Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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?

Was it “the midnight” the synth wave band?

No, it was some collaboration between two very bad rappers that sounded like it was recorded in the iOS voice memo app. The other rapper's name is very distinct so decided not to use it to avoid any potential hurt feelings while Googling himself.

it's actually very cool and practical

The tricky thing about new releases is that we don't have much data for them until after people start listening. Labels can use unique identifiers for their artists, but they don't have to, and indie distributors generally don't, thus a new release by "Midnight" gets assigned to one of the artists called "Midnight" by an earnest automatic process that isn't always right. So it's not that we don't know enough about you to know that you wouldn't like this hip hop Midnight, it's that the systems haven't figured out this track is hip hop and not metal until after we've already put it on your Release Radar...

The android app no longer let's you add a whole album to a playlist. The option seems to be completely missing. I have to assume this wasn't intentional and it's coming back.

Glenn, thanks for that info. I don’t have any comments about it, other than that it’s an interesting problem. Must be fun to work on the back end stuff there.

"The android app no longer let's you add a whole album to a playlist. The option seems to be completely missing. I have to assume this wasn't intentional and it's coming back "

I actually had a chat with one of the the support team members about that this morning and seems and they were completely unaware of it (at least that's what I was told,doubt it), and promised to send it to the developers as it does seem to be an oversight. I did preface the conversation stating the importance of being able to add complete albums to a playlist since best of year and best of decade playlists are on the horizon.

I've been infuriated by Spotify twice today on separate platforms. 1) iOS. I went for a run, and pressed play on my run playlist. After the first song, it starts playing something I had queued up last night. I had to stop running, take off the arm band, take the phone out, unlock the stupid screen, go to the playlist and click on the second song: Thinking that it would dump the queue and play the playlist. I start running again, and ten minutes later the song ends and it goes right back to the fucking queue. I stopped, took out the phone, this time restarted the app, thinking it might clear the queue (I feel like this has worked before, but it certain did not this time. I finally just gave up. I had too many songs queued up to sit there and select and remove each song in the middle of the running track. I ended up just manually skipping by double-tapping my bluetooth thing. I can't for the life of me understand why there isn't a simple "clear queue" function in this app. It's not the first time I've been infuriated by the stupid queue system.

2) Web app (Chrome). Just now, I alt+tabbed from a video game and typed in spotify.com in my browser, logged in, and was taken to some marketing page. No landing page, no link to my own listen page. Tried listen.spotify.com, www.spotify.com/listen... 404s. How is there now a big fucking "LISTEN" link on this landing page? I guess the obvious answer for how shitty the web app is, is that they do not want people to use the web app and instead to download and install their terrible desktop app.

The android app no longer let's you add a whole album to a playlist. The option seems to be completely missing. I have to assume this wasn't intentional and it's coming back

This may be related somehow to the other infuriating change to the Android app whereby it's no longer possible to select individual songs from an album for downloading. It's the whole album or nothing.

I've never seen an app get so consistently slower, less functional and more prone to freezing or failing to load, it's appalling now, so much worse than 2010

It is amazing that with a more than twenty year history of music player UI’s on phones and tons of accumulated experience of what functionality works and doesnt work to build on, they still keep fucking up their front end over and over again as if they’re the proverbial blind men with a description of an elephant.

a more than twenty year history of music player UI’s on phones

tbf every second of that time apart from the ipod clickwheel pretty much sucked

While streaming something just now I got an ad repeatedly from the RNC asking me to speak out against the "Democratic impeachment overreach."

Wouldn't artists and labels working with Spotify want to know that their albums were being interrupted with pro-Trump advertisements? I would think a lot of them might have an issue with that.

Hey @Spotify --- Fuck you for taking these ads. pic.twitter.com/hpY1MYO7SM

— Brian O'Neill (@NYC__Native) October 3, 2019

it’s funny.. as a premium subscriber I would have never known. Tempted to drop the sub in protest.