Continuing with Spotify?

I think the Spotify fallout warrants its own thread

― west elm girls (Whiney G. Weingarten), Saturday, January 29, 2022 2:53 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Neil out, Joni out

obviously this pleases me greatly, but it's going to take a contemporary megastar to change minds.

Grimes' mother:

Feeling enormous pride that the artists who got this #Spotifydeleted train going are Canadian.@Neilyoung & @jonimitchell

There are sure to be more, and bigger. But it’s Canadians who led.

— Sandy Garossino (@Garossino) January 29, 2022

I no longer control it or I would in support of Neil https://t.co/hrD132gi8T

— David Crosby (@thedavidcrosby) January 29, 2022

nagl Barry

I recently heard a rumor about me and Spotify. I don’t know where it started, but it didn’t start with me or anyone who represents me.

— Barry Manilow (@barrymanilow) January 28, 2022

it's going to take a contemporary megastar to change minds.

Well, Neil was a step forward after 270 doctors and scientists...

Lol. Cardiacs quit a couple of days before Neil but I am not sure that anyone noticed.

Well, Neil was a step forward after 270 doctors and scientists...

― deep luminous trombone (Eazy), Friday, January 28, 2022 9:23 PM

yeah, which should have been the slam dunk from the get-go. and yet here we still are.

(insert generic angry outrage rant that basically sums up to)

man. this whole thing really sticks in my craw.

ugh, past my bedtime and i'm grouchy. sorry for the unnecessary attitude.

Spotify lost $4 billion in market value this week.

— scott budman (@scottbudman) January 28, 2022

I know it’s just anecdotal, but I know several people IRL who are canceling their Spotify subscriptions this week (and I have few enough IRL “contacts” that that number feels significant to me).

They paved Paradise, put up a Rogan Pod

No idea who this guy is but seeing lots of similar grim takes. And unlike Lloyd Cole, Bret's not afraid to play the 'wrong side of history' card

These artists have a right to remove content in protest. But make no mistake, their intent is to force Spotify to censor Joe Rogan so that you and I can no longer choose for ourselves whether to listen.

They’re on the wrong side of history. Truth persuades. It doesn’t coerce.

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) January 29, 2022

Joni jumping in gives me hope that more will follow.

Worth noting here, I think, that The Best Show and Kreative Kontrol have left:

pic.twitter.com/79BJTQe0b1

— The Best Show (@bestshow4life) January 27, 2022

I hope you get the connection... pic.twitter.com/XzT3NsCPc5

— Kreative Kontrol (@VishKreative) January 27, 2022

I suspect a lot of the young popular artists who could potentially make an impact here don't care about vaccines or public health and probably an alarming number of them totally agree with Rogan. OTOH artists have their own issues with Spotify and if a significant number of people drop it it may prompt a few more to leave, or they might at least perceive themselves as having new leverage.

If you’re impressed that Spotify lost $4bn this week, just wait until you see how much they lost in the three weeks prior to that. Shares peaked at €312 last year, they’re less than half that now. The model just isn’t as profitable as investors want it to be (see also: Netflix dropping 45% of its share value in a few months).

^^^

the spotify market drop this week may get a tiny further bump downward from the news but is in line with market trends. artists dropping one at a time isn't going to occasion more than a "we're listening" statement from the company; it would take an organized action to make this more than a PR hiccup for them. Five, ten, fifteen big artists individually pulling their catalogs won't make them say "ok, we'll eat the hundred million we gave Rogan." an organized effort of fifty or more artists might -- Future of Music Coalition is as close as we have to that and I'm not sure they want to spearhead something that might be framed as partisan

it would take an organized action to make this more than a PR hiccup for them

see also: literally every other consumer protest

TIL, Neil and Joni are both polio survivors

I do want to ditch Spotify. I'm in the middle of a 3-month trial of Apple Music but I hate their UI and search functions. I'll give Qobuz a shot with their free month. One frustrating thing is having to pay some third party to migrate playlists, and the migration options seem to have frustrating limits. I just discovered the 1500-track Anthology of Dub playlist this past week, and the Spotify ---> Qobuz migration tool has a limit of 1000 tracks per playlist.

I don’t have any specialty loyalty to Spotify but I have become pretty dependent on streaming. The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

i'm continuing with spotify

“Speciality loyalty” = morning brain

My spotify and hulu subscriptions are intertwined, so if I ditch spotify for another platform I lose (free) hulu. As soon as it becomes clear where the greatest number of people are migrating to, I'll follow. But for now I'm stuck.

and the Spotify ---> Qobuz migration tool has a limit of 1000 tracks per playlist.

split the 1500 tracks into two playlists of 750, migrate them both, then drag and drop the second playlist into the first playlist, right?

