Actually, just tested that last question by generating a 'Create Similar Playlist' from a playlist of great songs from otherwise mediocre albums, and got a playlist of almost entirely mediocre songs.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 14 July 2017 06:53 (six years ago) link
oh that rating songs thing is addictive as hell
― in twelve parts (lamonti), Friday, 14 July 2017 07:35 (six years ago) link
RIYL is basically why i scan the genre threads so hard
― Chocolate-covered gummy bears? Not ruling those lil' guys out. (ulysses),
I don't have spotify but I had hopes this might have been RHYL music, the woman in greggs gets a lot of her records there
― saer, Friday, 14 July 2017 08:44 (six years ago) link
We do a wide variety of track-based and artist-based recommendations. It's basically a tradeoff: the more you aggregate, the less precise your data becomes but the more accurate. Discover Weekly is very track-centric, but has artist-level filtering to get mostly artists you don't know. Daily Mix and Release Radar are very artist-centric, but then also have very particular track filtering and ordering rules. "Related Artists" and most of the other stuff on the Discover page are artist-centric. "Create Similar Playlist" is actually track-based, but track- and artist-based results are often very similar unless you intentionally try to make them different.
I've done some experiments where I pick two fairly different songs by a single artist and try to find the music that is most distinctively popular among just fans of each song, but mostly what I find is that listening patterns don't actually break that way. Most people who listen to electric Dylan also listen to acoustic Dylan. Most people who listen to Pat Benatar or Cyndi Lauper's post-pop work also listen to their popular records. Most people still listening to early Ulver records are also listening to the later Ulver records.
So you think you're listening to only the "good" songs from bad albums, but in fact most people who like those songs probably actually like the rest of those albums. "Good" is, statistically speaking, your own solipsism showing.
― glenn mcdonald, Friday, 14 July 2017 17:07 (six years ago) link
Your Top Artist: Markus Guentner - Express Yourself
Your Top TrackSchool Of Fish - Pete Namlook
Then it basically goes on to say I listen to nothing but death metal when BBQing, which is... not entirely untrue.
― beard papa, Friday, 14 July 2017 23:20 (six years ago) link
Cheers, Glenn, that makes sense.
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Saturday, 15 July 2017 00:20 (six years ago) link
yeah great stuff glenn!
― niels, Saturday, 15 July 2017 17:32 (six years ago) link
Anyone else have Spotify launching automatically on start up even tho you've set it not to?
And I've seen the spinner so much more lately - can take minutes to access playlists (only after auto-launch I think).
― nashwan, Wednesday, 19 July 2017 12:14 (six years ago) link
yep, this has been happening on my work laptop for the last week or so. strangely, I have another Windows laptop with Spotify installed at home that does not have this issue.
― fffv, Wednesday, 19 July 2017 14:50 (six years ago) link
That spinner goes on and on and on
― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, 19 July 2017 23:42 (six years ago) link
The Spots! The Spots!
― Under Heaviside Manners (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, 20 July 2017 00:05 (six years ago) link
My top genre is Fourth World. I don't know what that is?
― kraudive, Thursday, 20 July 2017 19:33 (six years ago) link
lol there's a whole thread for it :pfourth world music
― Mordy, Thursday, 20 July 2017 19:47 (six years ago) link
Ok thanks for that. Not sure I'm much wiser though.
― kraudive, Thursday, 20 July 2017 20:28 (six years ago) link
I thought it may have been my listening to a lot of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Klara Lewis and Alice Coltrane.
― kraudive, Thursday, 20 July 2017 20:40 (six years ago) link
is there sponsored content on Release Radar?
― niels, Friday, 21 July 2017 08:12 (six years ago) link
No. Personally, I think Release Radar might be a pretty good place for promoted tracks if they were relevant and labeled. By it's nature it's already inherently a sampler rather than a playlist you just start and leave on expecting a focused listening experience (unless you only listen to one thing), and we have a pretty decent idea of bands you might like (or might already know outside of your Spotify listening) that we're not currently including in your Release Radar but could.
― glenn mcdonald, Friday, 21 July 2017 14:11 (six years ago) link
Yeah, I wouldn't mind as long as it was relevant and labeled. It's such a useful playlist!
Is the list "front loaded" so the most relevant new music is at the top or is it more of a random sampler?
― niels, Friday, 21 July 2017 14:31 (six years ago) link
Seems front loaded to me - clearly based on artists I've made a point to follow or I can say I've listened to at least once in the last few months. But I guess that criteria isn't enough to make a fully new playlist every single week. Often the bottom 1/3 of my Release Radar playlist is tracks by artists who were also on the playlist the week before, but now they've moved down.
― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Friday, 21 July 2017 18:51 (six years ago) link
Release Radar is pretty strictly ordered: first artists you Follow, then artists you don't Follow but have played a bunch (in descending order of how much), and then potentially some Discover-Weekly-style suggestions if there aren't enough artists from the first two categories with new releases. And this pattern then repeats for releases from the previous week or two.
― glenn mcdonald, Friday, 21 July 2017 18:53 (six years ago) link
Just noticed that. Happy to receive a weekly email, I feel like they haven't been sent in awhile.
― calstars, Friday, 21 July 2017 21:18 (six years ago) link
rely pretty heavily on Release Radar ever since they stopped notifications so I'm happy with minimal messing
― Choco Blavatsky (seandalai), Friday, 21 July 2017 22:48 (six years ago) link
is there a way to browse labels in Spotify?
― niels, Monday, 24 July 2017 08:43 (six years ago) link
Label:name in search e.g label:Warp
― Dan Worsley, Monday, 24 July 2017 08:50 (six years ago) link
c:\run autoexec.bat
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, 24 July 2017 09:01 (six years ago) link
nice, thanks!
