Spotify - anyone heard of it?

i hate that false tag shit. got a new release notification for david axelrod a while back and it turns out it was just some dunce who used a david axelrod sample in a song.

Disappointing it wasn’t a least a speech by the former Obama aide.

heardle doesn't work for me anymore, thanks Spotify

If you makes you guys feel any better, that false tag stuff also happens on Amazon Music – plus the UI totally sucks.

anyone tried https://earth.fm/

i use the queue feature very often and something that i would find extremely useful is a "play last in queue" option. i like to put on three or four albums in a row and sometimes add on to that in the middle, so a "play last" option would be ideal. the way the queue works now is functional, but kind of clunky. anyone have any insights?

I just use playlists for everything. I always have multiple listening plans going, so the one queue isn't useful.

I use playlists for organizing albums - feels kind of weird since... well, they're albums. But works fine.

It seems like there are a lot of multiple instances of the same album on Spotify as observed only when re-adding a track to a playlist that's already in it and the app failing to detect the duplication (despite only one instance of the album appearing in search results and being navigable to). I'm frequently adding tracks to large playlists, realising later they're already in (same version btw) and then removing them manually.

I've never head that tbh - always get the 'Already in playlist' message

You can drag songs to the top of your queue once they've been added (both on desktop and phone clients) xps

It seems like there are a lot of multiple instances of the same album on Spotify

Yeah, there are, see e.g. the albums list near the top of this page from Glenn's site. In most cases, however, it seems that various instances are simply used for different sets of countries, in which case a single given user would rarely add the same track from two different instances of an album.

Actually, I thought cross-instance same-track-ness was (supposed to be) caught by the mechanism – further down on the page, a given track is clearly associated with various releases and instances, so I thought this info might be used for duplicate warnings as well as e.g. for the (very useful) play count harmonization, but a simple test (adding a song from a single and an album) gives no warning, so I guess it isn't.

not important or interesting whatsoever but-

why does the #1 song have so many fewer plays than the ones below it?

https://i.imgur.com/aFyevwp_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

does it have to do with recent trends?

(hope that works. imgur seems to not want anyone to post photos off-site anymore. here's the link in case)

yeah, it has to be current popularity. Beyonce's entire top ten is from the new album, even though those songs have much lower play counts than her huge hits.

Yeah, Glenn's addressed this before - ranking is a secret algorithmic sauce, presumably meant to address both current and lifetime popularity. I imagine they want you to quickly see the songs that possibly led you towards that artist, which could be something trending recently as opposed to their biggest catalog classics.

I just wish there were a separate page that just shows you every single track ranked with play count, but I concede that this is a niche use which would used primarily by ILM posters.

I'm glad there isn't, Dr Casino. That would probably depress me.

yeah i figured- it just seemed like the gap in that one i posted is *especially* big so i started to wonder. thx everyone for new answers

also would appreciate seeing alltime stats, but simultaneously understand it's a silly thing.

the search bar on desktop version is baccccck!

Spotify's search function sucks. You can't use " to do an exact search, which makes finding some songs with common words in the titles a total pain in the butt.

yes but the search being embedded back in the top bar is good

Barry Adamson's 'Oedipus Schmoedipus' LP is listed as from 1993 when it's actually 1995. That's a weird error if it came from the label's own metadata as usually the year of release is given as later when incorrect.

('96 really, promos and the like aside)

Spotify is massively inconsistent with the release years it lists. Some artists will have albums listed by initial release year; others by year of reissue/remaster; and others a combo of both. It can make it pretty hard to track an established artists' career path without external references.

The normalcy of all that was part of nashwan's point as I read it?

All the dates come from the licensors, but this is one of the few bits of album-level metadata that we are allowed to override for manual corrections, instead of having to send the complaints back to the licensors. So I just fixed those Adamson albums. We have four copies of that, two from a former licensor with the correct dates but no streaming availability, and two from a newer licensor with the wrong release-dates despite having 1996 in the copyright info. Sigh.

