Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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.

I don't know why that would be, but Spotify support might be able to help you. I have no issues with Spotify sound quality over multiple different BT buds/headphones using either my Mac or my phone...

if you’re a Mac user, it kind of sounds like this. I had a similar issue recently.

I had that issue on my last MacBook (if it’s the same thing); downloaded the app to force the setting and the whole bit.

great they have kept the New Episodes feature as a constant , & now it has been constantly the same for 2 days. Lovely.
NOt showing any shows past Sept 1st like

I have never cared enough about Spotify's tweaks to complain before, but this new thing where a band's discography is displayed as a vertical scroll in descending chronological order is the worst, dumbest thing I've ever seen.

I've hung on to my $5/month Spotify Unlimited acct for years, never "upgraded" to Premium. At some point I put the Spotify app on my phone; I don't remember why, since Unlimited is supposed to be desktop-only. But I used the app yesterday to see if I could look stuff up on it even if I couldn't play it, and discovered that I can now use the phone app for playback! I don't know if it's an app bug, account bug or account upgrade, but it's pretty nice. (Glenn, if it's an account bug, don't rat me out.)

― Miami weisse (WmC), Friday, January 24, 2020 8:35 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Ha, I see the codes for those old accounts in queries sometimes. You've probably outlived the special-cases in the code that were intended to restrict them...

― glenn mcdonald, Friday, January 24, 2020 8:42 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

victory through attrition

― Miami weisse (WmC), Friday, January 24, 2020 8:55 PM (one year ago)

Accounting side has caught up with software side, and I've been informed that my Unlimited account billing is going away and will be converted to the free account, or I can bump it up from $5 to $10 for premium. Nice while it lasted.

this new thing where a band's discography is displayed as a vertical scroll in descending chronological order is the worst, dumbest thing I've ever seen.

*sits here sadly chuckling as a user of Amazon Music, which sorts an artist’s albums in (I guess) order of popularity; no option to sort alphabetically or by year*

I'm trying to figure out what order would make more sense than chronological

For an artist with a huge discography, lots of reissues, etc., it can get unwieldy (try scrolling for a specific Grateful Dead album on any streaming service)… but reverse-chron is generally my preference.

It's not the chronological aspect; it's the one-long-vertical-scroll part. They used to be displayed as a grid and you could click on the album you wanted to hear. Now the newest album (even if it's, say, a 2020 reissue of a 1975 release) is up top and you have to scroll down and down and down until you find the one you want.

Do they expand all the tracks of each album in the scroll?

Has this discography thing not gone back to what it was a year or so ago. I thought they did used to have discography's stacked vertically without thumbnails. Are they just continually throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. & I'm not sure for who cos they keep dumping things i like and trying things i really don't.
THey have updated the new episodes thing like once since I complained then stuck with that,.

I remember it being a pain trying to find things like specific Grateful Dead tracks when you weren't 100% up on what the individual set was when I was setting up playlists for teh radio show i did a few years ago. Which was mainly done using the Spotify set up because teh radio station had an account with them. & i think that was when I started using the program.
Think i frequently had to try to find the tracks using the search engine.
The thumbnail representation of a specific lp/set was pretty recent I thought. Is it actually older than teh current continuum of random changes which would date back 2 or 3 months wouldn't it? things are changing so much it's hard to keep track.

Really wondering what the story on that New Episodes thing is, looks like it may be done manually so it will update a load of things at the same time instead of automatically as a new episode is upped. Would think it would be part of an algorithm that would do the latter but this is the 2nd time I've seen it act like that. Would think incremental change would be more subtle and less visible.
Very odd, would think that this is a very individual process dependent 100% on the individual user's listening history and therefore not something that could act like that. Is there a process that would only update a number of things after a trigger or something I'd checked the new episodes thing at least once before it updated this morning and it still had the update thing from 2 days ago. JUst not getting this and am assuming that if it is happening to me it must be more widespread.

They used to be displayed as a grid and you could click on the album you wanted to hear.

I still see this method. I forgot there used to be a choice between grid and list view though.

Tabs would probably work well here although maybe there are accessibility issues with this that may be preventing it as viable method of navigating between albums, singles, comps per artist.

lol nm just noticed the grid/list toggle is still there at the top corner

lol nm just noticed the grid/list toggle is still there at the top corner

Thanks! Problem solved.