Spotify - anyone heard of it?

extremely otm, finally making me get off my ass to cancel premium and just stick with Apple Music.

100M move to triple the stock price while subscriber and ad revenues have not tripled. Solution is to give artists more revenue share as you pursue these stunts. Or dont give 100M to Joe Rogan.

is there data that shows rogan has significantly boosted revenue and at least benefited non-shitheads? can spotify take a smaller cut of the revenue and pay less money to fewer shitheads and still run a sustainable business?

Spotify (this morning) reported strong Q1 revenue growth, fueled by positive subscriber additions and strong ad sales, as well as lowered headwinds from foreign exchange rates.

The Swedish tech giant noted that increased subscriber growth and user engagement can be attributed in part to the better-than-expected performance of "The Joe Rogan Experience," a podcast it acquired exclusively for over $100 million.

By the numbers:

Revenue increased 16% year-over-year to €2.147 billion for the quarter ending on March 31, exceeding analyst expectations.

User growth: Spotify added 11 million monthly active users (DAUs), bringing its total active user based to 356 million globally.

Subscriber growth: The company added 4 million subscribers to its premium plan, bringing its paid subscriber count to over 158 million globally.

SHITHEAD POWER

this machine powers shitheads

Fair dos, I just hate having to see his horrible opinions here. As you were.

A colleague on Slack (where this article was being discussed) says he’s been a Spotify Premium subscriber since 2009, but is now investigating other options due to Rogan.

I'd be out of I didn't have a family plan full of friends and family...... who don't even live with me..... take that!!!!

if

"What I will say is we have 8 million creators, and hundreds of millions of pieces of content," Ek said. "We have a content policy and we do remove pieces that violate it."

Spotify says it has 8 million creators, but the company continues to single out and champion Rogan, a major name in podcasting who it signed to a licensing deal last May. On its first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday, Spotify name-dropped Rogan twice. The report said Rogan's podcast was helping Spotify grow its ad-supported business and that the podcast had performed above the company's expectations for adding new users and engagement.

On Spotify's earnings call Wednesday, Chief Financial Officer Paul Vogel cited Rogan for contributing to the platform's strong podcast consumption last December. That was the same month Rogan's podcast became exclusive to Spotify. He mentioned Rogan again when asked about podcast advertising.

"Spotify prohibits content on the platform which promotes dangerous false, deceptive, or misleading content about COVID-19 that may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health."

message received!

i don't really care tbqh

why would you

So many annoying things about the recent Spotify revamp, but maybe the worst is that hitting the expand/full screen button that used to show a large version of the album art now shows you a big random photo of the artist - while the album cover actually shrinks in the corner!

the UI has always been rife with obnoxious counter-intuitive bullshit imo. a constant annoyance to me: downloading something automatically adds it to "your" stuff (heart icon), but *removing* the download does not un-heart it.

when you download a track, your user profile and the track data are sent to a special server in the datacenter for a ceremony. "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder".

i just hate the asymmetry of it. like a text adventure where you enter a mine by walking "north" into the entrance, but have to go "up," not "south," to leave.

stanley kubrick designed the spotify ui this way to subtly make you uncomfortable

Little one for Glenn:

XTC's Real by Reel is incorrectly spelled Reel by Reel here:

https://open.spotify.com/album/4S6y2iTYbGONSlNJHYyrVl?si=BqvX4dtLTgakTJ1_yQ48Rg

Oh, and the version of Sunday Girl on Parallel Lines is wrongly titled 'French Version' here:

https://open.spotify.com/track/5v6VaqC8b4P7NcKb45W77j?si=5679f5ba1bdb4c3e

Glenn can't help to fix such errors. There's a way of reporting them but I reported a bunch over a year ago and they've never been corrected.

Oh, never mind then. I did look around the fabulous options on the desktop app but couldn't find anything. I'll leave my campaign for truth there.

Probably a wise move. Should you change your mind, instructions for reporting incorrect titles &c. are here>

https://support.spotify.com/uk/article/report-content/

THey just updated the interface and dropped some features and apparently about 3 months of recent podcasts. So the most recent ones from several things i'm following are now fro february. Bah and indeed humbug.

Not seeing the recently played option or the list of previous searches. How awfully annoying.

I've noticed that on desktop you sometimes need to re-re-order by date to see the newer episodes of a podcast.

It updated the podcasts when I looked back at them. So must have just been redoing the visuals then adding in the links incrementally. Spotify has taken an age to up date daily podcasts recently. So have listened to things i wanted to hear over breakfast hours later.
Wonder if new interface will make that faster but seems like some features are currently missing.
I did find having access to a list of most recent searches by clicking blank in the search engine was really handy. Not seeing that at teh moment, so wonder if it will reappear in some form.

