (I wish you could on mobile.)

The previous android app had text saying "devices available" and you clicked it and selected a speaker.

Now it has text saying "devices available" and you click it and it takes you to the song playing screen and the text saying "devices available" disappears.

Seems it's been replaced with a tiny little icon that maybe looks like a speaker if your eyes are under 40.

The real estate freed up by removing the helpful text is now taken up by nothing.

And it makes Alexa confusing because she asks you to select “devices available.”

More metadata weirdness:

James Thomas' surf band has three separate artist listings, twice as "The Mermen" and once as "Mermen" (he's also there as "Mermen James Thomas" but I think that's an intentional use for his solo work).

Discography link on the artist page has disappeared. Has top 5 tracks, playlists, appears on but no way to browse their discography. This is on iPad version 12.1.4 .