Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I found a UI change that I like: the cluster of recently played stuff at the top of the Home Screen

Seriously though the 'I don't like this artist' thing in playlists like Release Radar just doesn't work at all right?

I think my top feature request would be to filter my library with the normal search filters you can use on the greater collection: genre, year, etc. I've completely lost control of my library - there's so much in it that I keep forgetting to listen to, and have to put albums into playlists to keep visibility on it.

turn the label information at the bottom of an album/single page into a live link that pulls up a label's catalog

Yeah, I really want to do that with (and for) labels, but the data is a mess. "Label" is submitted as an unstructured text field, so there end up being countless spurious variations and compound credits.

You can experience the erratic data yourself here: https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=label

btw, I use your new releases by genre page every week to find tracks for DJing

Anyone getting a short loud static clip sound between tracks? been doing it all day and it's very unpleasant

How weirdly analog. I haven't seen any other reports of that. What platform are you on, and how are you listening?

this is happening for me at the moment with gescom's minidisc on various platforms (chromebook web player, mac app) but nothing else so i assumed it was a problem with that release. not a major issue as there is really no reason to listen to gescom's minidisc.

For some reason I keep winding up with an invisible display. it just says Queue then has nothing else visible. I corrected that last week by reinstalling Spotify but it's gone back to that like a week later.
Anybody else come across this?
I thought it had actually turned off the rest of a queue of podcasts and tunes I had set up but it is still playing now.

I had just swapped over from my mbile phone so do wonder if that has anything to do with things. Can see queue on phone still.

Oh yeah, does give full display for Recently Played but blank for Queue.

restarting worked this morning. It didn't last week hence the reinstallation. But it is a pain that it does that cos it means you can't see what's coming up or anything. Or see how to reshuffle the queue by hand.

Is this old news?

Spotify now displays this "About recommendations" section in the menu for all its official and algorithmic playlists

The standout line: "In some cases, commercial considerations may influence our recommendations"

Strange but really illuminating disclaimer pic.twitter.com/ftZCgwiGtT

— Cherie (@cheriehu42) August 2, 2021

well that certainly seems like what happens and this feels a bit like transparency but i don't trust that feeling and i want to know more about what kinds of actual or anticipated challenges this is responding to

we're keeping track of you because your taste is truly unique and by the way, it really suits you, and we know these other things that will suit you as well because we're so in tune with your unique snowflake vibe that we're basically giving you a shortcut and wouldn't you rather hear it framed like this than in some other more sinister way?

https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/the-record-labels-are-weaning-themselves-off-their-spotify-dependency

Glenn, what do you know about this new "Tracy Chapman" single? It's just a cheaply recorded piano piece, which sounds like improv, and cuts off after about a minute. I suspect someone has gamed the system, but who knows. May want to look into it, though.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2wP4TiA63jULmnT44hZyni?si=R3NQTDgJSJKM2cYfob3dNw

stuff still gets uploaded to the pages of established acts all the time somehow, sometimes it's just an unrelated act that shares the same name as a much more famous one & sometimes it's deliberate gaming of the system

The core problem is that "uploaded to the pages" isn't even vaguely how it works. Everything on Spotify is delivered via bulk feeds from licensors and/or aggregators, often with incorrect or missing metadata even before we get into the possibility of malice. It's kind of a wonder the system functions at all.

so, big surprise, Spotify has been doing some shady shit. spoilers: things are going in an *even more* artist-unfriendly direction.

— Fourth Strike Records (@StrikeFourth) August 6, 2021

we have been given access to the new Campaigns beta feature. essentially, artists will be required to pay to show their *own followers* that they've released new music.

if you tap on one of these screens, Spotify takes 50 cents straight out of the artist's pocket. pic.twitter.com/E4VKl9CFwk

— Fourth Strike Records (@StrikeFourth) August 6, 2021

They’re also testing a .99/month, ad-supported plan, which I suspect (if rolled out broadly) would likely cannibalize their 9.99 plan and drive down artists’ rates even further?

There's a problem with tryng to move things around in a playlist of podcasts if tehy change the thumbnail that goes with the representation of teh show in the interface once it's added to the playlist. ON the podcast's own page there is a photo of the guest, once it's added to teh playlist it becomes the generic photo of the host. & the way they have the title printed for at least the show I just added you don't get to see the episode number because there appear to only be a certain number of letters allowed in a playlist title before cut off.
So bah and indeed humbug. Stupidly making things more difficult than they need to be.
Surely easier to put series and number down numerically at the beginning of a title.

Those pop-up notifications are in addition to the normal What's New feed and Release Radar, so it's not charging artists for access to their own fans, it's charging them for a very limited extra resource (I think we show only one pop-up per user per day). $.50/click is more than I would pay, personally, but I have no idea what the range of rates is, and the blacked out listener-count in that Twitter thread might be a factor...

I thought that once New Episodes had returned for podcasts it might be a permanent feature like I think it used to be. It was around constantly for a couple of weeks I thought and I found it useful.
So I'm disappointed and a bit frustrated that it's vanished again.
Could do with it being a user defined option to keep it. Otherwise have to permanently try to keep abreast of what shows may have a new episode which doesn't appear remotely easy with the current interface. Ho hum.

does anybody use Daily Drive?

i looked at it again and i just find it basic af

they steal other people's news programming i.e. NPR Up First and Ny Times' The Daily, and stick some songs inbetween

as an experience it's not bad - public radio style news and current affairs with skippable songs as filler. but all NYT and NPR have to do is withdraw consent for those podcasts to be used and suddenly Daily Drive is a pretty bereft little playlist

Presumably NYT and NPR want the audience?

