Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Every podcast I’ve never heard of gets paid 4 billon dollars to produce episodes exclusively on Duckass Media but every podcast I’ve ever heard of has hosts that will do an hour long episode on whatever topic I want if I send them fifty bucks and loose ketchup packets https://t.co/4QNVKgzZrI

— Brendel (@Brendelbored) June 15, 2021

can't arrange tracks on the playlist again. does it just go haywire after you've listened for a few hours?
It's started adding tracks at the top of the list not the bottom and rearranging everything every time I try to make the playlist I want to listen to in the order I want to.
Brought up a track so that it plays next, then another track to play after it. So the 2nd track moves up to beyond the first one. & won't be reorgansied.

I had an option of picks as part of the layout yesterday and for a few days before that. Actually seemed to be giving some interesting choices but it's now vanished. Weird seemed to be moving to having music at teh bottom of the Home page and then back to podcasts. I don't know if there is a control to determine what choice . I have been listening to a podcast followed by an unfamiliar musical song. So would like that suggestions pick thing back.
Then today its gone to having mixes or at least I've looked in what those mixes are and tried to pick individual tracks from them. To put on playlist. The mixes seem to be based on recent choices of tracks I've used. I guess that's standard and other people use them more .
Did that screw up the way that tracks were adding to the queue?

Really annoying. Was hoping to put something together to remain listening to. have had to restart the computer after it froze and lost changes i made to the playlist from the time.

2020:

https://i.imgur.com/CNP9EIs.jpg

tfw you pay $100 million dollars to someone to broadcast antivax propaganda and COVID conspiracy theories on your platform, insist that his opinions align with company policy doing so, and then he runs a three-hour ad for the white supremacist subscription service that launched the Proud Boys, run by a guy who was fired from his multi-million $ radio job after livetweeting himself harassing & abusing a black woman in Times Square, calling black people "not human" and "illegal savages."

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Monday, May 17, 2021 6:06 PM (one month ago)

apparently this episode also includes theorising that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Tuesday, May 18, 2021 5:32 AM (one month ago)

2021: https://i.imgur.com/5lhP2kN.jpg

What i sthe story with the interface hviung a thumbnail up for a podcast and then not letting you immediately click through to teh latest episode. I keep having to go through like 2 layers, Top thumbnail look at date, find out its several months old or last year's. click op title on bottom of figurehead episode and finally get to new episode. Why not just keep new one as the figurehead you click on at the top when you select the series?
& half the time you have to wait for new episodes to populate below that figurehead.
Bah and indeed humbug.

Navigaton and control seem to be issues that need to be looked at quite heavily.
Would be like if what options as to what one could access from the home page were open to control by the user. Would be good if things were predictable at least.
Or is there a way of making them show up when they're needed.

this isn't spotify specific, but the "pop up" is the most annoying UI device currently used everywhere.

I discovered that Cmd-L to get to search works even if you can't see a search bar

Yeah just wondering if there are any further keyboard shortcuts that I'm not aware of. have been using that Ctrl +l for the last couple of days.
But main thing would be to be able to be aware of what he contents of the Home page were prior to scrolling down Or is that keeping them guessing part of the fun according to them.

Have had some interesting recommendations turn up on the album picks. Some things I haven't heard of that I remember which surprised me.

The home page changes all the time. It isn't meant to be a predictable way to navigate through your own stuff.

hit ? for a full list of keyboard shortcuts...

Ooh - Cmd-F!

When I say predictable its more what sections are going to be in not what the contents of those sections are going to be. Would be good to know that if i scroll down I would find album picks with a dynamic contents so I kept getting things recommended that were different each time.
Also knowing that I had a set of podcasts that I could scroll through that related to one of the podcasts I listen to frequently. Though possibly a different one at different times. I would have thought that kind of thing would be there each time but it doesn't even seem to be that predictable.
& I don't know how you call up something like Album Picks or whatever except for it chancing to be there at certain times. like

also wish it wouldn't dump an entire playlist that I was halfway through and tehn say taht they couldn't play this at this time when I'm transferring from one device to another.
JUst got halfway through a podcast and went to go from phone to desktop and it just blanked out. Gosh how annoying.

