Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I'm no longer sure I know what "touchstone" means.

It's like a red pill but you absorb it through the skin

This may be just me, but lately whenever I randomly search for playlists based on a keyword, it's pretty much only giving me "official" Spotify playlists. It may give me one or two user-generated playlists, but that's it, which is very different from my past experiences. Is anyone else noticing this or is it just me?

I have really enjoyed finding interesting playlists then clicking the creator to see what else they have put together, seems like those days may be dwindling in Spotify at least.

noticed it too - also noticed yesterday when searching for a rainy day 70s playlist that there was... a rainy day 70s playlist MADE FOR ME :O

kinda cool

You can use my research tools to get unpersonalized playlist results, and lots of them...

https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=playlist&name=hyperpop

Hi Glenn,

I've noticed in recent weeks that your New Releases by Genre page seems to have significantly fewer items than in the past. Have you made changes to how this works?

We made some big changes back in April. There aren't fewer things, but the categorization is a lot less fuzzy now, so each genre is more accurate and each release appears in fewer genres. So if you've been following only specific genres, you might want to recalibrate and add a few more to catch things that previously might have drifted into different ones.

Good to know! It does indeed seem to be a bit more spread out now.

Really enjoying the slight lag on the desktop program so that when you go to delete a playlist, just as you click the menu suddenly readjusts itself and you end up downloading the playlist instead.

There should definitely be a law requiring pop-up menus to be built completely before display.

Hmm, I can't make that menu readjust, though. What's the exact shift you're seeing?

another odd thing I've noticed is that when I do song radio for things like techno tracks, the radio playlist comes up with a ton of one minute long tracks

Really enjoying the slight lag on the desktop program

Has become really sluggish for me on my M1 Mac in last few days too. Can't be an update as I'm still on an old version cause I don't have admin access on this work machine.

So this AI DJ thing just plays basically the same tracks each time you try it out? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity.

THey still keep messing around with elements of the design for no reason . Keep messing around with how long a queue you can have , changing number by one or 2. Seems to be a bit of a weird thing to do. Is there a reason, is having a lot on a queue on my computer affecting anybody else. Would have thought things would be more autonomous per computer .

The DJ isn't meant to repeat itself like that, not sure why it is for you...

i'm also getting the "very short songs" thing in my artist radio! listened to "only for tonight" by TERR and (nearly) every song after was like 1 or 2 minutes long. strange!

Yeah, I'm not a fan, especially since I'm specifically looking for songs that are more like 6 minutes long.

fuck this garbage company forever

“Spotify has already learned that there’s no money to be made with exclusive rights to superstar offerings. “After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks to little effect,” explains tech journalist David Pierce, “it seems to have largely given up on the idea that exclusive content is the path to riches.”
The more profitable move is to manipulate listeners—prodding them to choose music the platform can use without royalty payments. As far as I can tell, this is the single biggest advantage to AI music. It’s a cheap alternative.”

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/nobody-will-tell-you-the-ugly-reason

"well, mainstreaming a fascist podcast didn't work, guess we need to force-feed our user base all the royalty-free music we can dig up or create"

All they need to do is start a faux Pitchfork site that reviews their AI artists

We don't have any AI artists.

https://i.imgur.com/seT1zcd.jpg

If you search for "daylist" you now get things like this.

I'm not sure I particularly listen to more emotional and symphonic work on Wednesday mornings but I'll go with it. Quite enjoy Spotify's endless iterations on personalised generated playlists, none of which seem to stick except for DW and RR.

the AI DJ is creepy

none of which seem to stick except for DW and RR.

The thing about menu commands moving around after you open the menu should be fixed now, by the way.

It is, thank you!

The DJ insists on playing me stuff off something called the “front left” playlist and I wish it wouldn’t, they’re all awful.

AI DJ's voice is awful BUT I like the idea of having a curated playlist that bounces around a few different themes BUT when he said he was going to play some deep cuts I hadn't heard in a while, he played three things from the discover weekly playlist that I'd listened to not two hours beforehand, none of which I've ever knowingly played before on spotify more than once.

Playlists and algorithms are the new payola.

I'm not sure the DJ queue is getting your plays in realtime yet, so those may have been picked before you played them...

in which case the algorithm must be identical to the discover weekly one, or more likely it's just picking them from that playlist.

Yes, the latter is likely.

TIL there's a genre on spotify called "lowercase".

Oh it's ASMR ambient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowercase_(music)

Now I’m imagining Radu Malfatti jamming with mumbling cowboys

So they got rid of the little bell in the app that low key notifies you of new music??? What

I don't think anything intentional happened to the bell, and mine is still there and working...

Oh, if you're on Android there might be a test running where that What's New feed is in the sidebar you get when you tap your profile pic...

49min Discover Weekly this week! It won't last until Monday lunchtime.

Oh wow, yeah mine is brisk again as well, with just one track over 3 minutes

Oh, if you're on Android there might be a test running where that What's New feed is in the sidebar you get when you tap your profile pic...

Glenn, not sure what Spotify’s responsibility is as such but when all the music from the Tzadik label was recently added, it credited musician and label founder John Zorn with all of the compositions:

https://spotify.link/YU3BseIuMDb

And in a number of cases, it also credits Zorn as a performer where he is not (while also crediting the music writing to Zorn):

https://spotify.link/gPKPF7NuMDb

Does Spotify have a policy of reaching out to labels in instances where the metadata is all wrong? I get that Tzadik is a small label with limited resources, but a friend noted to me that you could probably enlist a superfan to correct all this for free.

Metadata is the label's responsibility, and technically their prerogative, but I suspect these are just oversights. I'll pass these cases along to the right Spotify team, and we'll see if we can get Tzadik to do a little cleanup.

"The heart is now a plus." True words.

so the checks on the right side indicate that a song has been added to a playlist, but do not indicate that it’s been downloaded or added to your library. the checks on top of playlists that appear after you click on the plus sign mean that the playlist has been added to your library. meanwhile, there’s still no way to add individual songs to your library without first adding them to a playlist

cool

its maddening. why are they so insistent on getting rid of the heart.

... and now it's back?

My heart will go on