Continuing with Spotify?

There was a time when I really enjoyed Discover Weekly, but I barely listen to it anymore. The curated ones stink like payola. I wish they (or another service) leaned more into promotion of user-created playlists.

I don't listen to a lot of curated lists, but I use the radio feature a lot

just want my playlist recognized as pure gold that it is

― he's very big in the region of my butthole (Neanderthal), Monday, February 7, 2022 1:15 PM

The struggle is real, friend.😄

The only playlist I really wanted to keep was my "liked" tracks playlist which is several thousand tracks that I liked over the years. It's not really that huge of a deal but I wanted it enough that it was worth the 4.50$ it cost to transfer it over to Tidal.

Being manipulated to pay for something you created yourself is a very familiar feeling for academics like me …

I don't really have a p.o.v. on Neil Young calling for Spotify workers to resign & everyone else to withdraw their $ from certain banks, but I think it's funny that Pitchfork decided to straight-up call him a hypocrite in their reporting on it:

Despite his criticism of Spotify and big banks, Young has continued to point his fans to Amazon, which has earned heavy criticism for its inhumane working conditions and fervent union-busting.

Damn, that's cold, Pitchfork!

Are folks really that attached to their playlists? We've been building a hiphop playlist for the past year or so and it's up to over 9 hours by this point. If that just suddenly went away, Andy would certainly be able to remember my favorites and build a similar one fairly easily elsewhere. Of all the reasons to give up Spotify, that seems like an odd one — feels like the same energy as the teacher who gets mad that someone erased their chalkboard, but also can't remember what was erased.

There are some playlists that I have spent months working on (compiling and sequencing) and would feel crushed if Spotify vanished without warning. But if it announced it would shutting down in a week, I would just export the track listings as text files and rebuild them elsewhere. (I actually have some of them in a Google doc already, because I'm paranoid that a track might disappear without being grayed out and I'll forget it was ever there to begin with.)

does rogan still run ads on his show?

I went with Tidal yesterday. I like the interface and got an offer for 3 months for a dollar before the full price kicks in. It'll cost me $4.50 (one time) to convert playlists, which is fine since I'll save almost $20 with that $1 deal. I did discover that early Camper Van Beethoven is missing on Tidal but available on Spotify and Apple Music, which is odd.

YouTube Music seems to have all the CBV albums, but Amazon Music only has a few late-period ones (the band got the memo!!)

The box set is still p affordable on Discogs…

https://www.discogs.com/release/888500-Camper-Van-Beethoven-Cigarettes-And-Carrot-Juice-The-Santa-Cruz-Years

Spotify had a playlist called something like Badass Womyn at one point - Angel Olsen, Mitski, etc. indie rock - it was the first time I saw "womyn" since the early '00s.

I'm planning to switch to Tidal for the more expensive plan that gives half directly to the artists I listen to, curious to see some artists talk about how that impacts their royalty statements.

oh, I just realized that it's 10% of the monthly not half for twice the price. I'd rather just spend $2 extra on bandcamp every month, 99% of my listening will be in the car or walking with my PortaPros, don't think I need Dolby Atmos.

Isn't it 10% which goes to your single top artist? And given it's Tidal, don't they manipulate the books so it goes to Kanye and Beyonce no matter what?

Jay-Z I mean, not Kanye, forgot which arsehole was married to which for a moment.

split the 1500 tracks into two playlists of 750, migrate them both, then drag and drop the second playlist into the first playlist, right?

I've been on Qobuz for almost a month. Their desktop app design really needs some help.

I'm also trying hard to understand any real benefits of Qobuz over Tidal or Spotify. As far as I can tell Qobuz's library doesn't have anything over Spotify's besides the handful of artists who recently pulled their music. But I have yet to find any meaningful library differences.

Aah, the part where I responded to the italicized section got cut out.

Basically, I can't figure out how to combine 2 Qobuz playlists.