As for exact-match searching, that was the original sole function of what eventually became a slightly more involved research wing of everynoise:

https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=track

The other day I put 86'd by Subcircus on a playlist, when I came round to playing it it was a completely different song. It seems like the track titles on their album Carousel are completely mixed up - the titles match the order shown in discogs but the actual songs are in a completely different order - which matches the tracklist shown by google, I don't know where their information comes from.

We got the same wrong tracklists from two different licensors in two different countries for that Subcircus album, so the data was probably mis-entered way back at the dawn of digital time...

Thanks for the everynoise link! Really useful.

Terrible article by someone who can't figure out how to use Spotify: https://www.theverge.com/23380261/spotify-app-podcasts-audiobooks-clutter-music-leverage-complaint

You literally just have to click on Your Library and the Albums tab comes up. Not that difficult...

I do agree that podcasts and audiobooks are unnecessary on a music app though.

I think this guy uses Spotify like most people use Netflix—go to,the home page and see what’s featured right now.

They're both guilty of sticking the high-margin items in your face

I hate the podcasts and desperately wish I could block them, but somehow have never even seen an audiobook on there.

Ah, it's US only, so this new bit of crap is still in my future.

I hate all the stupid “THRIFTED”, “THRASHERS”, “FRESH EXPERIMENTAL” whatever “curated”playlists they shove in my face on every artist page, it’s like who cares

Glen, there are some pretty big mistakes on Golden Palominos tracks in the Spotify catalogue I thought I'd mention to you:

1) Cookout on both versions of the self-titled album and on The Celluloid Collection is actually Darklands from the record, A Dead Horse:

https://open.spotify.com/track/2o1SH4ILklYkxEkpvK8Nnk?si=74033515ec7f4f96

2) On A Dead Horse (the 2001 issue, not the one from 1989) -- Angel of Death and Lucky are listed in the right order but the music is swapped (Lucky is supposed to be the bluesy one, AoD the ethereal tune).

https://open.spotify.com/track/0OSxKSy4OsHsJmQfcjIRpE?si=ecf3b0c808304bce
https://open.spotify.com/track/1V58ggzs5vDXNXADuVrPkm?si=205e172cf1ec4bdc

It sounds like Tidal has had some issues with their catalogue as well, so it's not just Spotify. But another ILM user said you might make these changes faster than the official channels -- and since the head of the band passed away last month, you may be getting more traffic than usual to them.

Passed along to the right team...

Even without podcasts/audiobooks cluttering the place the library is pretty much useless if you're an album person and you have a large collection. I don't get why it's so hard to have an album library similar to the ones music players on computers have. Hell I can create albums folders on Desktop/web Spotify so why not on the app?

Thanks, glenN.

Thanks so much for that BA fix Glenn - really appreciate these

Did Spotify get rid of the ability to add albums to a playlist? On the app the option no longer shows up for me. I see some people on Twitter reporting the same.

still works for me

Hey there! We'll let the team know you'd like to see that feature return in the future. Let us know if there's anything else.

— SpotifyCares (@SpotifyCares) October 12, 2022

Seemed like it was actually removed in the new update. Terrible decision.

Seems

Yikes, I use that feature all the time. Every year I create a playlist for newly-released albums, adding them as they come out and listening whenever I have time. Dipping into that playlist probably accounts for 30-50% of my Spotify use.

on what version of the app are you seeing this? doesn't really make sense that this would be disabled altogether. so far I'm not seeing it on the android version, the windows version, or the browser version.

iPhone app

The twitter and support threads don't ever know moment to moment what the product managers are testing in the app. So you can report a change to twitter or support and they will not have any idea if what you are seeing is a bug, or an A/B test, or a new feature change for all users. They will just say "try reinstalling the app, and we'll let the team know about your experience, thank you for your feedback." There are too many product teams testing changes on the 3 major platforms (web, iOS, android) and sundry minor platforms (alexa/echo, car integrations, etc).

Adding albums to playlists still works for me so it's probably an A/B test or a bug.

Aimee Mann currently singing her way through a song called 'Nothing is good enough - Instrumental'.

This is a pretty old one but for the remix release of The Juan Maclean's 'Feel Like Movin' the Leon Vynehall remix (6:30) and the radio edit (4:09) remain the wrong way around