Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I've hung on to my $5/month Spotify Unlimited acct for years, never "upgraded" to Premium. At some point I put the Spotify app on my phone; I don't remember why, since Unlimited is supposed to be desktop-only. But I used the app yesterday to see if I could look stuff up on it even if I couldn't play it, and discovered that I can now use the phone app for playback! I don't know if it's an app bug, account bug or account upgrade, but it's pretty nice. (Glenn, if it's an account bug, don't rat me out.)

Ha, I see the codes for those old accounts in queries sometimes. You've probably outlived the special-cases in the code that were intended to restrict them...

victory through attrition

The only thing I'm OCD about in the world is music metadata, so it's a bummer when a reissue gets the year of the reissue rather than then original year. It's sorta understandable if it's remaster, but this is the same Recloose LP that was released in 2002.

drives me crazy when it's the reissue year and not the original.

This morning we announced that @spotify is acquiring The Ringer. Couldn’t be more excited to work with @eldsjal and his phenomenal team.

More details to come down the road... but @ringer will remain @ringer in every respect. They appreciate what we do and they want us to be us.

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) February 5, 2020

glenn, can you make the track titles on Selected Ambient Works II show up as the little pie charts? thanks

I have a collaborative playlist with a couple of friends but I can't add to it from the browser version, and it's quite difficult to add even on the phone app, though doable, in a reeeeal make shift way. I know it's because it's someone else's playlist but given he's made it editable, and I follow it, it would be very cool if I could add things to it easier.

I'm not kvetching 'cause I love this thing really but I don't really get how after two or three weeks of listening to Vangelis, Jarre, TD etc, Discovery can recommend me Emmylou Harris and Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Discover Weekly uses six months of your listening history...

Ok, that's good to know, though I've definitely had it respond faster than that before. Still not sure who's been listening to country on my account!

Ah, maybe the 6 months thing explains why DW sometimes gives me tracks I've listened to many times before (a while ago).

I do feel that it's often surprisingly cohesive as a playlist: eg one week it'll be very heavy on a particular genre. Which would make sense, but it may be an artifact of my pattern-sensing brain.

i've basically stopped listening to DW because it's been like >50% repeats for over a year now

just listen to daily mixes at least there's songs on those i know i'll like

Can’t believe they haven’t got around to offering a lossless option, sure there’d be a demand for it.

my DW is usually good about not repeating tracks from previous DWs (more so now than in the past)

my Daily Mixes are reliably listenable, though one is interestingly garbled these days with random audiobook tracks from a huge "Horror Classic Collection" I liked ... I just unliked that anthology to see if the mix will straighten itself out

my main complaint these days is the way the Discover feature has gotten buried in the iOS app ... it used to be accessible from the footer menu, then it got moved to an item on the Search page, and now it seems to be drifting farther below the fold there ... Discover is the 10th item on my search page (not counting the search field itself) and the only one I use regularly

Mundane spotify UX issue #2354728:

How to explain this latest minor irritation? You know the three dots to the left of the track title - the dots that lead to a menu for "add to playlist," "view album" etc. Well, either my thumbs have gotten fatter or something changed behind the scenes in the app, because now, half the time I try to press that button, I wind up just pressing play on the track, or starting the track over. This is killing my vibe man.

Discover is the 10th item on my search page (not counting the search field itself) and the only one I use regularly

you know you can add it to your playlists though.

I think we're talking about two different things ... I'm talking about the Discover feature, not the Discover Weekly playlist

good idea though to follow Discover Weekly, I have done that

Ha ok i've never actually seen this Discover thing before, looks great!

Me nether!

probably half my time on Spotify is spent checking out Discover recommendations, I've found a lot of amazing albums and artists that way

Why is it that when I'm playing a playlist or my liked songs, I can go into the play queue and sometimes the songs have the three horizontal lines so I can rearrange the running order and other times the lines aren't there?

seriously, what's the deal with the backward input constantly occurring when i use the search bar?

^^^Related to this--75% of the time it will search for the last thing I searched for while ignoring what is currently entered.

Me nether!

ooh me nethers. fyi if you use the desktop app it's the discover tab in the browse section.

Anyone else get one of those "You're one of [band x's] top fans worldwide. You're one of their top 1% of fans." messages"? The band I got it for is extremely popular and it doesn't make much sense that Spotify would clock me as one of their top 1% of fans.

I got one for Big Thief

"top 2% of Miles Davis fans"

not sure what these messages are supposed to achieve but w/e

never

I got 'top 1%' one for Dylan. It seems to be a sell to get you to sign up for the artist radio.

I got top 1% Cure fan with a link to listen to them even more which turned out to be an "artist radio" playlist full of Smiths and New Order songs

i don’t know about you guys but i 5-starred the Dylan catalogue years ago.. i remember New Morning being particularly tough. had to respawn a lot iirc

I got one for the Beatles, but I think it must be counting Podcasts as well, because I binged two or three different Beatles related podcasts in the last few months, but haven't played as much Beatles music compared to like Echo and the Bunnymen or New Order.

That reminds me: the worst thing about asking for a track by the Beatles on the Spotify Alexa skill is that it *without* fail plays instead a cover by 'x beatles tribute band' who presumably exist just to capitalise on such accidental plays. I have to resort to using Spotify Connect instead.

I mean, that's the only bad thing, but it's really bad.

Half of the streams for "Sunflower" have to be from my son asking Alexa to play "Spiderman on Spotify"

I feel like I've asked this before but...why doesn't spotify provide users with their stats all the time, a la last.fm?

― musically, Friday, December 9, 2016 12:01 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

how is this still not a thing?

My "top 1%" message was for Ariel Pink, which... I didn't really anticipate.

I got Chaka Khan

Top 1% for Rihanna, which I don't believe! I mean, I listen some, and my partner listens a lot, but it still seems like a limited number of minutes for her potential audience.

Totally know I'm in the top 1% for Sina Alam and Michael Dracula

I'm in the top 2% of listeners of M83! Which is, sorta believable but I don't listen to them any more than other bands who have a decent smattering of stuff in my playlists. Perhaps I don't listen to enough of anyone to be in their top 1%, but tbh it seems like all these artists are on the Grammys radar, so it is probably not going to tell me about how I am the number one fan of Saariselka or something.

Ugh to all the thumbnails on playlists. Is there anyway to switch them off?

Ugh to all the thumbnails on playlists. Is there anyway to switch them off?

They added thumbnails, and removed the text that tells you the name of the album. Not helpful.

I doubt I'm in the top 2% of King Crimson listeners, especially since I have their discography on my Plex server at home.

I think it would be great if you could subscribe to the Release Radar playlists of celebrities. Talk about vertically-integrating the influence chain.

I don’t like the ui of the new iOS app. Very weird to have two sets of play controls so close together. Hate the new home view.

I really like the thumbnails in Playlists but don't really understand the point when in Album view?

Anyone finding on the desktop app's Recently Played block it's listing stuff you did not listen to (in my case Slade's 'Merry Xmas Everybody') or if you did it was not at all recent enough for you to remember (or corroborate with last.fm)?