Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Am noticing a fair bit of playlist degradation, with tracks no longer available to play, even though the albums are. Do albums get removed and re-added, and if so is any effort made to re-synch with tracks that were previously added to playlists?

In fact it looks like 90% of the songs on playlists I transferred from itunes a few years ago, using an automated service on the web, are no longer available :(

Noticed this as well, older lists built with a lot of Local Files of music that is clearly available in the spotify library are mostly not recognized anymore.

WHY THE FUCK DO THE CONSTANTLY CHANGE THIS APP FOR NO GOOD FUCKING REASON ?

local files wish ye was heyah

Local Files is pretty decent these days all in all (finding stuff you add there instantly) as long as you don't care about wanting to update track metadata within the app (which I still do in MediaMonkey now and then as that had the best approach for this I've ever encountered).

Going between phone and desktop apps though and I keep having to manually clear the playlist queue on the phone only for it to keep coming back - this seems worse than ever lately and keeps catching me out as I forget there had previously been a queue (rightly, having removed each track from it manually on the phone app already) so really jarring when you expect the next track in a playlist or on an album instead. There isn't even a 'Clear entire Queue' option to at least do this with one click or touch.

(finding stuff you add there instantly)

if only

One very annoying thing about Spotify is the way it treats EPs. They are listed with the artist’s singles - which is fine in itself if you’re not going to make a separate section for them. The problem is that instead of being listed chronologically along with those singles EPs are relegated all the way to the bottom of the singles listing. So if someone has released, say, 25 singles since 2012, you’d have to remind yourself to look below all of those for that new EP they might have released this year. It’s completely counterintuitive.

(I’m talking mobile here, the desktop version is pretty much unusable anyway, as others have mentioned)

if only

I should've added 'once you search for it' there true

One very annoying thing about Spotify is the way it treats EPs. They are listed with the artist’s singles - which is fine in itself if you’re not going to make a separate section for them. The problem is that instead of being listed chronologically along with those singles EPs are relegated all the way to the bottom of the singles listing. So if someone has released, say, 25 singles since 2012, you’d have to remind yourself to look below all of those for that new EP they might have released this year. It’s completely counterintuitive.

do you have an example of this? everything I've seen has all of the singles and EPs grouped together in descending release date order. for example, here what I got from the Carla Dal Forno artist page:

Name: Took A Long Time
Release Date: 2019-07-24
Number of Tracks: 1

Name: So Much Better
Release Date: 2019-04-16
Number of Tracks: 2

Name: Top Of The Pops
Release Date: 2018-10-12
Number of Tracks: 6

Name: The Garden
Release Date: 2017-10-06
Number of Tracks: 4

Name: What You Gonna Do Now?
Release Date: 2016-08-03
Number of Tracks: 1

Name: Fast Moving Cars
Release Date: 2016-04-29
Number of Tracks: 2

this is also the way they come back from the API. as a heavy Spotify user, I'm not saying that there aren't things that drive me crazy about the UI, but I also see stuff in this thread that doesn't make sense.

See, with me it’s different.
In descending order:

Took A Long Time (2019) (isolated above the Albums section, as Latest Release)
So Much Better (2019)
What You Gonna Do Now (2016)
Fast Moving Cars (2016)
Top Of The Pops (2018)
The Garden (2017)
(with the last two being EPs)

You are talking about the mobile version, right?

See, with me it’s different.
In descending order:

Took A Long Time (2019) (isolated above the Albums section, as Latest Release)
So Much Better (2019)
What You Gonna Do Now (2016)
Fast Moving Cars (2016)
Top Of The Pops (2018)
The Garden (2017)
(with the last two being EPs)

You are talking about the mobile version, right?

See, with me it’s different.
In descending order:

Took A Long Time (2019) (isolated above the Albums section, as Latest Release)
So Much Better (2019)
What You Gonna Do Now (2016)
Fast Moving Cars (2016)
Top Of The Pops (2018)
The Garden (2017)
(with the last two being EPs)

You are talking about the mobile version, right?

Another strange thing my Spotify is doing, it plays every song three times in a row.

seems to have spread to yr posting

as I jokingly tried to acknowledge

The order I gave is what I see on desktop, web, and Android. I guess I can check it on iOS when I get home from work to see if it's the same.

When you request artist albums from the API, there's an album_type parameter that lets you pass one of the following: 'album', 'single', or 'compilation'. there is also an album_group parameter that includes 'album', 'single', 'compilation', and 'appears_on'. I assume this is why singles and EPs are grouped together. If the request doesn't specify album, single, or compilation, you get everything back grouped in that order, with each group in descending release date order.

Anyway, strictly from the perspective of the API, I don't see a way I could treat EPs and singles differently even if I wanted to. Maybe I could add logic based on the number of tracks. I can't see anyone doing that deliberately in the Spotify UI, but who knows.

With that said, the amount I have played around with the Spotify API is pretty limited. I mostly use it as a relatively easy way to grab data about something I am interested in so I can then do other stuff.

So it looks iOS (which I have) is the outlier here, for whatever reason. If you’re grouping singles and EPs together, that’s fine, but please order them chronologically.