The amount of clicking around you have to do after the latest update is so damn dumb. Why separate areas for albums, singles, and compilations. So much easier to just be able to scroll and see everything at once.

Agree with PBKR and agree with the homepage looking random.

Guessing the new Stars of the Lid single is another fake out

2021: https://i.imgur.com/5lhP2kN.jpg

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Sunday, June 20, 2021 5:51 PM (six days ago)

continued:

https://i.imgur.com/a4bRljp.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/RJUFtsC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/kYtYWeM.jpg

The problem was music piracy. The solution was to distribute music without paying the artists.

Jim Anderson (the architect of the Spotify platform) says the mission of Spotify was to distribute music...NOT get artists paid.

you can read an excerpt of the interview below courtesy of @digitalmusicnws. pic.twitter.com/kzHadm3EBN

— MF STO. 😷 (@BigSto) June 30, 2021

I was just reading this (not good, IMO) New Yorker article that was linked from a Pitchfork review. It includes these quotes from Kevin Weatherly, Spotify’s head of North American programming, which I thought were “funny”:

Weatherly is hesitant to suggest that he or anyone else at Spotify makes definitive decisions about how music should be organized or presented, pointing out that the service’s A.I. is merely reactive. “We’re not arbiters of taste,” he said. “We’re not A. & R. We’re here to try to connect our audience with different types of music, regardless of genre.” (…) “Prior to Spotify, you were spoon-fed what music you listened to by traditional gatekeepers. All of that has been shattered.”

(I know Weatherly’s name b/c he was a longtime radio guy, btw)

Prior to Spotify, you were spoon-fed what music you listened to by traditional gatekeepers.

I guess, to be fair, it’s more like being fed thru a garden hose with one of those rotating nozzles.

lol

Jim Anderson left Spotify in 2014, so presenting his current (2019, actually) comments as coming from a "Spotify Exec" is a little disingenuous.

So too, admittedly, is pretending like the traditional gatekeeping power structures have been "shattered".

But, on the third hand, if you allow yourself to be "spoon-fed" music by anything, be it corporate or algorithmic, you're responsible for what you swallow.

someone "who is credited with architecting the Spotify platform" speaking on the intent of the platform seems reasonable. they'd been operating internationally with free and paid tiers for five years by 2014.

Nah. In streaming terms, 2014 is quaint olden days. Apple Music didn't even launch until 2015, so in 2014 Spotify was still competing with piracy and paid downloads. Things have changed a lot since then.

competing with paid downloads is a big part of the point

paid downloads were bad

I use foo spotify. Thereby I control what music I listen to without succumbing to automated tyranny, unless I want to. Stream youtube from foobar as well. Best of both worlds.

I like to turn on the automated tyranny, sometimes at dinner parties, so I cannot be accused of tyranny

paid downloads were bad

And Spotify is good since I am deliberately searching out artists I read about here and other fora. I don’t l,like just hot play on “Rap Caviar” or “Chill out feels”.

Hit play

sounds like u need more… Spoon-feeding

https://img.apmcdn.org/b2a983d2e065d61850c8159cfd7af557c4dfdad5/square/5f4303-20121221-spoon-transference.jpg

fwiw - I currently subscribe to two (2) streaming services* (not Spotify), and a few of the curated playlists are pretty key for me.

*I also buy CDs

Yeah I still buy cds too. Probably spend too much time on Spotify mainly as a podcast server. But I've been interspersing with single tracks of various music for the last few months.

I am intending to buy more music based on what I've listened to though.

Find the idea that they are anti music piracy but not pro paying the artist a ridiculous position. Would have hoped the principle behind the first part might inherently include the 2nd.

I do like having the packaging including a physical printed set of liner notes.

If only we had some explanation of Spotify's original business model to read, instead of some belligerent comments from a long ex-Spotify employee many years later.