― niels, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:08 (six years ago) link
If the label is two or more words put the search term in quotation marks otherwise you'll get lots of unconnected crap.
― Dan Worsley, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:13 (six years ago) link
I suppose it's been discussed already but the thread is so huge...So, I've noticed lately that the spotify app on my iphone takes much more space than it's supposed to (even when removing all the "downloaded" stuff).After checking online, it appears the issue is well known but the only way to really fix it is to erase the app and dl it again (indeed it reduces the space to a fraction of what it was before, like 10%).the problem is that it then "grows" again quickly, even without downloading anything...is erasing the app regularly the only way to keep it under control ? seems very primitive !
― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:16 (six years ago) link
xp roger that
just did a label:rhino search and man they have a nice catalogue
would be nice if it was more incorporated, also for browsing compilation series...
― niels, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:30 (six years ago) link
re:size if you've an android phone I think you can just manually erase the spotify cache through explorer (way I did it: connect your phone via usb then scan for large folders using Treesize)
― niels, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:32 (six years ago) link
I've got some album only playlists. Is there anyway to collapse them so they only display the album names rather than listing 400+ songs it lists the 35 albums?
― Dan Worsley, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:37 (six years ago) link
xpost thanks but unfortunately I have an iphone... no way to empty the cache... other than to delete the app altogether each time apparently !
― AlXTC from Paris, Monday, 24 July 2017 09:46 (six years ago) link
Same issue here, just deleted and re installed yesterday.
― calstars, Monday, 24 July 2017 11:21 (six years ago) link
I think the old trick of attempting to rent a movie (on iTunes Store) that is larger than the amount of space you have left on your device still works to free up room from space hoggers like Spotify. You can do it multiple times in a row to free up more space. Just be careful because after a few attempts they switch up the rental dialogue on you, apparently to trick you into letting the rental fully go through
― Dan I., Monday, 24 July 2017 12:06 (six years ago) link
People online saying it doesn't work anymore, but it do, I think
― Dan I., Monday, 24 July 2017 12:09 (six years ago) link
such an idiosyncratic Apple thing to not allow users/apps access to cache cleaning
― niels, Monday, 24 July 2017 12:20 (six years ago) link
(I know Spotify and every other app could/should just include it in their programming but since they don't it would be nice to be able to use 3rd party apps for this purpose)
― niels, Monday, 24 July 2017 12:21 (six years ago) link
Google play music on iOS has an option to clear the cache of temporarily stored music. Why not Spotify?
― calstars, Monday, 24 July 2017 12:56 (six years ago) link
I usually complain about issues with Spotify functionality, but there is one semi-recent change that I'm truly glad about. In the past, I could only load files for offline playlists onto the Android app if my phone was unlocked and the screen was on. This was a major pain because Android does not provide a straightforward way to stop the phone from locking after 10 minutes of non-use, so I would have to monitor it while it was loading files, which could take hours. On newer versions of the app, it loads just fine while the phone is locked, and I am very grateful for this.
― Moodles, Monday, 24 July 2017 13:45 (six years ago) link
another thing that is so annoying with spotify is that most of the times it takes sooo long to connect when you open it, whether I'm outside on 4g our inside on wifi...they could definitely use some rework on their program.
― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, 25 July 2017 08:23 (six years ago) link
Related: takes long to start + navigate playlist tree even when the phone is in flight mode (eg when on a plane wanting to listen to a downloaded playlist). I don't know why of course, but it almost seems like it is trying to connect to Spotify server in this case as well, only falling back on the last stored playlist tree when connection obviously fails.
― anatol_merklich, Tuesday, 25 July 2017 09:30 (six years ago) link
Spotify helps me know what opinions I should have on the issues of the day.
#resistance
― _Rudipherous_, Thursday, 27 July 2017 02:31 (six years ago) link
more on the space issue : I'm not sure but it seems like deleting the app makes it angry !initially, it took like 1G instead of the 100M (without anything downloaded).now after only a couple days after deleting/reloading the app, it's up to 2G !
― AlXTC from Paris, Thursday, 27 July 2017 08:38 (six years ago) link
how come alexa can understand voice commands when i ask it to play music on spotify but siri can't
― Mordy, Thursday, 27 July 2017 16:59 (six years ago) link
DW much better of late until tonight when I got to the last three tracks of this week's playlist - and two of them were John Cage's In A Landscape! But - this has a happy ending - one of them is the one I know, the other was some crazy prepared harp version. Which is great. Thanks, Spotify. Thotify.
― Michael Jones, Friday, 28 July 2017 20:51 (six years ago) link
hey Glenn, could you have one of your algorithms do a 150 most important female albums/singles list?
― niels, Saturday, 29 July 2017 10:03 (six years ago) link
i imagine glenn clapping his hands twice and the little bits of code all perking up to attention
"now listen up!"
― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Saturday, 29 July 2017 10:06 (six years ago) link
haha, that's also how I see it
this is kinda interesting btwhttps://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywgeek/why-spotify-lowered-the-volume-of-songs-and-ended-hegemonic-loudness
― niels, Sunday, 30 July 2017 09:55 (six years ago) link
Artist gender (or even apparent non-binary vocal gender) is one of those things we don't really have in data yet, so even if I replace "important" with "popular" or "central" or something else computable, I can't currently produce a gender-filtered list in any automated way...
― glenn mcdonald, Monday, 31 July 2017 14:03 (six years ago) link
(But -- don't tell the robots -- here's a personal list I've been making of a certain kind of thing from just this year: https://open.spotify.com/user/glennpmcdonald/playlist/1CmsHI9rh0ImWu2iQyObiA)
― glenn mcdonald, Monday, 31 July 2017 14:06 (six years ago) link