As I said on the other thread, between collaborative playlists, and the family plan, I'm not sure how I could readily disentangle myself from using this platform. If I had a single-user subscription, I may just hop over to Qobuz or Apple (mixed results with the free version of SongShift last night, migrating playlists over to my Qobuz trial, but not insurmountable).

xp - merging playlists: may or may not be possible once they're migrated; last night's brief experience gave me a fixed imported playlist that I could neither add to nor delete from.

oh, weird? i shouldn't talk - i've never heard of Qobuz until this morning - but i just figured any playlist could be edited, if you made it in the first place! kinda weird.

i really hate my opinion on spotify and the alternatives, so much that for once i'll stfu

is it easy to import spotify playlists to another plataform?

Xp - yeah, was odd. 37 of 40 tracks matched by SongShift, figured I could add the ones it couldn’t find manually on Qobuz but no: that imported playlist was read-only. The attempt to do the same with one of the ILX c20 classical playlists was hopeless - barely a 10% match.

If I pay actual money to some service to migrate my Bacharach list (738 tracks) and the Dub list and wind up with a 10% match rate, I will be hot under the collar.

The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

Rogan signed with Spotify in May 2020, and Apple launched podcast subscriptions over a year later. So AFIK they wouldn’t have been in the running when Rogan made his deal (in fact, it was deals like his which got Apple serious about building out exclusive podcasts of their own)… which may not alter your overall rationale

Do people have to be paid subscribers to hear Rogan on Spotify? I figured it was just to get people to the platform. Apple surely would have made a deal with Rogan to keep people using their platform exclusively, but probably didn’t need to as much as Spotify did.

Right, I don’t think that was part of their business plan at the time. Maybe they would’ve signed him in a different scenario, who knows (in which case Young would presumably be pulling his music from Apple)

Idk, I found a Steve Bannon podcast on Apple. Is it still okay to switch to Apple? Maybe I’ll go to YouTube where absolutely no white supremacists or QAnon nuts exist?

It's his reach and influence that makes the difference, the size of his audience.

I mean, Spotify pulled a bunch of archived episodes - with Gavin McInnes and others - so there was pressure from the beginning not to spoil the platform with his show. The issue then becomes whether giving disinformation on Covid is a deal-breaker for an episode of his that Spotify chooses to host.

I dislike Spotify for a few reasons, but yes switching to Apple or Amazon for political reasons (or even the sole reason of disseminating Covid misinformation) does not make a lot of sense. Some people earlier were suggesting that the fact Spotify directly pays Rogan, rather than simply making money off ads a la YouTube, is worse but idk if I find that super convincing.

That said afaict, Qobuz and Tidal don't have the "we murder workers" problem that Apple and Amazon do nor the "paying Joe Rogan $$$" problem, so it's a little disingenuous to frame this as just "Spotify or Apple? what's the diff"

Maybe so. I’ve never heard of Qobuz until about an hour ago. Admittedly I’ve never tried Tidal.

It was initially challenging to get past the "Tidal? lol" reaction, I'll admit

The thing that is bumming me out is that moving to a service that would be equivalent would just be moving to another corporation… I mean, it’s not like Rogan is not in Apple because they are principled. They just lost out o a deal.

otm. also, to the extent that this list of top 100 podcasts on apple podcast is accurate, the current #10 podcast in the united states (on apple podcast) is the Joe Rogan Experience Review, a podcast where some enormous fucking loser spends 45 minutes dissecting the latest joe rogan podcast

#15 is the ben shapiro show.

ben shapiro is worse than joe rogan (but not as popular). he is a hitler youth

the matt walsh show at #35, what a wonderful person he is

i survey the landscape of american podcasts and i want them all to disintegrate my own brain

let me check google/youtube real quick, see if there is any joe rogan-esque content on there

I moved to Tidal from Spotify about 3 months ago after being on Spotify since it originally launched and for the most part I've been content with it. There are a few things that I miss from Spotify, but nothing that would compel me to go back.

The increased emphasis on podcasts combined with the Helsing.ai thing are what pushed me to pull the plug. I'm also trying to shift more of my spending/listening to Bandcamp, but I'm too hooked on streaming at this point to abandon it completely.

I mean, Tidal is now majority-owned by a gross tech bro, if you're looking for a "political" reason to avoid that too

gross how?

Dorsey? I'm half joking (though he's not my type of fellow). He hasn't paid Rogan $100m, that's for sure. If I were a heavy Spotify user, and not invested in Amazon or Apple, I'd prob switch to Tidal - the UI is v similar

The arguments that other platforms also feature reprehensible content are valid but imho the Spotify/Rogan issue is different because of the extent to which Spotify has made Rogan the face of their brand. Rogans show is one of the most popular media properties out there and Spotify's play for him was explicitly about identifying themselves w/him in a bid to lure his audience, which imho puts it in another category than just "I can find people saying worse stuff on other platforms too". Ben Shapiro is a monster & is platformed by Apple Podcasts, but at least they are not repeatedly giving him big public bearhugs the way Spotify does w/Rogan, giving him the PR boost that his views are something Spotify considers normal & mainstream.

