Continuing with Spotify?

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...

I don't use any streaming services.

What I *do* end up doing is favoriting or liking things on Bandcamp, saving them for a Bandcamp Friday ostensibly, but really just saving them for when I have some time to listen in more and decide whether to purchase. This feels much more healthy to me and more like "going to the record store" than what you all are describing, and I recommend it.

Remember, music is about enjoyment!

I stream but I save albums to check out, curating playlists is too much like work for me

I just keep a "Faves" playlist of my favorite tracks each year, which ends up running around 60 mins. I arrange for flow and everything (not that anyone whom I share the link with likely listens or cares).

(I listen to it, though!)

xp re: Bandcamp. Yeah that’s where I’m at nowadays. As you said, it feels much more like actively going shopping for music in a store, and the act of editing down a shortlist to choose a handful of favourites is one of lifes greatest joys.

Also it means my Bandcamp collection is far more concise than my Spotify account, which sometimes feels like a cupboard packed with playlists,
greedily stuffed with all I can fit from the Spotify
audio buffet, then almost immediately forgotten about and gathering mould. So to speak :)

I have endless folders and subfolders sorted by decade, genre, and artist, plus a zillion playlists organized by year or by theme.

It would be fair to say I do “project-based listening” - where I have set out some parameters (ie, a list) of albums or artists or tracks to dig through. And then I archive that project somewhere via playlists or folders. (If for no other reason than to remind myself that, yes, I did work my way through Blue Cheer’s discography and I don’t need to do that again).

There are times when that can feel overwhelming but truthfully the process is where half the pleasure is

my Friday afternoon commute playlist is extremely cool

I really love being able to check out so much stuff. I still buy cds and lps though, sounds like a lot you don’t.

i can tell you how my kids handle spotify. they have one playlist of favourites and they leave autoplay on. they don’t use discover weekly. they sometimes check out top 50 or viral 50. that’s it. the only searching they do is to find a song they heard on tiktok. they don’t think about “algo” vs “no algo”. algos are just an expected part of any service.

the end result of this for my 13 year old appears to be an abiding interest in 90s west coast hiphop?

when I owned CDs I could see all the music I had at a glance

My problem is that I have very limited shelf space, so a lot of my CDs are in rows three deep and then stacks on top of those, making it very difficult to remember what I actually own at times and forcing me to go rooting around looking for things (is it in this pile? no, it's in that other pile behind the other one...fuck).

I don't use any streaming services.

What I *do* end up doing is favoriting or liking things on Bandcamp, saving them for a Bandcamp Friday ostensibly, but really just saving them for when I have some time to listen in more and decide whether to purchase. This feels much more healthy to me and more like "going to the record store" than what you all are describing, and I recommend it.

I do this; every day or two, I go to Bandcamp's front page and click the "new releases" link, specifying "jazz" (and then "metal" and occasionally "electronic" > "techno") and checking out a few things that seem interesting, placing them in my cart and coming back around in a week or so.

Also, I still use Tidal.

I have a whole convoluted method for finding new music to buy, particularly for DJ sets.

1. use glenn's spotify new releases by genre page to scan lots of weekly new releases quickly

2. if something catches my ear, pull it up on spotify and check out a bunch of that artist's recent releases

3. if I find anything there that I really like put it on my big DJ tracks master playlist

4. listen to list on shuffle to get familiarized with the tracks I've added

5. when it's time to put a set together, start pulling down about 2-4 hours worth of tracks from the master list into a set list and organize it, filling in any blanks as needed

6. purchase all tracks on the set list from bandcamp if possible, otherwise beatport

if there's tracks that I really like and want more of, or if I'm looking for something really particular there's a number of things in spotify that help me find more like that such as radio playlists and the "fans also like" suggestions. I also follow a lot of record label playlists where they'll just have their entire catalog.

I pretty much never browse for music in bandcamp because I find navigation on it to be a nightmare, just use it for actually buying the music.

Bandcamp is a brilliant shop and sampling-before-buying site but a nightmare for organising your own purchases and listening to stuff, especially once you’ve bought a couple of extensive discography bundles.

