Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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

The other day I was listening to Low, and when the album ended the default algorithm suggestions started playing, and while it was nothing I would have necessarily put on myself, I was impressed it was all stuff I was happy to hear: Palace Brothers, Smog, Dirty Three, Codeine, Papa M, etc. But a few minutes ago my wife shouted at the robot to play "ska," and it delivered a weird Spotify playlist that was I assume at least loosely based on my own listening habits (so a bunch of legit Jamaican stuff as well as reggae/ska adjacent stuff like the English Beat, Clash, Bad Brains, Specials) but also a bunch of veeeeeeery loosely reggae adjacent stuff I've literally never played (No Doubt, Sublime) and third wave+ ska stuff that is not remotely to my preference (Reel Big Fish, Bosstones). Wonder what the algorithm was thinking, choosing that stuff even though there are hours and hours of better options that I've actively "liked" or downloaded.

It’s the mostly popular stuff labeled ska?

Yeah - if the "similar to Low" stuff wasn't based on your listening habits, why would you expect the ska to be?

I’m impressed by how the algorithm has a good sense of flow, i.e. a bunch of quiet ones then a loud one to break the mood, or vice versa, and so on and so on

I don’t really care about whether it’s a tick or a heart, but it was good having the heart in the right hand column in playlists on mobile, so you could see what you’ve liked already

xpost I suppose the difference was that the Low related stuff, while nothing I might have played myself, was stuff I liked and enjoyed, definitely capturing/continuing the mood, whereas the "ska" playlist was packed with stuff I literally never want to hear. So, one generated playlist made me want to keep listening and add stuff to my likes or downloads, the other made me turn it off. Some of the tracks, like Bad Brains, were clearly because I'd just been listening to Bad Brains (not the first group that comes to mind when you think ska), so if they know what I'm listening to and what I like, I'd expect a generated playlist to be more hits than misses, like the Low one, and not half big misses, like the ska one.

But Low is band you like and Ska is a genre that contains stuff you don't seem to like

But yeah, if I ask for a ska playlist it mostly gives me 80s hardcore stuff so there must be some taste factor involved

Genres have the canonical Spotify playlist and then the "made for you" version. I'm not sure which one you get by default if you use voice control.

Actually I'm having trouble finding the canonical ones now so maybe they are all more specific than a general genre like ska

If you got Ska Mix (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EIga94c2zaOqu), that one, like all the "Mix" ones with that same graphic treatment, has a pool of potential tracks picked by machine learning from what listeners put in playlists with "ska" in the title, and then is algorithmically personalized to try to approach your general taste and include some things you already like. This approach is not designed for purism.

There's also https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7WJ4yDmRK8R (and a few others), which has a pool of tracks picked by a human editor, and is then personalized. That approach produces a lot less non-ska, but might also have less stuff you already know. It doesn't look like there's an official straight hand-programmed Ska list without personalization, which is too bad.

And then https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2aKMOs9FxzuCX6kdylLX94 (and the other flavors linked in the description) is the genre-system version with no personalization. These sets are meant to be the most internally coherent of them. The tracks and sequence for each are picked algorithmically, but based on human genre-guidance and oversight.

This is fascinating

Glenn can you say more about “based on human genre-guidance”?

Every genre in the Spotify genre system (which is what I'm mapping on everynoise.com) gets there by a human deciding a) to include it, b) what to call it in this namespace, and c) what core artists define and demonstrate what it means. Algorithms can pick up from there and do interesting further work, but there are always humans checking their extrapolations and overriding them (or tweaking the inputs further) when needed. None of it is unsupervised.

Still getting sub-2-hr Discover Weeklys, and the Daily Mixes frequently seem to be going that way too. It’s quite odd.

Though I guess 2 hours is still an average of 4 minutes per track, which is not abnormally short.

I've had a couple of other recent Spotify experiences that were a lot more spot-on. The other day I was listening to a Bauhaus album, and when it ended I started getting all sorts of other cool stuff I enjoyed. New Order, Birthday Party, Cramps, The Sound (most not "liked" by me previously, afaict). Today I put on "Pretty Hate Machine" and got another good run. Pixies, Garbage, Sonic Youth, Tool ... I should see what it spits out if I just ask it to play "goth" or "industrial."

https://www.thefader.com/2023/10/25/report-spotify-to-demonetize-lowest-streaming-tracks

Spotify is planning to roll out major changes to its royalty model, Music Business Worldwide and Billboard report. Per those publications, the company will execute this plan in the first financial quarter of 2024 in an effort to “combat three drains on the royalty pool — all of which are currently stopping money from getting to working artists.”

These drains, apparently, are low-streaming tracks, “fraudulent activity” on the platform, and non-music “noise” audio that, in the current model, is placed on par with bona fide songs. (As Stereogum notes, the company’s definitions of “fraud” and “noise” are as yet unclear.) Spotify’s solutions, according to MBW, are as follows:

1. Introducing a threshold of minimum annual streams before a track starts generating royalties on Spotify – in a move expected to de-monetize a portion of tracks that previously absorbed 0.5% of the service’s royalty pool;

2. Financially penalizing distributors of music – labels included – when fraudulent activity is detected on tracks that they’ve uploaded to Spotify; and

3. Introducing a minimum length of play-time that each non-music ’noise’ track must reach in order to generate royalties.

(As Stereogum notes, the company’s definitions of “fraud” and “noise” are as yet unclear.)

non-music 'noise'

noise=fraud, got it

thanks, spotify!

i'm being flippant obvs, but it feels like a move down the line is going to be determining which music is accessible enough to be on the platform. too dissonant? spotify's not for your band, fraud... er, i mean friend.

I for one am shocked, just shocked

Well #2 & #3 at least seem to make sense? Fighting fraudulent activity (which I assume means all those bogus tracks using the name of famous artists) sounds good; it also seems that 5-second (or whatever) tracks of noise that may be gaming the system shouldn't be generating royalties

they should get rid of all the bad music too

Both desktop and app seem very glitchy recently. Slow to start, sometimes can't find playlists for 5 minutes after startup, taking forever to respond when you click play, showing previous weeks of Release Radar until you've gone out of and then back into the playlist a dozen times, etc etc.

I was having that problem, especially on my phone. I deleted the app, restarted the phone, then reinstalled the app and it's been working better.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/05/swedish-criminal-gangs-using-fake-spotify-streams-to-launder-money

Need a Breaking Bad reboot where Jesse tries to launder meth money by jumpstarting Skinny Pete’s piano career.