Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

What would cause half of Underworld's catalog to go missing on Spotify?

which half, in which territory?

huh, just checked (in Canada) and almost all their albums are gone, the only albums after dubnobasswithmyheadman are Everything, Everything and Barbara Barbara. All the Drift Eps are still there.

Too many new releases, they broke Spotify!

I'm in Canada, seeing the same

In UK and all the studio albums between Second Toughest and Barking have gone.

weird inconsistency

given the Drift releasing non-patterns it wld be really cool of them to pull six of their old albums for a few months to drive ppl toward the six new albums they're releasing in November, but this looks more like a fluke of licensing deals expiring?

back now

can't imagine that was intentional... but who knows, given how there's something technically different with seemingly every week of the Drift releases

yeah I'm seeing everything (everything), abysmal deluxe version track titling and all

oh wait yes it's all unplayable

Despicable. TREASON?

working for me. Listening to Beaucoup Fish as I type this.

"New" Scott Walker and The The tracks very much not by who you'd expect

and a new track by The Smiths (but not by The Smiths) came up in my Release Radar today. I thought there used to be a way to report mislabelled tracks?

indeed, about bullfighting; i'm sure Morrissey's delighted.

The option to add an album to a playlist has returned on the android app

it wld be really cool of them to pull six of their old albums for a few months to drive ppl toward the six new albums they're releasing in November

surprised that labels haven't pulled this shit before tbh

eheh yeah that Smiths "new release" is fun : but do artists get paid if everybody stops listening after 5secs ?

artists don't get paid regardless, it's Spotify

touché !

Reluctant as I am to add to the litany of complaints on this thread, why are all the tracks I play pausing briefly after the first nine seconds?

It was actually completely down for me yesterday, I found this page https://downdetector.com/status/spotify/ which had other commenters complaining about the nine second thing.

There was a giant delivery of old 45s this week that had a bunch of artists with the same names as much newer ones, The Smiths among them. We're on it.

Snarkiness notwithstanding, you don't get paid unless the listener plays at least 30 seconds of the song.

Wait, Spotify rips vinyl themselves?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFkGEi0Et08

Ha, no, "delivery" meaning "upload of music". Although I wouldn't bet that nobody has ever mailed a box of vinyl to our offices, I can say with pretty high confidence that we do no ripping of anything ever.

Anyone got an idea why most of the DM catalog is displayed in greyscale right now?

https://i.imgur.com/mpZ5Vev.jpg

^ browser version, btw.

Doesn't that mean not available, but it's showing because you've told it to display non-available tracks?

No, they play as normal.

That's weird. I'll see if I can find out why it is...

Seems to be the work of the band (or label), not a bug, but I don't know why. A little searching turned up a bunch of reddit threads of speculation about it, but no answers.

Yeah, I was informed it was like this on all platforms.