"Epic collection, friend. There's no more room in your library. To save more, you'll need to remove some songs or albums." I know there are so many things happening in the world that I should be more angry about, but literally nothing makes my blood boil as much as seeing this message pop up on Spotify.

just grabbed my iPad and on there I am getting the same weird order of singles and EPs, so we can confirm that it is an iOS issue and I don't know why (or how) they would do this. my guess is that it was an attempt to put singles and EPs in their own groups that they never finished and then just released anyway.

Why would Spotify get rid of the mini-player widget for Android? I have a low-end phone and mostly used/accessed the app direct from my homescreen with this. A few days ago, it was just gone. Spotify no longer in the list of apps with widgets. It was buggy to be sure but can't understand the removal of a way to make accessing the program easier?!?

i would try and confirm this but i have no idea and cannot discover how to get widgets on my home screen, despite having done it before.

Seeing this thread devolve into nothing but complaints about Spotify is becoming something like porn to me

Buy records, you freeloaders

xp Try a "long-press" on an empty area of the homescreen?

bingo! and yep, no spotify widget.

I guess the 'hide this song' (in radio stations) is broken on the OS X app?

The Epic Collection problem can be solved by offloading to playlists, I think

Every time I come back to Spotify the next song in the queue "I Specialize in Love" by Sharon Brown. Whether I close the application and reopen, or just leave it open and idle for a while. I like to think it's my computer's favourite song.

Looks like the Android widget is returning (due to popular demand): https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Android-Android-Widget/idi-p/4802473/page/137

That's cool, I had completely forgotten about that widget

hi all, i'm not much of a spotify user, much less expert. anyway, i'm wondering if it's possible to somehow sort artists by monthly listeners and geography so that i can see a list of the top listened-to artists in, say, Chicago.

is that possible? or is that an "email Spotify's publicist" kind of thing

there are charts by country but that's just one chart for all of the US

There aren't city charts, but http://everynoise.com/everyplace.cgi has generated playlists of the most distinctively popular music in particular cities. And on the About tab for individual artists you can see their top cities...

thanks, y'all

There's this as well: https://spotifymaps.github.io/musicalcities/

(that map and Every Place at Once are the same data...)

glenn, is everynoise.com/everyplace topped by Mexico City because they have a greater number of distinctively popular tunes than the rest? What is the metric for that initial ranking of cities?

So many times I'm listening to some obscure garage or art rock nugget, and when I look to see "Where people listen" it's quite often Mexico City. I can't tell if it's because the city is especially diverse in their listening, or if it's just cause it's really big with a lot of Spotify penetration.

It's party because they have distinctive tastes, relatively speaking, but also our third-party geocoding treats Mexico City as one giant single place, where it breaks NYC up into boroughs, for example. So Mexico City does end up being the city label with the largest number of Spotify users by a sizable margin, at least at the moment.

I've argued that the "Where People Listen" thing should be done proportionally, for this reason, but have yet to convince the right people that this would be better than counts, overall. Counts are admittedly easier to understand.

So that initial list is ranked by total number of Spotify users in that place? Los Angeles being treated as a single place too, so more listeners than NY, NY. I take it London must be geocoded like the greater NYC area?

putting this here for Glen:

Worth noting that almost all of Fahey’s Spotify catalogue has fucked up audio that sounds like it’s partly underwater.
― Naive Teen Idol, Saturday, September 14, 2019 12:56 AM (ten hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

these are weird comps with like corel 1998 clip art for covers. they applied some strange panning and reverb also, and some of them aren't even albums. one has studio outtakes i haven't heard anywhere else. not sure what bizarre publishing/licensing shenanigans went into those ending up there
― global tetrahedron, Saturday, September 14, 2019 9:07 AM

Have you seen T. Rex on Spotify? There are more sketchy, barely listenable live albums and comps then there are legitimate releases and they still don't have any of the acoustic albums up.

there used to be a ton of weird Steely Dan comps, but they seem to have mostly vanished

Not sure if this has been mentioned but two very annoying things seem to be happening with my Spotify lately:

- It's completely reorganised the order of my playlists, and I have a LOT of playlists
- When I go to type something in the search box, sometimes it types backwards!

yeah, on my device the playlists are now in the order of most recently played rather than most recently created

The typing backwards thing has been a hassle for me for what feels like a year

big fan of erhcetua

Don’t think I’ve ever experienced the backwards typing situation, but as for the playlist ordering thing: Spotify sometimes messes with that in an update, to my initial dismay as well. HOWEVER, as it turns out, there are actually several different playlist sorting modes available to you, and you can select which one works best for you (in a given situation) by using the filter function above the playlist, next to the Search in playlist function.

It’s actually the same set-up within playlists (search + filter). It’s actually very cool and practical, but Spotify makes it very easy to overlook these functions.

https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/sorting-and-filtering/

Someone should coin a term to describe the irrational irritation one gets when an algorithm gets them SO wrong. Like, I listen to a lot of metal on Spotify, and the band "Midnight" is a band I've listened to a few times - and I get that "Midnight" is a pretty generic word for a band, but with all of the information that I've been giving them about me for the last however-many-years that I've used it; what would make them think I'd want to listen to this atrocity that just popped up on my New Release Radar a few minutes ago?