Spotify - anyone heard of it?

maybe you were/are caught in an A/B test

arrrr this new version is driving me nuts

it's so crazy that you can't just drag songs around in a playlist to reorder them. the tracks move under your finger, but nothing happens when you let go. instead you have to tap the three dots, then "edit", then reorder, then "save"

doubtless this has been complained about here before, but it's just kind of mind boggling

on the other hand, what glenn does, or part of what glenn does, eg the 'radio' feature that plays similar tracks based on what you were just listening to, is just an incredible achievement. i have found so much great stuff this way. it should be like, somehow preserved or made into a public utility, or put into the library of congress. a way of navigating the essentially limitless catalogue of recorded music with zero effort required on the user's part. it even feels like there is some effort put into varying tempos, varying deep cuts with popular tracks, but that may be a figment of my imagination

I found a similar feeling from the more limited resources of my ATRAC walkman which I returend to listening to on losing my phone a couple of weeks ago. That there is an algorithm that will sort music in a way that seems like tehre is somebody consciously djing still surprises me. I think that is about 20 years old so technology has probably improved no end. Still not worked out how it sorts things which seems to be right across genre and is presumably all AI there, the tracks on that were entered with my labeling which presumably means that tags were even less easily sorted.
Wonder what human input you would have on a system like spotify, is anybody sorting like to like in general to help guide algorithm at all. Or is it all based on some form of recognition of sample of track that I'd like to know more about.
Seems to be so much more than pure luck anyway. ^ wonder what selection process is and order of tracks played in etc etc.

Different Spotify features work different ways, and even I'm not always sure which bits of my work factor into which ones at any given moment.

But many of the things on everynoise.com are my attempts to give products of collective listening back to the world in some form. E.g. this recent addition is sort of an unpersonalized (and unrandomized) version of artist radio:

https://everynoise.com/canonicalpath.cgi

it's so crazy that you can't just drag songs around in a playlist to reorder them. the tracks move under your finger, but nothing happens when you let go. instead you have to tap the three dots, then "edit", then reorder, then "save"

You mean on mobile, right? Because you can definitely drag songs around on desktop. (Meanwhile, I thought it was impossible to do on mobile, so I'm glad to know there is a way, even if it's clunky.)

On the new desktop app there is no way to “go back” (like going back to a previous webpage) to a previous album.

On quick first viewing, that Canonical Path thing is pretty impressive. Thanks, Glenn!

You mean on mobile, right?

Right.

https://everynoise.com/canonicalpath.cgi

holy shit

Quite interesting. Generates quickly anyway. Not had a chance to actually listen to a playlist yet but interesting for suggestions at least.
I did try entering a few different artist names and saw that when artist's names appeared it was with the same song title. Does it stay that way until they're played or something or would it just play the same song by the artist when yhey came up.
I thought most interesting results were from artist's who spanned more than one genre. That generates a bunch of artist's for each genre listed. I saw that with MC5 and Louis Prima. Unfortunately not so much with Gun Club who didn't seem to have any roots, blues,jazz, country listed which are constituent parts of the sound I think.
I would mix across genre if I was creating a playlist anyway. But this does look great. Didn't see how long a playlist went on for saw it was over an hour, possibly 2.
I guess the existing continued playlist function if that is still present is likely to remain inside of a genre or 2. May be based on listeners history so May reflect that diversity.
I thought the search for Frank Hutchison yielded some interesting results too since I'd been meaning to look up other contemporaries of his who weredoing something similar.
So far can see its good for suggestions so May investigate it further with other entries.
Thanks for sharing.

Meat Puppets came up 3 or 4 times with Backwater, Birthday party a similar amount with Mr Clarinet , Swans with the same song too. I have multiple lps by all 3 of those that are all pretty interesting so hoping that any time a band turned up they wouldn't only be playing the same song each time.

JUst checked another bunch of artists as initial point and yeah do keep coming across teh same track by a few different bands. Which is a shame cos I would hope it was dynamic. Also haven't tried the same band as starting point twice so not sure if it would change each time.
& if it does change over time is there an element of feedback to things that would suggest what does and doesn't work for teh listener and therefore a level of customisation . Or is it just what it is and you have a playlist that's handy and will pass the time etc.

Just would definitely prefer it if the songs by the artists changed each time one created a playlist. These do have larger worthwhile catalogues. & sound that changed over time so songs from one era would fit a flow a lot better than others, which is also true of individual songs.

It chooses the most popular on Spotify track for each artist.

so you only get one track per band. Would it be possible to make things more flexible and choose from a top 5 or something.
The walkman random seems to have a core group it returns to every so often and plays a different track from the few that are in the player. I think it may have some default bands that it will mix to per artist to some extent.
That's just my experience with a player i have enjoyed listening to . I thought you had far more of a database of music you can access. But its up to you or whoever wrote the program.

compact version of the new library view available in settings - but where have the albums gone? am i missing something? i hardly ever used them so personally not too bothered but i think some here might be.

Fucking ‘create new folder’ does nothing, no folders for you.

As the Canonical Path says at the bottom, it's just one song per artist. It's really an artist explorer in the form of playlists. That is, like a path, it gets you places, but when you find yourself somewhere interesting, go off the path and poke around...

It's brilliant - thank you. Artist radio is fine but, yeah, too personalised to past listens rather than discovery (I never want to hear Nico's These Days again unless I actually pick it!).