Are their ads stripped out?

no but they may prefer their audiences to listen via their own ecosystems one day. in NPR’s case via NPR One, or in NYT’s case via the NYT app. they’d get better data, attribution, etc.

Right. There's lots of products built on foundations as shaky, though. Apple News has similar limitations for participating publishers, but it's worth it for reach.

OR IS IT

Well OK not for everyone but I don’t see signs of a sea change happening in outlook.

I just think there's a limit on how willing publishers are going to continue to be to give away their content to competitors - content that directly builds value for competing products rather than their own. You can say it's 'reach' and I'm sure the advertising money is pretty good for those very big podcasts. But the audience relationship is with Spotify. The subscription is with Spotify. Look at it this way. If I start my own radio station I can't just start airing The Daily. I would have to pay the NY Times some kind of syndication fee. (If they agreed to let me air it at all.) If I were the NY Times I would be asking Spotify for money every month in exchange for allowing it to feature The Daily.

In any case Daily Drive feels to me like it's not quite radio but also not quite music streaming despite being quite clearly both. I'd rather just flip on NPR, or listen to my own playlists. But others might feel differently? Anybody use it regularly?

I don't know a lot about podcast distribution compared with written content, it's true, and it's so different to distribution of written content. Like, very few people who listen to The Daily are listening to it on the NYT site itself, are they? It's through distribution deals with people like Acast, I thought. If someone subscribes to a podcast, isn't their real relationship with that podcast itself, which applies regardless of where they hear it? I've always thought that podcasts are one of those areas where publishers actually don't have tight tracking on the user because there's no cookies or sign-in etc. Like, they don't even know if I've listened to what I've downloaded. And hosting it on Spotify, if the ads can stay in place, seems like a good deal – presumably helps with bandwidth costs too?

If someone subscribes to a podcast, isn't their real relationship with that podcast itself, which applies regardless of where they hear it?

People who listen to a lot of podcasts are going to stick with a single platform to manage their subscriptions, since it will keep track of which episodes you've listened to, etc. So far Spotify hasn't given me any reason to switch over from Pocket Casts, even though they've had a few exclusives I've checked out.

Same thing happening here. Someone has been adding bogus ambient/new age albums to my @SpotifyUSA and @SoundCloud pages. New album just showed up this morning, 24 tracks of complete and utter shite. https://t.co/SwBoiEo0Sm

— Steve Moore (@stevemoore2600) August 19, 2021

The Disintegration Dupes

One for the legal types. If someone was to upload a piece as above using someone else’s identity is there anything to stop the genuine person from exploiting it as their own work. i.e. they forfeit that right by in effect gifting it to them.

The EU generally recognizes moral rights of artists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

US generally lags behind the EU in recognizing moral rights, but has VARA (Visual Artist Rights Act).

All of the above generally applies to visual arts, but it would be interesting to see if it could be applied to music as well.

It's bad enough when someone does the artist name scam, but sometimes they actually use the song titles of the artist in question too. Lots of Aaliyah isn't on Spotify, and a fake Aaliyah uploaded a song called More Than a Woman. It was up for quite a long time.

If someone was to upload a piece as above using someone else’s identity is there anything to stop the genuine person from exploiting it as their own work. i.e. they forfeit that right by in effect gifting it to them.

Not legally, if I’m understanding the question (which is separate from what Spotify’s policies may allow). The most the “real” person could do legally is have the piece removed.

Actually, I’ll amend that by saying if you have a band/artist name registered as a trademark, you could theoretically sue an infringer for damages. That would be a long way to go though if it’s just a track or two on Spotify.

Looks like the "Basinski" song is still up, but it's been quarantined from his discography
https://open.spotify.com/artist/6M8YgOVLSKJmf9n0ZXSW1F

Weirdly the DATE ADDED for all my Release Radar stuff this morning was "in 27 minutes"

argh, tried to transfer unlistened-to songs to a new playlist on the desktop app and the dumb thing erased something like 75% of them after i moved them. current interface is buggy garbage.

I've got some local files i would like to play on spotify but they're not showing up as local files. Every other album in the folder i selected shows up but one. Is it possible for artists to block albums from showing up in local files?

solved :/

can't play the local files now...damn you spotify

J0e R0gan, this thread’s unofficial mascot, has Covid and is taking unapproved horse dewormer.

weird thing I've been experiencing: I got some new Bluetooth headphones (https://en-us.sennheiser.com/pxc-550-ii), overall really like them, sound about as good as BTs can I think.

So the weird thing is that I subscribe to Spotify and also Qobuz this French hi-rez streaming service

When I use these BT headphones (and also tested on a cheapie Amazon pair of BT earbuds too, same thing happened), Spotify sounds so weird/bad...and this is NOT a bitrate thing, like it just sounds like there's a blanket over the music. When I listen to the same track on Qobuz, it's like the veil is lifted -- this is a really striking and noticeable change not sitting there trying to discern the subtleties of bitrates

and it's definitely Bluetooth related, when I use my home set up - Chromecast Audio > Schitt Modi 3 > stereo - that weird muffled degradation isn't there. Sure, I think Qobuz is better overall, but the Spotify HQ stream sounds fine, it sounds like the same piece of music and i'm sure most people wouldn't really notice a difference.