Spotify - anyone heard of it?

So a week or two back something changed again and instead of showing the most recent "appears on" features, the iphone app now shows the most popular "appears on" albums/playlists instead, which i guess is all fine and dandy if you're looking for the most heavily anthologized Elton John tracks or whatever, but a total disaster for anyone (me) trying to keep track of new dancehall riddims, which are now basically unsearchable unless you already know the name of the riddim. No more "oh hey, that's i-octane singing, let me check if i can find out the name of the riddim through looking at his artist page." Sigh.

I had prepared this very same post. It’s the same on desktop btw, but it’s worse on mobile because it only shows you 25 releases - which was sort of okay when it was the 25 most recent ones, but now it’s a disaster, especially when you’re following genres like dancehall or Afropop or rap or any other genre where people do lots of features on other people’s tracks or albums, and that’s actually most genres these days, I’d think. So no, I don’t get this decision at all.

Case in point: a couple of days ago maura posted a song on the rolling r&b thread, it was Miguel on someone else’s track. It had slipped my mind who the main artist was, so I checked Miguel’s Spotify page for his latest collaboration - but it was not to be found among the 25 that were shown. How is that helping the user at all - or the artist for that matter? “Hey, I’ve done a new thing, but guess what, you don’t get to see it!”

(and yeah, it’s probably worst for dancehall. The other week I wanted to check for riddims an artist was on in 2011 or 2012 and was forced to search 120 or whatever releases sorted in random chronological order)

The Appears On thing involves issues that have nothing to do with what you're seeing. Hopefully it'll be back soon...

I don't know if this helps at all as a workaround but you can add year:2020 to your search to get this year's releases. Doing that with Miguel got me his appearance on Too Much by Ro James as the first track on Songs.

And for new dancehall releases, you could try

http://everynoise.com/new_releases_by_genre.cgi?genre=dancehall®ion=US or https://open.spotify.com/search/genre%3Adancehall%20year%3A2020/tracks but I know Spotify's idea of what's in a genre isn't always the most accurate.

That search-for-year thing is very useful, thanx alba.

Glenn, if you’re hopeful I’m hopeful too, but you do sound awfully mysterious!

“Coming soon to a theater near you: 5G - The Movie - it has nothing to do with what you’re seeing...”

lol,
And thanks, Alba, I'll definitely try that.

i love searching by year look at this amazing time capsule from the early 40s

https://i.imgur.com/ga8TQLq.png

Amazing colorization work!

Track 2 seems a pretty inappropriate tribute to Pearl Harbor but what can you expect from one of those "edgy" swing bands.

Local Oafs is a great name

Am I missing an easy way to remove albums from a playlist?

Or is just a case of doing it track by track from your phone or (slightly easier) highlighting all the tracks on the desktop app?

I love Canvas. I just found out that Kraftwerk have added some neat little animations (taken from their live show, but not in 3D obv) to go with some tracks on The Catalogue on Spotify. Is there any way to browse songs that have Canvas?

what's the deal with this piece of shit clipping off the first half second or more from tracks/albums? particularly bad/noticeable on the MJQ's "versailles", also on "shotgun willie". not OK at all

Dammit, we thought our secret scheme to get rich by shaving .5s off of old jazz and country songs would NEVER be detected. At least not until "Take Five" got whittled down to "Take Four", but by then we would have been long gone.

(I checked every version of "Versailles" available in the US, and none of them were clipped. Got a link to the one you were playing?)

glenn, you are a saint for still actually trying to help

oh I didn’t realise we had an insider on here. thought it was just a bitching thread

this def sounds clipped but it’s pretty minor I guess

https://open.spotify.com/track/24wQ5BTQnckCjNlIdBmL38?si=PDOkcMaxSL-1V_YUA6pepw

Are you listening over bluetooth? I had a cheapo speaker which for some reason missed the first bit of a track, probably not as much as 1/2 second, but enough to notice.

That happens with Airplay too with my AV receiver. I think it has a race condition between the CODEC and the power amp.

Well, I don't know the song well myself, so you could be right, but the versions on Spotify are all consistent, and match the corresponding ones on YouTube, so if there's an issue, I'd have to guess that it's at the label/master end...

Ok it could be my equipment or something but it happens with or without bluetooth. it’s not as catastrophic as I made out I only notice it if I’m previously familiar with CD/mp3 versions. probably is a master issue

More voice query weirdness, via Google and Sonos this time. 'Hey Google, play Dancing Queen' - plays Dancing Queen by the A*Teens. 'Hey Google, play Dancing Queen by Abba' - plays Dancing Queen by the A*Teens. 'Hey Google, play Abba, Dancing Queen' - plays Dancing Queen by the A*Teens.

My latest horror is

"Computer, play Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan on Spotify"

"Playing Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan Tribute Band from Spotify"

Thankfully in this case if I drop the "by Bob Dylan" it plays the right version.

I wonder if it's possible to steal from the tip jar of chancers like Bob Dylan Tribute Band.

On the plus side, the Beatles problem seems to be mainly fixed. If I ask for a track by the Beatles the Beatles tribute acts don't get a look in.

Weirdly, it's the opposite situation to with Lay Lady Lay though – if I don't specify the Beatles then I get cover versions, though not by soundalike tribute acts:

Computer, play Tomorrow Never Knows on Spotfiy. Playing Tomorrow Never Knows by Aso from Spotify
Computer, play You Won't See Me on Spotify. Playing You Won't See by Anne Murray from Spotify.