I'm running an unscientific experiment with an EP I'm releasing, in terms of the algorithmic and editorial playlists. My theory is that you should always pitch the shortest track on the release, especially if it's under 3 min, even if it's the weirdest track on the record.

In an effort to overcome choice paralysis with the music I already know (ignoring the incomparably vaster problem of the music that I don't) I've set up a spreadsheet with all the albums I've ever owned or saved to Spotify or otherwise loved, and a random number generator. If I were feeling fancy I could stick it online with some kind of api nonsense to try and open the album directly, this works fine enough though.

This has been helpful for me:

https://www.nativenoise.co.za/spotify/album-selector/

^essentially lets you scroll through your saved albums randomly

Update: it didn't work, lol. I guess the next experiment is to always include a track that's both 2 minutes long AND accessible.

OK what fresh hell is this?

What in the name of Steve Albini is this underneath the lyrics box for Nirvana's Lithium? Kurt would have loved the Instagram inspo slogan memeification of his work 😌 pic.twitter.com/Zm3D9p0znD

— Dan Hancox (@danhancox) September 21, 2022

A few of my fave current artists have recorded Spotify Singles recently, which is irritating to me as a non-subscriber (since I can’t easily hear them) – but it’s an effective gambit by Big Green.

xpost creepy

More track-matching weirdness. The Super Deluxe box set is available for 'pre-saving' on Spotify and as well as the already released new stereo mix of Taxman it purports to have the mono versions of Here There and Everywhere, And Your Bird Can Sing and Eleanor Rigby already playable. But start playing them and it's actually the old stereo mixes.

https://i.imgur.com/TLdQsJS.png

OK what fresh hell is this?

Ugh had to resubscribe to Spotify cause freaking Qobuz is missing some stuff that Spotify has. For example, there are gaps in what is available in the USA in the Ethiopiqes series. And just including their impossible search engine. I’ll still keep Qobuz for the booklet notes.

I finally switched to Tidal, the sound (if you subscribe) is FAR superior, it's more artist friendly, and it has a quieter aesthetic...the catalog is more sparse. I was skeptical at first, but I'm getting the hang of it and it's working for me now.

So many things I liked about Spotify - especially the playlists, however there are programs for moving your playlists...that's what held me back before.

Also what held me back is that the social aspect isn't quite there yet.

Aesthetically and economically, it is just clearly FOR MUSIC PEOPLE.

I have to say that the cool thing about switching platforms is that the algorithms are different, so if you hit "artist radio", you get different stuff than you do with Spotify. I was using those radios a lot to find new stuff.

yeah, the artist radio thing is surprisingly good on Tidal. On Spotify I feel like I was always getting the same tracks over and over again, Tidal's feels more diverse. On the other hand I feel like Tidal's equivalent to "Discover Weekly" isn't as good.

I'd love for these algorithms to be more parametrizable though, like an artist radio for which you can specify how broad or narrow you want it to be, or specify that you only want stuff from 2022, or exclude certain genres or labels or whatever.

at one point Glenn shared a link to a page he had that let's you create a Spotify radio playlist that doesn't factor in your own listening history, this resulted in a somewhat more diverse set of suggestions. Unfortunately, I no longer know how to access this.

spotify shuffle is definitely algorithmic and not truly random, which is kind of annoying!

it's been pretty buggy lately in browser, shuffling back to tracks played only minutes earlier

That unpersonalized radio thing is here: https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=radio

Or use that same set of tools to find an artist, and there's an "artist radio" link at the bottom of the "fans also like" sidebar...

Not sure how I missed this until now but why is the option to order playlists by artist missing? That field must have been pulled in 2021? I can't imagine the reason why. Glenn? What's going on there?

It's merged with title sort so click that three times or there's a dropdown menu on the right also.

No sorting in the browser version tho :(

it's been pretty buggy lately in browser, shuffling back to tracks played only minutes earlier

― nashwan, Friday, December 2, 2022 7:52 AM

i've never had a problem with this until the past few days. on my end it's like it gets stuck on one or two songs and i either have to restart the shuffle or manually go into the queue and skip to the "next" song.