This has already thrown up a new-to-me favourite artist,Tia Blake, as well as just making for some surprisingly good overall playlist listens (after doing a quick weed of overfamiliar tracks.

The one-song-an-artist thing will probably spoil the latter use case in time - I get that that's not really the point of it, but even an option to instead play 2nd-most-popular track (or 3rd,4th,5th etc) would be nice.

yeah worth checking out to see what it turns up.

Canonical path save as playlist not working in chrome, 'ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT'. It works in firefox.

I wonder if you could find an artist's most popular track among fans or superfans. e.g. autechre's most popular is 'bike' which is early years, radio friendly, included on many compilations back in the day, not at all representative of what they've been up to for the last twenty years.

It did occur to me that any algorithm that goes by single most popular track by artist automatically enhances that status. Or at least if it sets that track up to play. Presumably only significant in tandem with popularity of program.
But still one of those observer effects that which is observed like.

On the new desktop app there is no way to “go back” (like going back to a previous webpage) to a previous album.

Um, there's 2 arrows (< and >) at the top left of the currently playing pane that let you do just that

ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT usually means you have a Chrome extension that's keeping the page from loading.

As for wanting a playlist with different songs by the same artists, that seems like a common desire not limited to these particular playlists, so I made an experimental thing. If you copy any playlist's link into this:

https://everynoise.com/playlistprofile.cgi

then you can scroll down to the bottom and find the "make a new playlist with the same artists, but different songs" link. This will try to make you a new list with the next song down each artist's popularity list. On a long playlist that's a lot of API calls, so it may be slow or flaky, but it does seem to basically work. Which means now I kinda want to use it on everything.

OMG this is amazing

Is there a way to *limit* the size of these playlists? I'm going to speak in metaphors, which I'm sure isn't particularly helpful, but something with a higher concentrated essence of the original source track but less diluted across, say, 250 tracks?

I guess I'm thinking a, say, Labradford playlist, only 20 tracks long but hyper-focused on the original sound would be less unwieldy?

Question for curators of large playlists - is there any way to "insert" a song in a particular spot? I've got playlists with thousands of songs, and if I want to make a new addition, say, number 4 on the playlist of 4000, there doesn't seem to be any way to do this other than adding it to the bottom of the list and then dragging it up for a good 1-2 minutes. There's got to be a better way!

sorry, power user feature, only 1% will use it, not worthwhile, NEXT

“Same artist but different song” link looks amazing, ty

In the Spotify desktop app, which is the only way any serious playlist editing should be done, you can drag a song over to a playlist on the sidebar and hover there for a second, and that playlist will appear on the right so you can keep dragging into a specific spot. Or you can select a track wherever, Copy it, go to your target playlist, select the track that you want this one to appear after, and Paste.

I do have alternate versions of this Canonical Path idea that are based on individual songs, or albums, but the datasets are more unwieldy than the artist-based ones for multiple reasons.

Glenn, the copy/paste works perfectly - thanks!

“4050kced” ft. Sextile - crazy to fake a song with such a small band but it did get the scammer in my new release playlist.

milo on that note, i just got a new release notification for "de la soul and uk projects"- https://open.spotify.com/album/3dFn9TqBVYkVr2FYutmqR1?si=BRNbGyUaRIuFU6gUS3wRCw&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A3dFn9TqBVYkVr2FYutmqR1

it's nothing whatsoever to do with de la.

So now there's a 'Use Compact Library layout' setting which will give you the old playlists view cool cool.

I have an update version waiting to load to my computer. Hadn't really thought about it but this morning I wondered if it was likely to have messed up any further.
Hadn't let it install cos I've been listening through a queue when around the computer. & that queue has been being added to and reordered etc.

I just accidentally hit Enhanced Shuffle and it kind of freaked me out a bit.

that same artist different song thing is very cool!

Stupid new interface: further shittery

Still won't create new folders, and now when attempting to move playlists around it commits suicide and blanks the entire playlist window, making everything unavailable.
https://i.ibb.co/n7fwRSm/Untitled.png]

God I hate this update.

the desktop update is unfathomably bad. i didnt like the old UI either but this went backwards about 500 steps from that.

It's ok I'm sure they'll find something worse to do shortly. Rapid action setting of firing things at the wall to see what sticks like.
It's only been like no time since they made the last design brain fart.so I'm sure they'll do it again soon.

Listening to an ambient playlist and it's weird to see all these artists listed who have several hundred thousand monthly listeners and zero presence anywhere online except Spotify.

wasn't there a big exposé that a lot of those artists are either AIs or employed by spotify to churn out stuff to populate those playlists so they don't have to pay artist royalties?

No. They're probably mostly pseudonyms for musicians who do other non-background music, but they're neither AI nor employed by Spotify.

ambient is a surprisingly popular genre

combined spotify streams for tracks on Eno's Apollo album abt 300 million

My impression is that a lot of people use Spotify almost exclusively as background music for work or sleep, so it's not too surprising that ambient and "lo fi beats to study to" are big genres.
Of all the music I listen to, my end if year summary often places video game soundtracks and fan heater noise loops in my most listened

wasn't there a story from the height of grunge's popularity that a number of the artists involved in the Seattle scene were also working in Muzak which was also Seattle based.

2023: The Year Ambient Broke

floated, big bag of floatation

Glenn, is there any way to filter/search a playlist for grayed-out songs? A search operator maybe? Looking to periodically check large playlists for grays to see if there's an alternate version of the song, etc.