Continuing with Spotify?

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.

that's on ios and android mobile btw

Does anyone actually use Deezer (especially in the U.S.)? Is it much more popular outside of the U.S.?

^I've always wondered this too... it always shows up in those lists of options, but who uses it(?)

Hey - does Spotify notify you when there's a new release by an artist you "Follow"? Neither of the two services I use will consistently do that, and it's really annoying... I'll get random, occasional alerts of releases by related artists (who I don't necessarily care about); and then I'll see that an artist I "Subscribe" to has something new, and I wasn't alerted.

lol I'll let someone answer that...I know it exists, because I've had people tell me something showed up on their Release Radar or whatever, but I've literally never used that feature (or the Home activity in general).

only people I know who use(d?) Deezer are French

Yes, Spotify has both a weekly personalized playlist of new releases (Release Radar) and a new-release notification feed that updates as releases by artists you follow are released.

A few things are maybe making me contemplate dropping Spotify for the first time:

1) The lack of surround/Dolby Atmos/360Reality Audio support – this is something I really love to explore and the labels are making an effort to support. Spotify should as well.

2) Song titles in Japanese – in fairness, if you know the song title in English you can type it in w the artist name and it will come up. It’s just annoying to not be able to see it in English and know what song is what. Other platforms have these in English if it knows I’m an English speaker. Spotify should too.

3) The garbage artist payments – I get that the economics of streaming are messed up right now but I’m not sure why Spotify has to be dead last among the major platforms and it bothers me.

I’m not quite ready to jump ship just yet – but I am starting to feel these things more strongly. And while it would be annoying to start fresh on Apple Music or Tidal or whatever, my experience trying Amazon Music HD over the last month makes me think it won’t be that difficult.

On #3, all the major music-streaming services have basically the same deal: 70% of revenue goes to royalties, which all of them distribute by the same stream-share method. So none of them actually set a per-stream rate, it's the result of dividing the total amount of royalties paid in a month by the total number of streams. And this is actually done not only per-country, but per-product within each country (premium, family, duo, student, ad-supported...), so the effective per stream rates vary widely. But if you pay $10 to Apple or Spotify, both services turn around and pay $7 out in royalties.

Spotify has a lower global average than Apple because Apple doesn't have an ad-supported tier and doesn't operate in some of the countries where the local subscription rates are lower in US-dollar terms. But neither of those things affect you.

#2 is interesting. We actually tested that at Spotify a year or two ago (showing translated titles in your device's language if they're available) and it produced such a dramatic negative reaction that we ended the test early. It turns out that lots of people have their phones set to English for UI purposes, even if they listen to music in other languages, and showing translated titles made it impossible for people to find or recognize songs that they actually knew (and saw discussed everywhere else) by their original titles. So this problem really needs a different UI that would allow you to see translations in addition to original titles, rather than in place of them. But that's harder. One day...

Thanks, Glenn. Yeah, I was wondering about automatic translations and whether that would actually mess things up further. But I’m assuming it uses an auto translation in the background anyway if searches for the English titles turn up the Japanese ones, right? I wonder if this could be solved with an option in settings to enable (perhaps with a disclaimer that some translations may vary). I imagine the other (more expensive) way to do it is to just manually cross reference Japanese titles with any titles translated into English (which is what I presume Amazon did for records like the Yellow Magic Orchestra S/T record).

Thanks for the clarification on streaming payments.

Any thoughts on #1? I know a lot of the weird uncle hifi types have been clamoring for Spotify to make good on its HD commitment. But I’d be more interested in the surround stuff, especially since the immersive thing is beginning to take off on other streaming platforms and the music industry as a whole.

The YMO record has official English versions of the song titles, so it's kind of funny Spotify doesn't have those on the "US Version" issue of the record I'm seeing there. I'm guessing the record company could switch the titles to the English versions? There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason (to me as a user) on which language a Japanese release uses for song titles, when there are English versions of them. Automatic translation in their absence isn't something I'd thought of and would lead to some really odd titles.

But I think it would be nice if Spotify "knew" the romanization of the characters so it could display a readable version of the title, or at least find it in searches I can type.

