Spotify - anyone heard of it?

thx

as always, thank YOU!

Me: Alexa*, play And Your Bird Can Sing by the Beatles

Echo: Playing And Your Bird Can Sing by the Beatles Tribute Band

* actually 'Computer' as my wife prefers that wake word to having a compliant (actually not so compliant) woman in the house

I'm also in the US. I'm pretty sure this happens with every Beatles track - I just chose that one at random.

And yes, when I go into the Alexa app, it says she heard exactly the right thing. Just DISOBEYED me.

I read someone online suggesting that Spotify does this because it pays less royalties to the Beatles Tribute Band but I would like to believe this to be a terrible conspiracy theory.

I mean, as conspiracy theories go, that one at least has a rational justification. But no, we're not doing this intentionally.

Seems like it used to tell me when I created a playlist but now I can’t find it.

My son asked Google home to "play some music on Spotify" and it decided to play a Dexy's Midnight Runners compilation which no-one on the family account follows. Not complaining tbh, just seemed an oddly specific choice for such a non-specific request.

be grateful you didn't get journey

boy would I love to see the complete code chain of the decision tree that came up with that

that's what sexist robot construction worker said

lol

Finally made a dent in my Epic Playlist this evening.

Epic Collection, I mean.

Basically most songs don't need to be me in the Liked Songs playlist. You just like the album and follow the artist and you can find them that way.

So listening to some Pearl Jam today and some of the songs have wee animations that go along with them: Lukin, for example. But my brother doesn’t get them! Anyone else?

Could be that Canvas is turned off in his settings

Do they still have that? Glad I switched that shit off.

Anyone else still having problems with Spotify Connect today? After it stopped working last night I briefly got it to work again but now it's crocked again and there's a Daily Star article about it so it must be serious.

I had issues as well

Actually not just Spotify Connect. Also the Spotify Alexa skill blithely says it's playing the song you ask for and then there's just silence.

Is yours working again, Sufjan?

Still down for me. Sonos says it can't connect to spotify.

I'm paying for premium but still getting ads recently. Has something changed.
Be in the middle of a podcast and get something advertised that I am not interested in.

maybe try logging out and logging back in?

xp I can't play anything in the web client right now, but the iPhone app is running normally

Stevo, are you sure the ads aren't part of the podcast? Premium prevents you from hearing spotify inserted ads, but I don't think they can do anything about ads within submitted content.

which is like... every podcast

Got mine working again, after first casting from my iPhone to my Firestick rather than Sonos or Echo, and then switching afterwards, but that could well just be a coincidence!

yeah, I switched accounts on the sonos app, and it works now. it was all a trick to get us listening to sonos radio.

How you liking that Sonos radio?

I'm brand new to Sonos so it seems great to me but just the consolidated list of stations would be great even without Sonos Radio tbh. I found an article from last month that said David Byrne had 'curated' one of the stations, shows, playlists, which I quite fancied checking out but when I looked I could only find Thom Yorke's bah.

I signed up for that Label Love thing a while ago, and it's cool, but clunky. The guys is working on a discovery app for Spotify that looks pretty cool:

https://tracknack.com/

xp yeah, that curated stations seem good. I only seem to use it when spotify connect doesn't work, or I am playing music for a few people, as I hate picking music for a crowd.

You should always start off with Captain Beefheart, you'll learn who's who in that crowd right quick.

Reporting back on a little experiment. For the past three years I've used ifttt to append my Discover Weeklys into a long playlist called DW Archive. In the past week, I've gone through half of it, weeding out artists I don't like and any tracks I already knew before DW suggested them to me.

I was curious whether a track being in a playlist has an effect on future DWs even if you don't listen to it, and if so whether removing tracks you already know (and like) would just make them reappear in DW.

Results: it's comical how many of the artists (and often specific tracks) I removed from the archive playlist in the past week have appeared in this morning's new DW. That pot is not going anywhere! So, I'm not going to remove any more of the tracks I like but already know all about.

I have a 331 hour playlist of Discover Weekly stuff I haven't checked out yet. Seemed like a good idea to set up at the time :) It's using Smarter Playlists... i think using that you can also de-dupe any playlist.

Your plays from the playlist you made will count - there's nothing to distinguish it from any other playlist you've made. Back when DW was new I did hear that playing from the DW playlist didn't affect future recommendations.

> I was curious whether a track being in a playlist has an effect

Sorry, I answered talking about plays from certain playlists. Making/adding to playlists has no effect on any recommendations - only actually playing things. Unless that's recently changed.

But maybe that's the case for what kind of things it will suggest to you, yet still a part of the algorithm deprecates putting a track in someone's DW if it's already in one of their playlists. Because otherwise it seems a massive coincidence that so many of the tracks I deleted from this megaplaylist in the past week have turned up on this week's DW.

No, DW doesn't filter based on the contents of your playlists, at all. But if you PLAYED a bunch of those old DW saves while deciding whether to keep them or not, those plays made it much more likely that you'd get tracks like those in DW again this week.

I had that mega DW playlist thing set up but after a while it up and died, at which point I just started backing them up one by one for a few years. I finally got rid of almost all of them last week and experienced a brief sense of Delete All My Bookmarks disencumbering.

Thanks glenn

I didn't listen to the ones I deleted on the grounds of knowing them well already that then reappeared in this week's DW (eg Star by Primal Scream). I suppose it's possible some of there weren't as many of these as I thought and others were actually just other well-known songs by the artist (eg maybe I'm misremembering and I actually deleted These Days by Nico instead of I'll Keep it With Mine, which is the one that appeared in the new DW.

I guess if I was listening to lots of the other songs from my DW archive, they're just close enough in Spotify's A.I. to I'll Keep it With Mine and all these other old chestnuts for it to have thrown them at me. How much of a track do I have to listen to for it to count? I'm worried now that all the bad U.S. indie singer-songwriter stuff I listened to for 30 seconds before deleting will make my DW bad for weeks now :(

I suppose it's possible some of there weren't as many of these as I thought

:30 or more counts as a play.

Thanks you! I'll be sure to let my hasty judgment kick in before then.

Oh, and do listens of tracks in Discover Weekly itself count? Would all be a bit circular if they do.

They do. You definitely want them to, otherwise you'd REALLY get the same things over and over...

Or, to be a little less glib, playing an individual song in DW strongly weighs against getting the same song in DW again (it can still happen for complicated reasons, but it usually won't), and slightly increases the chance of getting more stuff "like" it (according to matrix math) in future DWs.

Ah, that's fascinating - thanks again.

(it can still happen for complicated reasons, but it usually won't)

and i appreciate that you have to hit the 30 second threshold for DW to stop suggesting the song (for other people at least). i always wondered if there were great recommendations for me that were getting thrown out because i skipped listening to DW that week.

but i always thought that was a ridiculous number for the purpose of spotify thinking i actually liked a song. i ALWAYS listen to a new song for at least 30 seconds, unless it's something i've already heard. i probably don't give up on a new song until i'm halfway through. i wish spotify could 1. keep track of the average % of a song's length a user makes it through songs they haven't heard and 2. decides that the user likes the song based on reaching that variable, or a portion of that variable. i don't know how anyone can decide they don't like a song before 30 seconds.