Spotify - anyone heard of it?

If you're curious what Spotify listening data reveals about the music kids like, around the world, my PopCon contribution this year is a web thing to help you find out.

The Aqueduct of Youth

(The panel it's part of is called The Platforms of Youth: Meme-ing, Marketing & Streaming, with five other explorations of "Old Town Road", Christian musicals, aging, Tiktok and VSCO Girls...)

what the @ the "classic" kids listening in Australia being the exact same 1980s Triple M FM artists as the classic adults listening, but different songs

Interesting! Checking out the South African and Dutch rankings right away. Am I correct in thinking the lists are filtered, with only “homegrown” stuff allowed in? Or is any song that doesn’t overlap with another country’s lists eligible - because there are some “international” (=by US artists) songs in the South African classic list?

(also, not your presentation, but “Brittany” Spears???)

There's no filtering, it's just driven by distinctive listening. Music can come from anywhere.

Some of those record covers tho.

Cyprus dude looks like a stand up comic. Not sure what's going on with the Serbian. Ukraine guy looks like a football hooligan/ star of a cheapo remake of 'crank'. No way does anyone under the age of fifty listen to the Ecuadorian effort. Conan Gray bosses everything by refusing to be restrained by national borders.

xp

Googling for the term “distinctive listening” just now, because I wasn’t familiar with it, I came across a 2014 article by you:
https://www.significancemagazine.com/culture/83-the-sounds-of-places-mapping-the-world-s-musical-taste

”We do, in fact, have per-country top-track charts in Spotify itself. These measure the absolute popularity of tracks among the sub-population listening in a given country. Statistically, though, these charts tend to be fairly well dominated by global hits. (...) When I say I want to hear what they're listening to in Estonia, I mean that I want to hear what they're listening to in Estonia that, proportionally speaking, nobody is listening to anywhere else. I want to hear the music that is most uniquely Estonian, or more precisely the music that is most uniquely loved by Estonians. So I've been experimenting with code to generate the kind of additional alternate chart that I mean, measuring the most distinctive listening of a country. It's not perfect, and the occasional global hit wanders in due to emotionally irrelevant factors like regional licensing contingencies. But for the most part these charts do appear to be rather effectively getting past the global to the local.”

Yeah, without knowing what % of local kids are listening to this stuff rather than “global hits,” I’m not sure what we’re supposed to take from it.

Well, I for one do find it interesting to know what local/unique/distinctive music people in a particular country are listening to, while taking it as a given that they’re ALSO listening to “Savage Love” and “WAP”. A bit more clarity about the criteria/method used would have been helpful though.

Yes, these use a variation on the same technique described for places: a combined weighting of absolute cohort popularity and the share of global popularity that represents. So it would take a lot for the kids in Estonia to represent a non-trivial share of Drake listening, for example. But more is still better.

I'd be interested in how genres map and differ across regions. Like does a 20 year old Scottish Lil Peep fan listen to broadly the same other music as their Australian, Estonian, etc. counterparts? Are there specific genre artists that don't connect across borders?

runrig

Ha, they keep coming up in the Duolingo Gaelic course.

This thing goes into a lot more detail: age, gender, genres...

http://everynoise.com/everydemo.cgi

the fun never ends. thanks @spotifyartists "Thanks for your interest in Spotify for Artists.

We took a look at the info you gave us but can’t confirm a connection between you and the artist you claimed, which means we can’t grant you access."

— loscil (@_loscil_) September 15, 2020

FWIW, I just fixed this "Loscil" track, which looks like part of the same nefarious batch as some earlier cases discussed here...

I just noticed this group session feature!

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-07-28/your-squad-can-now-stream-simultaneously-using-spotifys-group-session-beta/

I've been trying this out, doesn't seem to work exactly. You can have other people in a session listen to what you are listening to, but having participants update the queue seems broken.

oh i guesshttps://app.jqbx.fm/ is still the best option for that than

"This radio station cannot be started. Please try with something else."

It's the "radio station" of a birthday playlist my sister made for me in July -- and back then it worked fine and I liked it. What's changed? Why doesn't it play now?

please mark, you can’t reasonably expect your whole life to be one big birthday

*throws embarrassing tantrum*

why is the web app so much worse now, releases on artist pages are now automatically sorted by popularity mixing singles and albums and EPs all together. you can click on the "popular releases" heading to get through to a better organised discography like before but only if they have enough releases and the text space for release titles is limited enough to be annoying which it wasn't before

my desktop version has been being pretty erratic over the last couple of weeks. I'm getting duplicate podcasts turning up in my queue.
& they don't delete.
NOt sure what is going on . Pretty annoying having to correct it.

why is the web app so much worse now, releases on artist pages are now automatically sorted by popularity mixing singles and albums and EPs all together. you can click on the "popular releases" heading to get through to a better organised discography like before but only if they have enough releases and the text space for release titles is limited enough to be annoying which it wasn't before

― ufo, Thursday, October 1, 2020 7:06 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is the case - and indeed highly annoying. They did, yesterday, at least change one thing back, which is putting the latest release on the left again (that had also disappeared, so you had to scroll through popular to find the latest one yourself). It's a mess.

So a lot of artists "popular releases" now list the same (the newest) album twice, on the left side. Prob because it's both most popular (because it's new) and the newest. It looks like this, and it's ridiculous imo:

https://i.imgur.com/irSt4ee.png

https://i.imgur.com/CVBF62B.png

i expect that those pages are used only a tiny fraction of the amount that the big playlists are, so they become an afterthought. anything considered 'niche' functionality - even something as basic as an artist page - will get deprioritized

You're probably right, but it was good the way it was? Sorted by release year, descending in order from left to right. If it doesn't have a big priority, just leave it be, it was ok the way it was.

wtf Loveless has gone

Don't worry, it'll probably be back soon in fifteen years time.

Wha? I can still see it, here in the US at least.

nope, not here in the UK. guess the thought of someone listening to it at 320kbps finally got to him.

All the MBV albums have been gone from Spotify since spring 2019 for me.

if you ever want to check which regions an album is available on Spotify, for making a playlist for people overseas etc, there's this tool:

http://kaaes.github.io/albums-availability/

These are the current limits of Kevin Shields' empire:

https://i.imgur.com/AQsT4Bl.png

I think the tool needs to be updated, as the grey seems to indicate countries where Spotify itself is unavailable, but Ireland and North African countries have been added since then, I think. But good for checking US/UK etc.

Can a VPN get around that or is it based on verified billing address?

The latest MBV is not on US Spotify.

Onimo - I think it's based on IP address not billing country so yes I guess a VPN woild work in theory

No, it's based on where you pay.

Should have just waited for Glenn – apologies for bad information.

What the ....? https://open.spotify.com/show/2Zy2XZMKHDGBSv8ouqwZ0R

get that starred

android app having many issues with the playbar freezing

or maybe not freezing. just displaying the wrong songs and showing |> instead of || while playing. seems to be a real bug related to recent android update. it eventually happens after every reboot. anyone else notice this?

I've had this happen a few times recently

I usually have to exit and then force stop the app to clear it up

yes, me too

Oh, me too! I just assumed it was my shitty phone being shitty, glad it's just the Spotify app being vmic.

this happens to me constantly

app is borderline unusable now