You don't Qobuz for the library, you Qobuz for the sound quality

Yeah, I couldn't figure that out either, or how to post-edit migrated playlists - and my trial expired a couple of weeks ago (looks like I can still play a random 30sec chunk of anything on there at 320k through the app, and my playlists are still there). I quite liked the interface, and the liner notes/credits.

xp

yep, if you're talking strictly catalog i might try deezer, they seem to have everything spotify has and some odd things that other services don't

The sound is very good but their apps could use more intuitive features imo.

yeah, honestly it's tough because i think spotify is pretty far ahead of a lot of the competitors in terms of useability

i do like that qobuz tries to make really nice actual human selected playlists or little summary playlists and articles about a certain label etc, their content can be pretty good sometimes

I wound up with Tidal instead of Qobuz largely because Tidal's UI is so close to Spotify's, with some things I like even more (placement of production credits, existence of songwriting credits, super big album art).

xp The Qobuz write-ups are cool and yea I'd like to find more playlists. I think you're right that they don't have any robot-selected playlists.

have you tried the phone app? I think it's better than the desktop

Yea I spent some time organizing my playlists yesterday and since then the phone app auto-organized them back to where they were lol.

It's still better than the desktop app tho.

the big thing the desktop app still supports that other versions do not is the ability to play folders of nested lists as one big playlist

i have now tried qobuz and tidal and i’m sticking with tidal. tidal rules

I've imported all my playlists from spotify into tidal. I'd like to be able to select them all and then dump them into a folder. is this possible

Tidal's algorithmic elements (like a radio station based on a song) still seem to lag behind Spotify, about equal to Apple Music.

Keep hoping one service will break through the sexist algorithm barrier, ie making a station based on a song by The Beths or Dry Cleaning it pays attention to genre rather than just populating a list with bands with women singing.

I don't subscribe to any streamers, but I've done Spotify and TIDAL on a trial basis and I thought TIDAL was better than Spotify by a good margin across the board. Algorithms don't mean anything to me because I always pick what I play. I'm kind of stuck with "free" Spotify as a way of trying out albums before I buy them, but if I ever make the plunge to subscribe, it would definitely be TIDAL.

making a station based on a song by The Beths or Dry Cleaning it pays attention to genre rather than just populating a list with bands with women singing.

xp I just tried this in YT Music (for the Beths), and get stuff like Malkmus, New Pornos, CYHSY, etc.

(oh, sorry, I was in Amazon Music. Just tried it in YTM and got not as diverse results)

(now tried Dry Cleaning in Amazon, and also get acts with both men and/or women singing)

Not Spotify-specific news, but Snoop what are you doing, bro????

Great dangling modifier in that piece:

After buying the iconic brand and catalog last month and promising to transform it into “an NFT label” operating in the metaverse, fans were perplexed this weekend…

So I finally signed up for a free month of Qobuz and their app is really buggy

so they've learned spotify's secrets?

“why yes, the album is finished, so obviously i want to switch output sources now” ffs

Qobuz’ search function is so bad I’m considering keeping my Spotify subscription, ecccch.

Haven't seen that viscerally unpleasant Joe Rogan podcast image for months. Don't know whether Spotify finally buried him or whether my algorithm is working. Still would LOVE to remove every podcast from my home page. They can all fuck off. Mighty Boosh? Fuck off. Unf*ck Your Brain? FUCK OFF. Do You F***** Mind? FUCKING FUCK OFF!!!!

I've had it turn up over the last couple of weeks while I've been searching through things. So maybe it's not being proffered as much.

I was just responding to the ‘is music you loved most from 16-22 your go-to music’ thread and realised I was heading way off piste and it belonged here…

I find Spotify kind of overwhelming, to the point where it has been actively preventing me from seeking out or listening to new music.

At this point, 10+ years in I am drowning in playlists - I made genre playlists as I’ve gone along, monthly ones, mood ones, I also follow all sorts of great curated ones. Plus playlists of things I’ve ‘liked’, release radars, playlists pulled from playlists ad infinitum.

The whole mess gives me crippling option paralysis. If I want to listen to any of the my crafted genre playlists I find myself skipping music I previously loved but don’t want to ditch from the painstakingly crafted playlist for ‘completeness’ sake.

Then I feel like I should be listening to new music. While doing that I get to the thoughts of ‘why are you doing this? there is so much music you have already on these playlists that you have barely heard 3 times’

Then I feel like I should maybe just make a playlist of things I like this month. But if I do that and end up dragging each of the songs to their respective genres and playlists and and and etc etc etc.