Looks like they have done away with the track popularity bar (on desktop) in favor of just presenting a track's play counts directly. (You used to have to hover over the popularity bar to see the play counts.)

I like this change because I keep a running playlist of new albums to listen to, and instead of dragging over an album's entire tracklist, I'll just drag over one track. And I generally like the use the most-popular track because that's usually the single and I can sample it on its own.

lol yeah i was complaining about that upthread. i'm cool with the playcounts being thee but slightly hidden, displaying them so prominently makes me feel like it'll contribute even more to the ongoing sports-ification of music

ILX's very own Adamrl once told me that Audioscrobbler brings together his four passions in life: music, the Internet, voyeurism, and meaningless statistics.
― jaymc (jaymc), Wednesday, August 10, 2005 12:14 PM (fifteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Motherfucker, now I have the new desktop version and lo, local files have fucked off into oblivion.

I've been using a desktop version from 2014 or so, I'm sure I'm missing out on a few features (can't play podcasts for one) but i like local files being functional and every update seemed to cause more aggravations. I think I was happier with the 2012 version tbh.

There's a switch for Local Files in Preferences...

not a fan of the artist name stacked under the song title. its the most important field and its like 3rd in the visual hierarchy now. and you have to click title 3-4 times to sort by artist name now...

Dang - https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/05/02/spotify-hits-a-billion-android-installations-doubling-in-just-two-years/

Does the Spotify API extend to letting people build their own front end? I'm assuming not, or we'd have seen it by now, but that'd be great – letting independent developers make nerdy-as-hell players where you can add whatever columns you like based on the the metadata, for example.

I'm surprised there isn't much. I like the Logitech Media Server plugin using librespot. I was looking the other day to see if someone had tried a proper desktop client

https://github.com/librespot-org/librespot

"ncspot" looks interesting :)

Desktop probably a lot to take on considering Spotify can moot your work at any time. There was more flexibility in prior API versions it sounds like. I wasn't using Spotify back then.

Found local files in the end, also found you can’t search them.

At least on the new Windows app, there's a magnifying glass on the far right side of each playlist including Local Files next to the Custom order drop-down.

Fucking hell

Glad to hear I'm not the only one finding aspects of the new design frustrating. I think I was using partial bugs as help aids. BUt still finding glitching wiping out what good they did all too often.
Like the fact that there were so many titles kept in recent search or if that even had an actual title. Like only found that stuff through a shortcut so not sure if it was officially recognised as part of the programme. I'm on Ubuntu so really don't know how intentional/ unintentional things like that are.
BUt could do with a similar cache. Not seen if there is a grouping of things like followed podcasts or what it would be under.

Just got the android update yesterday. Don't like the bubble menus at the top. Also, the new podcast main menu is weird. It doesn't matter how your sort it, they won't be in the order they were released. It just looks like a jumbled mess. But if you click on New Episodes, it takes you to what the old main menu looked like.

I know this isn't spotify specific but

WHY IS EVERY NEW RELEASE'S TRACKLIST IN ALL CAPS NOW

To be honest I'm surprised it didn't come sooner. The tyranny of prissy all lower case was bound to elicit a violent reaction sooner or later.

I’ve noticed (on other platforms) that artists frequently use all caps for their artist name; I assumed it was to stand out in playlists.

Typeface version of the Loudness war

it's enough of a trend that even the latest steven wilson album does this, presumably ironically/satirically

Opened my mobile app to find that Spotify has "upgraded" by library but taking what was once a logically ordered grouping of playlists and presenting them in a chaotic jumble. Honestly, algorithms are not always the answer!!

I wish you could turn podcasts off. I will never want to listen to a podcast on spotify. I never want to be notified or told about them or see their stupid cover art.

Hey, they're a podcast company now, even if you can't actually cast any of the programming to a pod. At least Rogan cracks out hours of material a week for the $100 million Spotify paid him on your behalf. Actual Prince cunting Harry and Meghan Markle got c. $50 million for theirs, farted out one 33-minute episode ("curated" from audio by a dozen other mostly multi-millionaires, despite being designed to “elevate underrepresented voices”), then sat back to lol @ the poors.

tho I suppose it took King-Emperor Ed 8 almost a decade after abdication to stop endorsing Hitler to win WWII and install him as president, give up on ruling the Bahamas, and just get on with attending Hollywood sex parties. They might drop some fire episodes in 2027, talking to polyamorous thought leaders.

bro you need to chill out and…

https://i.imgur.com/BrJymvB_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium