Continuing with Spotify?

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.

And I supposed where all this ties in to that ‘16-22’ thread was that I know for a fact back when I was that age I could only afford a CD, or a few 12”s each week and I would listen to anything I bought so, so much.

Now I feel like I give everything 20% of my attention while the remaining 80% is janitorially thinking ‘where should I file this’ / ‘hey this would mix with xyz’ / ‘this is just retromania of genre Z’ rather than focusing.

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.

Yes, dude! I got stuck into a loop where I spent way too much time thinking about effects pedals and way too little time practicing, by a huge margin. Gear Acquisition Syndrome, as it is sometimes called. Haven't played guitar or bass in years because it wasn't musically satisfying to me and I kept going back to the need to shop. How stupid is that? Tried to teach myself piano for a while, but couldn't stick with it. Sometimes I tinkle around on the keyboard though, just trying to figure out melodies, which is maybe just about right for me!

I have lots of "scrap playlists" that I make to sample new things. Usually destroy these once they outlive their usefulness/I decide I just am not going to get that deeply into those songs/albums/genres. These are usually pretty disappointing. This is where I'm trying to sift through the waves of new music that I see recommended and end up just being like, "eh."

Then I have a few classic playlists that I curate and love. They may be themed around pop women from the 2000s or motivational songs from action movies or the best 1990s alternative songs that I loved.

spotify is a mess. i usually just hit 'liked songs' and shuffle it. maybe sort by date and listen to the most recent stuff. the phone version lets you filter by genre which is cool, wish they would add that functionality to the desktop version. wish the liked songs had a lot more filtering options tbh.

other than that i check out my discover weekly playlist pretty frequently. i have tons of playlists but group them in folders and never feel like opening them up to sift through it all.

And I supposed where all this ties in to that ‘16-22’ thread was that I know for a fact back when I was that age I could only afford a CD, or a few 12”s each week and I would listen to anything I bought so, so much.

Now I feel like I give everything 20% of my attention while the remaining 80% is janitorially thinking ‘where should I file this’ / ‘hey this would mix with xyz’ / ‘this is just retromania of genre Z’ rather than focusing.

― Agnes, Agatha, Germaine and Jack (Willl), Monday, August 22, 2022 12:09 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I could have written this exact post. Scary

We old

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.

Since 2004, I've been making best-of-the-year playlists. For the first few years, I would listen to a bunch of songs and albums during the year, regularly move favorite songs onto a playlist, and then at the end of the year add some new discoveries from year-end lists. I would get kind of obsessive about sequencing the final collection of songs, but the process of compiling them was a straightforward byproduct of my usual habits of listening for pleasure.

Within a few years of using Spotify, though, I started keeping track of albums I wanted to listen to eventually, or that I thought I *should* listen to or might potentially enjoy, even if I wasn't compelled to listen to them right away -- and so by the end of the year, I didn't just have the handful of new discoveries to catch up on, I also had the backlog of "stuff to check out." But by that point, my primary motivation for listening to those albums was for the chance to encounter a song I could put on the playlist.

To make matters worse, I got kind of lazy about listening to new music as soon as it came out because I knew I could just add it to the "stuff to check out" playlist. Which meant that I was approaching more and more albums in a methodical, cold-eyed fashion, where I'd just listen once or twice or only as long as it took to identify my favorite song from it, and then on to the next album. For the last two years, I've put off even starting to compile the playlist until the following year and then spent months listening to little besides the hundreds of albums "to check out" from the year before.

Over time, the best-of-the-year playlist has expanded in length, as I've listened to more and more albums, and I've found a lot of genuinely great songs along the way. I like the end product, but the process does often feel like a time-consuming chore, and I don't really feel much of an emotional connection to most of what I listen to.

Sounds similar to my experiences. I’m glad I have the playlists, and more often than not at this point, shuffling them will uncover total gems that I don’t remember adding at all, that are totally my bag. But I’m with you on the feeling a lack of connection to it all.

I also have a 2500+ track deep ‘sample me’ playlist folder with subfolders for ‘brass’ / ‘fx’ / ‘vox’ etc. I don’t have a hope in hell of getting through that lot even if I live another 60 years, and it keeps getting bigger. But I can’t bin it because ‘what if that is *the* sample…’.

In some respects I almost hope for a solar flare to come along to wipe it all out so I can enjoy music again as the digital curation of it just frazzles me.

"stuff to check out" is death

I like how this thread has become a combo self-help group / confessional for people like me who are having an increasingly hard time navigating the blessing and curse that is modern music consumption. I'll say this: I know I enjoyed discovering music more, on the whole, twenty years ago, when it required more effort. But is that because of algorithms and access, or because it was, uh, twenty years ago and I was twenty years younger? I don't imagine people under 20 are having these kinds of anxiety attacks

it helps that I have a specific focus for "new music" - stuff that fits with my general radio show themes (which are v. eclectic but still pretty genre-specific, imagine a show where International Anthem and Staalplaat get equal billing), shorter tracks (well less than 10 minutes ideally), no (or very few) cuss words, that's what I end up buying on Bandcamp, and at this point just already-bookmarked ILM threads plus the artists and labels I follow give me enough input most of the time

recent examples:

Amateur Hour
Valerie June
Stephen Mallinder
Radboud Mens
Isa Gordon
Panda Bear/Sonic Boom
Cassini (ILX all-starz)

I used to have a "stuff to check out" playlist but I eventually gave up on it. I just accepted that there's stuff out there that I'm interested in that I will never listen to and I am probably missing out on some good stuff but whatever, it's not like I ever got around to listening to every album I ever held in my hand considering whether I should buy it while browsing in a record store and I'm sure I've forgotten completely about most of those albums. Think about what you have, not what you're missing out on.

I know I enjoyed discovering music more, on the whole, twenty years ago, when it required more effort. But is that because of algorithms and access, or because it was, uh, twenty years ago and I was twenty years younger? I don't imagine people under 20 are having these kinds of anxiety attacks

I would say partly just being younger, also partly inability to cope with change - we learned how to cope with limited access and are having trouble dealing with unlimited, for these youngsters unlimited is all they know and I'm sure they're coping with it fine and developing different listening strategies as a result.

One other aspect is physical visibility - when I owned CDs I could see all the music I had at a glance. Now even if I have a similar online playlist or library of albums, at best I have to scroll through a huge gallery of thumbnails to find something.

I feel like my experience is almost the inverse of what most of you are describing. In the CD era I spent a ton of time categorizing and cataloguing not just my listening, but my "collecting", and always had a giant stack of CDs that I had purchased but either not played at all yet, or not really absorbed, and I felt a constant sense of obligation to do so.

Streaming has relieved me of most of that sense of burden. It's not my job*, as an individual listener, to categorize or catalogue things. There's no sunk cost obligating me to listen to 5 more albums by a band I'm turning out to not really need more of. Plus discovery is no longer gated by shopping, which was always a terrible way of exploring music. So now I get to wander around the entire music universe (more or less), and it's even more amazing than I ever imagined.

*It's probably relevant that it is my job, as an employed person, to categorize music. Not to catalogue it, but that job gives me easy ways to make use of other people's cataloguing work. I can imagine feeling less willing to leave all of that to other people if I weren't involved in how it's done...