In a weird uncle hifi moment, I did a trial of Apple Music to sample the Atmos etc... I didn't even find it worth the UI clutter.

sources on "beginning to take off"? :)

Deezer's pretty big in Europe and I think may have even pre-dated Spotify in France. They also aggregate streaming radio stations.

Well, said the weird uncle, you need speakers that are Dolby Atmos capable to hear the difference. I have a Sony HT-A7000 soundbar for my TV and rears that are all Atmos-capable. The easiest way to describe the difference between 5.1 and Atmos is that Atmos speakers have upward firing speakers creating a sense of vertical as well as horizontal movement.

As for “beginning to take off,” I’m just noting that there is def. an industry-wide push going on to mix in Atmos. New albums—think—The Weeknd, Taylor Swift but also Brian Eno—but also quite a few older records being remixed for Atmos. I have a playlist of things I’ve liked here. On Apple/Tidal there are releases being upgraded to Atmos almost daily. It’s definitely a thing that it would be nice to see Spotify be a part of.

Anything requiring upfiring surrounds is not about to take off. I used the headphone version of Atmos, making sure I was doing everything right, fancy DAC and everything. What a congested mess.

Not that I haven't had a bit of fun with surtound music, as a novelty...
Albums in 5.1 surround

I have no insight on fancy formats...

Automatic translations would add a whole extra layer of weirdness. The test I was talking about just used alternate-language titles that the labels were already including in the metadata...

I def. understand the skepticism. I can’t speak to the AirPods Pro thing, but in my experience so far, Atmos/360RA-compatible speaker systems are actually a lot less complicated to set up than the 5.1 system I cobbled together when we moved into our house.

One reason is that these formats are natively compatible with the soundbars that the big box stores are pushing on home entertainment buyers. Those have come along way, have more (and better) speakers inside them (including upfiring ones), connect wirelessly and don’t require a separate receiver you have to stick somewhere. They’re really slick, work with a wider range of listening spaces and speaker setups (you can use dozens of speakers and don’t need to be tuned to Lamont Young’s Theatre of the Eternal Music for it to sound right).

Another is that you are seeing film/streaming/music seemingly moving toward this format together (the latter of which which never quite happened with 5.1 pre-streaming). Collectively I think Atmos/360RA have more potential for a cross-media market than 5.1 ever did.

I would also note that the new albums with immersive mixes—like, say, The Weeknd stuff—sound pretty incredible, with the discrete feel of 5.1 where you get separation but also a much more enveloping feel (likely because of the upfiring speakers act as a kind of “glue”). You can really tell the difference between a record well-mixed for Atmos and a transfer from a 5.1 or quad transfer from the 70s.

At any rate, that’s a long thread hijack. It’s just something that I’d like to see Spotify offer as my main streaming platform. But I get the sense that they are looking at younger markets and less invested in hardware and stuff like HD (which I actually don’t care about). You never know tho.

Thankfully the tiktok style feed has fucked off.

Not for me it hasn’t.

Is the tiktok style thing how it just starts playing suggestions as you scroll down? It's annoying the hell outta me.

Got an email today telling me they're sunsetting my (quite) old version of the desktop client in May, so now I'm going to have to use the shitty nu-Spotify if I want to use it at all.

Why? Just let me live in the good old days.

so glad I quit, some free version is still stuck on my phone but it refuses to play in any other mode than shuffle

garbage platform that will only get worse

meanwhile I am easily spending over $50 a month on Bandcamp, suck it you Rogan enablers

listening to Television Personalities And Don't the Kids Just Love It and this sucks so much, it's sourced from a not particularly good vinyl copy, audible surface noise and distortion at point

had this experience with Roger Miller's Words and Music this week. :(

i found a few inconsistencies in song titles from the CDs i remember having -- one in swapped song titles and one with an extra word thrown in. it's the kind of glitch i feel like it would be hard to get anyone's attention about so i just move on.

with the swapped song titles the issue could be with the CD i have not having the titles in the correct order but what is the correct order then? (roy montgomery scenes from the south island) the other one was def an error. (the song as i know it is "you're still beautiful" and spotify claims it's "you're still so beautiful" which is not how the lyrics in the song go whatsoever.) again what am i supposed to do about this?! so i put it here.