For someone like me, an obsessive lister and hoarder the whole thing is a complete fucking chore and I spend more time worrying that I’m missing out on something or doing playlist admin than enjoying listening to music. I know this is my problem and not Spotify’s but it is a problem nonetheless.

I tried at one point just sacking it off and creating a new account but ended up back on the playlist hell one within a month - in some kind of ‘sunk cost fallacy’ due to the amount of time spent using it.

If you had told teenage me I would have access not only to listen to 80% of the music that weeks NME, but 80% of recorded music ever, I would have sold my kidneys to get access. But here I am 10 years in and I couldn’t be using it less.

Nowadays the vast majority of my favourite music of the last few years has been discovered from sifting through my Bandcamp ‘music feed’, looking through the collections of people who have bought a handful of the same songs as me, finding tracks I like and buying them.

I don't use Spotify, but I relate very strongly to the option paralysis. I still use iTunes to listen to music, and still make playlists there, and I have a bunch of playlists of things I'm saving to listen to later, and it's like gigabytes full of music. Later never really comes.

although I have many playlists, most of my listening is focused on two big ones. The first is just all my favorite stuff, a huge list of just everything that I like and want to hear on a regular basis. I look at this as my master radio station that just plays the stuff I like. The second is New Music, anything new that I'm wanting to check out. Once something is no longer new to me, I take it off, possibly moving to the favorites list if I still like hearing it.

I have specialized lists for very particular moods or situations, and a few for DJ-oriented listening tasks, but those first two are the main ones. The key to me is keeping lists big enough so they don't just feel like I'm listening to the same thing over and over again.

I left Spotify for Apple Music several years ago. The latter just integrates better with all my devices, although it has its frustrations (for me, primarily the way it handles playlists from my existing iTunes library, which is about 2/3 classical music).

I mostly don't bother with playlists. I just have my track collection, my album collection and my artists collection. Whenever I listen to new stuff (which I mostly get through the algorithmic recommendations or through ilm) I put anything I like into my "liked" tracks and then later will sometimes just listen to the latest additions to my liked tracks which sometimes prompts me to check out that artist's albums, which will sometimes go into my "liked" albums. Any artist who was produced something I like goes into my "liked" artists.

When I don't know what I want to listen to, I just put tracks collection on shuffle (it has basically become the world's best radio station at this point).

The only playlists I really keep are "<current year> Tracks" and "<current year> Albums" playlists, which are mostly just so I don't forget anything in year end polls.

I tried creating curated playlists for myself in the past, but it was just too much of an undertaking and ultimately not that much fun to do.

I'm listening to way more new music in the streaming era than I ever was in the CD or download era.

I set up "smart" playlists that will keep track of stuff I haven't listened to in, say, 6 months. I can't stand to shuffle classical tracks, so I need it to be able to play by album. That works great on my Mac, much less so on my mobile devices.

"option overload" is what i call it.

one way i try to mitigate that burnout is to limit how many days in a row i check out new (to me) things. like if i check out a new album or band today, i might end up listening to a few albums or the same album more than once. so tomorrow, i'll take a break from "new" music. maybe revisit something else similar, maybe listen to the new thing again, maybe just read a book, maybe just throw on my "radio" playlist for the background. it helps to reboot my brain, otherwise everything starts to kind of sound the same and i find myself asking "do i even like music anymore?" and other obvious nonsense.

an aside: i ran into this same problem with guitar effects pedals. i like delay and it's favorite effect, but the delays out these days are so far from a simple old dd-3. i started to find myself sitting on the floor in front of my amp pressing buttons and twisting knobs for an hour just to get a usable sound. rarely was able to work through a whole song because i always wanted to change something — and the pedals allow you to make all kinds of changes! it made me not want to play guitar.

Talking about ‘end of year’ tracks, when the massive end of year ILM playlist was posted last year my option paralysis was out of the window.

I was going to listen to it all, pick favourites, submit a poll and so on. I ravenously listened to the lot, relistened to get a shortlist from the long list and so on, discovered some real favourites.

Then once the poll happened, I filed the lot into their rough genre playlists to be heard some time in 2027 when the stars align and their genre is chosen + the dismal shuffle feature finds them. Send help.

Re: Smart playlists - these are one of my favourite things about iTunes / Apple Music and their integration with DJ software was invaluable back when I played out - at least to take chunk of ‘options’ away based on release date / genre etc.