Spotify - anyone heard of it?

ha it was i guess a bit! but the main way people used it was via the timeline drilldown, which was utterly user controlled. very little scope for label control and "curation".

glenn: chicken/egg? maybe users would follow friends if there was an actual reason to? i.e. why can't i comment on a song i can see a friend of mine just listened to? why can't i send a song to them inside the app? why do i have jamie oliver in my recommended users? nike run club?

i fully cop to being biased by my own preference for discovery coming via trusted people in my life or trusted personalities but i don't think i'm alone in this - at all - and it just confounds me that spotify doesn't provide these sorts of avenues. when spotify hired a bunch of radio people last year i assumed there was a recognition that music needs the sort of personal touch that radio can provide and that we'd see something like a better integrated beats 1 but it seems like all those people were just hired to make.. playlists? i mean, they're great playlists! (not to mention the best-in-class algorithmic stuff :)) but they're just playlists.

i didn't like the videos. on the "i'm with the banned" playlist they were redundant (and started with a trailer??) and on both playlists they took up too much screen real estate on mobile.

And of course it's true in a sense that we (Spotify) want control over how things are presented, because that's basically what we do. We're trying to bring more music to listeners and more fans to artists. We're more likely to use our own playlists to do this than random user-made playlists because, circularly, we control our expectations for how those playlists behave. We know that our editors are updating our lists regularly, and responsively, and responsibly. Somebody else's playlist? Who knows?

But at the same time, we have Discover Weekly and Daily Mix and Release Radar and Related Artists and lots of other things that are driven by people's listening, individually or collectively. We control them in the sense that we decide how often they update, and by what exact math, but if you listen to self-released black metal, you're going to get more self-released black metal from us. We don't have any incentive to push Drake or Ed Sheeran on anybody who doesn't want to know about those songs...

right i get that. what i am saying is that i would listen to more music, and become fans of more artists, if i was recommended them by actual people (maura; pete tong; ned raggett) rather than by the browse page or by my weekly playlists. in order for that to happen, the social features in spotify would need the sort of thought that instagram and snapchat put into stories and filters and timelines. what i am pondering - and this isn't really a conspiracy theory, more just a business model question i guess - is to what extent labels are comfortable with spotify being user-driven in an individualized, personal, editorial way, beyond the anonymized mass of data needed to drive playlist algorithms. the evidence so far is: not very

For what it's worth, I don't think anything that has happened with "social" features in Spotify has anything to do with Spotify or labels being uncomfortable. Nobody in the music "industry" loses if your friend tells you about a song.

it always felt like cleaning up to me

well there are issues with UGC sitting alongside your editorial. during the recent UK election there were official live streams on youtube from CNN, iTV etc, with live chat running side-by-side in the browser. without exception the live chats were chockablock with swears, escort service spam, etc

or, if you allowed rich editorial user playlists, and promoted them "fairly" in browse, i.e. v popular playlists at the top, what's to stop a sharply written, frequently updated playlist called "worst pop of 2017" taking deadly aim at the big pushes of the week from labels?

or just on a really simple level, i could send a friend a track and say "AWFUL!!!!!" and maybe everyone else who follows me would see that too?

it's not easy to do. but imo it would be great (for me) if spotify confronted these challenges here and did make the app more user-centric and more social

I want to discover which songs are bad

lol

what prevents money from flipping the "worst pop of 2017" playlist curator? I trust the semi secret algorithms more than I trust strangers. My friends and I SMS playlists and tracks with comments to each other all of the time. That is all of the social stuff that I want. I don't want all of the problems of reddit added to spotify. Things are pretty good. Fix bugs and support hardware, imo.

what prevents "worst pop 2017" is the fact that by definition it eliminates most of its audience

also I'm not sure what you mean by "sharply written" in the context of a playlist, but given the hostility of basically every editorial outlet (spotify qualifies as one now) to even mildly critical writing, and the indifference to "sharply written" vs. "incoherently mean" or "predictably zingy," those also prevent it

My friends and I SMS playlists and tracks with comments to each other all of the time.

I used to be able to do that in Spotify, but for some reason they decided that if you didn't have a Facebook account you wouldn't be able to.

well, mildly critical writing on anyone who is not the industry cycle's current designated target of critical writing

xp you can't copy a link without facebook?

(asking because I don't know how to test this myself, and I am genuinely curious)

You can copy a link without fb.

Didn't explain myself very well. You used to be able to send and receive tracks, playlists etc direct to other users from within Spotify now they need to have a Twitter, fb etc account.

