Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I often will put a huge playlist on shuffle then scroll through the queue and bump up anything I'm particularly excited about to next up.

Hey hey hey you're listening to HITLER RADIO [sound effect of a sieg heil, stuka dive, air raid siren, and explosion] where we're playing ALL the Reich's favorite hits ALL DAY LOOOOOOONG

[Imagine Dragons - Radioactive starts playing] https://t.co/wExe0JTQ2Y

— the prince with a thousand enemies ♂️ (@jaketropolis) March 2, 2023

(It wasn't actually a playlist, it was just the automatic artist-radio for an "artist" that was some historical albums of WWII music...)

Das Führer Weekly

Finally, a change I can get behind: the new improved Add to Playlist.

Ooh, what's this?

update on discovery mode, which lets artists accept a lower royalty rate for an algorithmic push. joe says in the first month, listeners save songs 50% more often and follow an artist 37% more often when the mode is used

— Ashley Carman (@ashleyrcarman) March 8, 2023

excellent news for consumers

Sad lol. Maybe I'll actually try it, since Spotify royalties are effectively $0 anyway.

can you switch back once you get those listeners locked in?

I don't like or defend Discovery Mode, but yes, as an artist you can opt into and out of it.

Ooh, what's this?

Last night the app offered an alternative shuffle mode that I guess throws in suggested tracks as well, no thanks

There's an 'enhanced' button that does that. I use it on some of my genre playlists and it'll throw up some cool tracks I may not have heard.

So instead of one swipe it’s now multiple actions to ‘add a song to the liked playlist.’

Gotta get those app engagement numbers up?

pro: you can add a track to several playlists simultaneously (which comes in handy for me, I do a lot of that)

con (and it’s a big one): you can longer add duplicates to a playlist (this really fucks with my playlisting methods, because I do a lot of that)

It’s only one action to add to the liked playlist. Then once it’s in the liked playlist, or any playlist, then you can click again to add to or remove from others.

That’s if you use the plus, otherwise you can use the three dots and then add to playlist.

how many slurp juices to convert your heart into a plus

but please remember to never leave the house without your laptop if you’re thinking of adding duplicates, kids!

I just created a playlist in Spotify (for sharing / to duplicate one I made in the service I actually use), and was impressed at how easy it is... you can type directly in a dedicated search box to add songs, etc.

Used to be that in the list of songs in Release Radar or something I'd swipe left and it would have a green heart and the song is saved to my likes.

Now I swipe and it pops up with another menu asking me to add it to a playlist (or multiple) and I have to tap done to make that screen go away. There also isn't a visible heart on the list of songs in a mix so I don't know if I've already liked it or not.

This seems designed entirely to make you look at the full screen view of a song (where there's the plus sign) so you can get the full Spotify-becomes-TikTok experience. I'm not looking at my stupid phone when I listen to music, I'm walking or riding in a car or working on a computer.

The visible indicator should be back shortly, at least.

is there a way to look at longer song titles immediately?

so many things these days have such long titles and then you factor in bonus tracks/remixes with "extra info" that gets added to the title. so sometimes i won't know what i'm listening to and i want to see the song title because that's where the pertinent info is. i just want to see who the remixer was or who the featured guest vocalist is and it's at a point where that info is only in the song title. i look at my phone (or ipod, whatever i'm using atm) and it will sometimes take a full 15 or 20 seconds for the proper song information to display, as it's on a "scrolling marquee" for those longer titles. it's reached a point for some deluxe editions and singles with multiple remixes of the same song where i just give up and go look at the full info on discogs. it wouldn't be such a discrepancy if i could just click on song credits and have it all be there, but that info is notoriously incomplete on spotify.

holy hell, that post makes no sense. the crux is: i want more easily accessible and fully detailed credits, dammit.

one more sunday morning gripe—
the new "add to playlist" implementation has broken the ability to add offline or local files to playlists. as of now, i have to "like" the song, "add it to my library", go to the playlist i want to add it to, click the add songs button, and then browse to the local file. i used to be able to just click the three dots next to the song and "add to playlist." i know spotify doesn't give a fuck about offline files, but c'mon. it's objectively worse and a frustrating downgrade.

hmm, the ... method still works for me on iOS, at least.

yeah, sorry to come off like a jerk but it's doing it on both of my main devices and i use offline files a lot, so it's pure frustration. it seems like the ones that were already there on various playlists are grandfathered in. and it still works the way i outlined, just huh. it's doing it on both my ipod (ios) and smartphone (android) and seems to have started either with the new "add playlist" implementation or immediately after. as it stands now, when i hit the three dots ("song menu") the only option i have for offline files is "add to queue" (and it will play the track just fine if i choose that, so it knows those offline files are there). just... i can still do it technically. with a lot more unnecessary steps though.

was reminiscing with my partner about watching mtv as a kid in the 90s, watching the videos flow for hours in hope of your favorite video coming on

or listening to the radio at night with the cassette deck ready to record if that great new single came on

and now it's at my fingertips any time I want

unbelievable

I miss those days

Maybe the real treasure was the cassette recording we did along the way

kids today will never understand the sublime annoyance of having to not being able to edit out Casey Kasem's voice from the opening of "Safety Dance"

sure, guys.

another thing with this new version is that it takes ages to load (several minutes in some cases) - something I’ve seen people complain about through the years, but which had never happened to me before

yeah very long load times on mobile now

Yeah, I had some load-time issues, too, and they should get better shortly...

Once again sparing you all my Spotify doomsaying and confining it to Thread For Chatter About The Streaming Music Economy

Yeah, the app just opens into blackness for ages before finally getting its shit together.

wow the whole app has gone completely buggy over the past couple hours.

on iOS there's something called DJ where the queue button used to be and, as of now, it's an error generating button. the queue button on my android is now a generic "share" icon.

IT'S TALKING TO ME NOW?

okay. i'll stop using spotify jfc.

It only talks to you if you ask it to, dude.

It's always listening, though. Like a good friend

(It only listens if you ask it to, too...)

i pressed the button that i thought was the queue. it started talking.

everything's gone now and the queue is back to normal across the board. no "DJ" anyway. "add to playlist" has returned for local files on android only.

anyway=anywhere

Kind of interesting, from a business perspective, how they got snaked on HiFi audio (and still haven’t launched it).

I got the new mobile version with an update today. Haha - it's laughably shit. Huge videos on the home screen for 'new' playlists or albums I might like, that autoplay as you scroll down. And no way to turn them off as yet. Utter wank.

They're probably waiting to offer Joe Rogan in quadrophonic.

The mobile version is utter shit now, nearly unusable.

There are other options.

Spotify sent me an e-mail about this new release and I can't imagine what I've listened to that's even remotely similar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zcM9ziaNOg

I got the same email and wondered the same thing. I'm guessing these guys have a ton of promotional cash out there to push this to as many people as possible.