Oh, wait, we do. From 2011. From that same guy.

https://startupbeat.com/spotify-101-the-freemium-music-model-why-it-works-and-the-vision-that-drives-the-social-music-startup/1947/

It's true, though, that for the first few years of its existence Spotify was not really focused on artists as a constituency, nor vice versa. It began very much as a desktop music-searching/library application, entirely focused on the listener, and on already-music-knowledgeable listeners at that. There was no editorial team or Spotify-curated playlists before the acquisition of Tunigo in 2013, and no personalized playlists before the acquisition of the Echo Nest in 2014 (which is how I joined). The reorganization that created a company division to focus on the artist experience was in 2014 or 2015, I forget exactly, and even then most artists weren't directly involved with their Spotify presence.

As streaming started getting enough commercial traction for the music business to start growing again, in 2016 and 2017, lots of other dynamics began changing, too, none of them specific or limited to Spotify. Desktop -> mobile; music geeks using streaming as a cloud library -> more casual listeners using streaming to replace radio; playlists as a cool sharing feature -> editorial/algotorial/algorithmic/personal playlists as the primary listening mode; subscription streaming as "an experiment" (as Taylor Swift put it) -> subscription streaming as most of the recorded-music economy; label-focused reporting -> artist controlled tools. Closer to global availability. Oh, and podcasts...

So the problem wasn't the piracy, or the fact that artists were losing their income from it--it was that the piracy wasn't slick and centralized enough, and random tech dudes weren't making fuck tons of money off of it?

Every day there's a new reason to hate Spotify, and more apologists inventing creative new mental gymnastics to justify it.

Uh, if that's your conclusion then I'm guessing you were always going to reach it. But you're missing a key stage in this story if you forget that it went: piracy (industry crashes) -> paid downloads (industry stays crashed) -> streaming (industry starts to recover).

(And none of these are new reasons or new "apologists". And it's not gymnastics to be walking in a direction you don't happen to like.)

Here's an interesting piece about the CDs -> Napster -> Apple power-shift (with a little bit about streaming and Spotify) from mostly the perspective of the old industry:

https://themusicnetwork.com/forget-napster-it-was-itunes-that-held-the-record-industry-to-ransom/

The labels may have gotten streamrolled by Apple to a certain extent; but visiting Sony.com to buy a Mariah Carey album was never a solution, and “why didn’t they just team up?” is way easier said than done…

Who agreed on the shockingly low sound quality, and why didn’t the labels rally for more hi-fidelity options, like FLAC and other lossless formats, especially when internet space and storage space were no longer legitimate issues?

I wonder if it's a technical or policy reason behind showing number of track plays only on album view and not on playlists or radio. I'd love to be able to see it in those other contexts.

Whenever you're not sure whether something is due to technical constraints or policy decisions, the answer is almost always "two different teams built those two things independently 8 years ago, and now that's just how they've always been...".

Ha - thanks glenn. So neither really, just: no one's felt pressure/inclination to make a change

That quote above... it's odd to think that the labels wouldn't have been all for the low quality* and the DRM and all that stuff. They knew they'd be able to sell better downloads (or streaming memberships or whatever... or I suppose vinyl) later on. It was in the best interests of Apple and the labels.

* I had to Google and refresh myself on this... originally the sold files were 128kbps with DRM, 99 cents each. They started doing 256kbps DRM-free in 2007. 256 or 320 is good for me but 128 is brutal.

*in 2007 for $1.29 per song.

Upgrades for previous purchases were available as part of a $25/year program? Yarg...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/01/18/itunes-drm/21964513/

anyway yeah, poor labels

I paid $25 for one year of iTunes Match just so I could convert all my crappy old Napster and Audiogalaxy mp3s to 256k

2021: https://i.imgur.com/5lhP2kN.jpg

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Sunday, June 20, 2021 5:51 PM (six days ago)

continued:

https://i.imgur.com/a4bRljp.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/RJUFtsC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/kYtYWeM.jpg

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Saturday, June 26, 2021 8:00 AM (two weeks ago)

having trouble reading between the lines here but I'll crack it

https://i.imgur.com/5La4c1I.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/EazQ5x3.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0AFrZNC.jpg