I see. I guess I never liked the in-app messaging very much. I'd rather have fewer messaging interfaces to check, so I am fine with sending links via those. I suppose the value was that you could have a spotify tier of friendship, i.e. a list of people you only cared to share your spotify username with. Now you'd have to share an email address at least.

Just got email confirmation thingy

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-playlisting-fake-artists-so-why-are-all-these-fake-artists-on-its-playlists/

That is interesting. But it seems to be happening only in the "yoga moods" kind of music that one would see as $10 CDs in check out lines named after different biomes. It doesn't seem like the kind of music that requires large investment from actually good labels, and I guess I don't really care if Spotify's practices discourage those kinds of outfits from existing.

https://surveys.spotify.com/affinity

http://www.vulture.com/2017/07/streaming-music-cheat-codes.html

This is somehow both surreal and inevitable.

Good article.
I can forgive and navigate around the "20th C. Schizoid Man" stuff, but the official Spotify playlists being stuffed with artists who don't exist outside the service itself seems particularly anti-working musician, which kind of sucks

http://musically.com/2017/07/11/spotify-fake-artists-traced-back-swedish-producers/

isn't the fake artist thing basically just the musical equivalent of netflix and other video streaming services offering their original content? I'm having a hard time being outraged here

Netflix doesn't automatically play Netflix content, you have to navigate to it and select it yourself. Also, own content is clearly indicated.

The problem is not so much that Spotify commissions filler, but that it hides its origins and feeds it to listerers by stealth to reduce payout to real artists.

On a different note I A/B'd Spotify extreme against a 256 MP3 and the latter won. Just more crisp, even with the Spotify EQ on. Not sure why I never did that before.

more crisp you say

Netflix certainly puts its own content on prominent display on every interface

netflix clearly identifies netflix original content because it attracts users to the service. What spotify does is just add bland filler and hope nobody notices, which is very different. So I guess my comparison upthread is probably not so apt.

(now I'm imagining Netflix inserting random cheaply made episodes of Friends or Planet Earth or whatever within current seasons of those shows and just assuming nobody will notice)

I like the idea that AI will provide these fake filler songs in the future.

(now I'm imagining Netflix inserting random cheaply made episodes of Friends or Planet Earth or whatever within current seasons of those shows and just assuming nobody will notice)

― silverfish, Tuesday, July 11, 2017 8:10 PM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With C-actors, vaguely familiar looking sets etc. Now I want to see this!

Srsly the Netflix comparison isn't helpful in any way.

I also don't see how this is substantially different than library music, which people love and even collect

actually, what this reminds me most of is The Sims 2 -- a lot of their Simlish tracks were recorded by actual pop artists, for the hype, but at least a couple of them were recordings by "fake artists," I guess we're calling them. the funny thing is now they've developed actual fanbases for their one song that isn't even in any real language, although it's hard to tell how much of that is astroturfed (fake bios/photos/"follow-up tracks" that are other artists' mislabeled work), and then whether that was EA astroturfing or just someone trolling

I wish that Spotify wasn't paying money to anyone for the white noise track we stream to my son's bedroom every night. The spotify software is infinitely more important to that endeavor than the recording we use.

If this stuff is bland and unidentifiable, why are people so upset about who records it in the first place? I'm more upset about Spotify removing useful functionality and apps.

Really enjoying the playlist that this thing generates: https://surveys.spotify.com/affinity

👍

isn't it just a "daily mix"? some faves with some recs?

No? Presumably they leverage the Likert scaling to fine tune the output in a more sensitive manner.

Also I'm assuming that it doesn't just produce the 'you've got great taste' playlist but also feeds into your entire individual recommendation profile, so has some effect on discover weekly, release radar, etc.

In any case the resulting playlist is a lot better than the daily mix, for me so far

http://spotify.me/

I CAN'T STOP RATING SONGS HELP

I know! I spent a couple of hours doing it last night, and it was so addictive I had a hard time getting myself to go to bed. Something about the near-immediate feedback of having the playlist update itself after every batch of ratings.

on the one hand this is a useful feature; on the other hand I am clearly not the intended audience because I use Spotify for reviewing albums, so I'll get a bunch of what I normally listen to and then Harry Styles

a lot of my assessments were fairly spot on but it listed my lifetime top album as neil young, harvest moon, which i've only streamed a handful from there, if ever. not sure how they computed that

If this stuff is bland and unidentifiable, why are people so upset about who records it in the first place?

Another problem, due to the setup that Spotify works as two big pools, premium and free, is click farms that play their own music 24/7.

Spotify could fix that by directly linking subscription fees and plays by account (ie, your money, minus Spotify's cut, goes to the artists you play), but apparently that's too much admin.