This is a total bummer, and probably means I’m moving to Tidal or something:


https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/24/21192473/spotify-revoking-support-developer-api-third-party-dj-apps-algoriddim-djay

Or you know buy music

Oh no that's seriously bad news

Ffs Spotify. They seem hell bent on making their app as un-user friendly as possible. From little things like not being able copy an artist name on the desktop app (something so simple that someone must have made a choice to remove it) to preventing anyone from using this huge resource for anything useful while stripping away any flexibility. The leadership must be on some 5D chess shit cos from down here it may seems bone headed and frankly antagonistic to users. Itss almost like it knows it's got the best catalogue of the streamers and the fancy algorithm (which admittedly is very good) will keep people subscribed, so they're making the baseline experience so low that any small improvements in the future will look miraculous.

hey glenn, can you get "FENIX FLEXIN TYPE BEAT" off Baby Dee's Popular tracks list? I'm sure she'd be amused but hey.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6PCURlsQP9m5RCdvtQOT2X

Reported...

gracias

That is really a bummer about djay integration. I like just playing with that stuff. How is Tidal's catalogue these days?

In the mood now for Discover Weekly, first time in ages. I had been automatically saving them to a playlist. Today I ran "artist de-dup" on smarterplaylists and went from 335 hours to just 71 hours worth of robot suggestions to catch up on. Maybe.

I recently put my auto-archives of Release Radar through http://organizeyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com and have been listening to a (still long) playlist that consists only of … high-valence chamber pop. It's much better than it sounds.

I'm frustrated because my Discover Weeklies (which aren't a "discovery" for me...stuff like Big Star or Wire, but that's ok because youngsters are just discovering that stuff)...

Anyway, my DWs are extremely white and kind of fortysomething indie cornball thing that annoys me to no end, which is weird because I spend half my time or more listening to artists who aren't white. Meanwhile, my Release Radar has a lot of black, Latino or Asian artists. The difference is pretty stark.

Also, the pop and dance music I listen to NEVER seems to make it on DW, whereas RR accurately reflects my taste.

I mean, I don't hate the DWs, but they tend to recommend stuff I was listening to in 1993, so I do listen to them so see if I still like that stuff...but none of the goth, dance, r&b, soul, reggae etc. shows up.

is this real or a forgery?
https://open.spotify.com/album/6h3otGDKSu9pCcUG7cpTtT?si=TKx9pqGOQ2a7dl_89Nj-pA

i ask bc there's no information about an album if you google it and i shazam'ed Mindful Bliss and it came up as Mark Barrott's Coming Up for Air but then i shazam'd Bittersweet and it's a song called Fzv by Tomash Kofa

and the late great says sandcastles on salinas is a future loop foundation track + he recognizes some others too

Anybody into 'binaural beats'?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7EF8wVxBVhG?si=QjyP3LJkSjigsmyKSR-Evw

Feel like it's a slight misnomer as there are

1) No beats

and

2) Only very subtle binaural flourishes

but it's pretty easy to just whack this on while working. However I do sort of wonder if this is the audio equivalent of Huel.

Spotify fueling a barely music renaissance

(and I'm here for it)

I came across a Delta Wave Deep Sleep one when I was searching for ambient playlists a week or two ago

Seemed an odd mix of some ambient sounding tracks and others that were just bass hums xp

there are so many incredible ambient records from the 90s that don't exist on spotify.

Yes. I wonder how hard it would be for a label to get some older releases on these popular focus/work/study playlists.

It doesn't even seem to be a genre on there - just 'ambient sounds' so gets lumped in with all the 'pink noise' and 'whale sounds' shit.

if glenn doesn't have a "pink noise and whale sounds" category already...

Can anyone (glenn?) explain how this happens

https://open.spotify.com/track/5aUf13PE8XmentDXP9zqTC?si=Xyu7FEV1T6O2wifx23iGug

It's supposed to be Slow Motion by SFF but about 47 seconds in it starts playing Babin by Josky Kiambukuta & Youlou Mabiala O_o

Anybody into 'binaural beats'?

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7EF8wVxBVhG?si=QjyP3LJkSjigsmyKSR-Evw

Feel like it's a slight misnomer as there are

1) No beats

Aren't "binaural beats" "beats" in the sense of a rhythmic interference pattern between frequencies? Like when you're tuning a stringed instrument against another string and you get it very close and you can hear a tremolo-like "beating" effect which speeds up or slows down as you turn the tuning peg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29

But yeah, it's a confusing name for them as a playlist on a music site.

Schicke Führs Fröhling turning into Youlou Mabiala is bizarre. The two albums come from the same licensor, so I guess my only theory involves a distracted label intern trying to do too many uploads at once. I'll ask our people to ask their people to give it another try!

As for "binaural", you can find LOTS more here: http://everynoise.com/engenremap-binaural.html

and you can see the whole genre-space reordered relative to binaural here: http://everynoise.com/everynoise1d.cgi?root=binaural&scope=all

Not enough individual whale-song artists to make a "whale" genre yet.

Nice one glenn xp

The correct version of Slow Motion appears on their 2018 Collected Works LP so I added that to the playlist I was making instead