That’s a good way of putting it.

I'm running an unscientific experiment with an EP I'm releasing, in terms of the algorithmic and editorial playlists. My theory is that you should always pitch the shortest track on the release, especially if it's under 3 min, even if it's the weirdest track on the record.

In an effort to overcome choice paralysis with the music I already know (ignoring the incomparably vaster problem of the music that I don't) I've set up a spreadsheet with all the albums I've ever owned or saved to Spotify or otherwise loved, and a random number generator. If I were feeling fancy I could stick it online with some kind of api nonsense to try and open the album directly, this works fine enough though.

This has been helpful for me:

https://www.nativenoise.co.za/spotify/album-selector/

^essentially lets you scroll through your saved albums randomly

Update: it didn't work, lol. I guess the next experiment is to always include a track that's both 2 minutes long AND accessible.

OK what fresh hell is this?

What in the name of Steve Albini is this underneath the lyrics box for Nirvana's Lithium? Kurt would have loved the Instagram inspo slogan memeification of his work 😌 pic.twitter.com/Zm3D9p0znD

— Dan Hancox (@danhancox) September 21, 2022

A few of my fave current artists have recorded Spotify Singles recently, which is irritating to me as a non-subscriber (since I can’t easily hear them) – but it’s an effective gambit by Big Green.

xpost creepy

More track-matching weirdness. The Super Deluxe box set is available for 'pre-saving' on Spotify and as well as the already released new stereo mix of Taxman it purports to have the mono versions of Here There and Everywhere, And Your Bird Can Sing and Eleanor Rigby already playable. But start playing them and it's actually the old stereo mixes.

https://i.imgur.com/TLdQsJS.png

OK what fresh hell is this?

Ugh had to resubscribe to Spotify cause freaking Qobuz is missing some stuff that Spotify has. For example, there are gaps in what is available in the USA in the Ethiopiqes series. And just including their impossible search engine. I’ll still keep Qobuz for the booklet notes.

I finally switched to Tidal, the sound (if you subscribe) is FAR superior, it's more artist friendly, and it has a quieter aesthetic...the catalog is more sparse. I was skeptical at first, but I'm getting the hang of it and it's working for me now.

So many things I liked about Spotify - especially the playlists, however there are programs for moving your playlists...that's what held me back before.

Also what held me back is that the social aspect isn't quite there yet.

Aesthetically and economically, it is just clearly FOR MUSIC PEOPLE.

I have to say that the cool thing about switching platforms is that the algorithms are different, so if you hit "artist radio", you get different stuff than you do with Spotify. I was using those radios a lot to find new stuff.

yeah, the artist radio thing is surprisingly good on Tidal. On Spotify I feel like I was always getting the same tracks over and over again, Tidal's feels more diverse. On the other hand I feel like Tidal's equivalent to "Discover Weekly" isn't as good.

I'd love for these algorithms to be more parametrizable though, like an artist radio for which you can specify how broad or narrow you want it to be, or specify that you only want stuff from 2022, or exclude certain genres or labels or whatever.

at one point Glenn shared a link to a page he had that let's you create a Spotify radio playlist that doesn't factor in your own listening history, this resulted in a somewhat more diverse set of suggestions. Unfortunately, I no longer know how to access this.

spotify shuffle is definitely algorithmic and not truly random, which is kind of annoying!

it's been pretty buggy lately in browser, shuffling back to tracks played only minutes earlier

That unpersonalized radio thing is here: https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=radio

Or use that same set of tools to find an artist, and there's an "artist radio" link at the bottom of the "fans also like" sidebar...

Not sure how I missed this until now but why is the option to order playlists by artist missing? That field must have been pulled in 2021? I can't imagine the reason why. Glenn? What's going on there?

It's merged with title sort so click that three times or there's a dropdown menu on the right also.

No sorting in the browser version tho :(

it's been pretty buggy lately in browser, shuffling back to tracks played only minutes earlier

― nashwan, Friday, December 2, 2022 7:52 AM

i've never had a problem with this until the past few days. on my end it's like it gets stuck on one or two songs and i either have to restart the shuffle or manually go into the queue and skip to the "next" song.

that's on ios and android mobile btw

Does anyone actually use Deezer (especially in the U.S.)? Is it much more popular outside of the U.S.?

^I've always wondered this too... it always shows up in those lists of options, but who uses it(?)

Hey - does Spotify notify you when there's a new release by an artist you "Follow"? Neither of the two services I use will consistently do that, and it's really annoying... I'll get random, occasional alerts of releases by related artists (who I don't necessarily care about); and then I'll see that an artist I "Subscribe" to has something new, and I wasn't alerted.

lol I'll let someone answer that...I know it exists, because I've had people tell me something showed up on their Release Radar or whatever, but I've literally never used that feature (or the Home activity in general).

only people I know who use(d?) Deezer are French

Yes, Spotify has both a weekly personalized playlist of new releases (Release Radar) and a new-release notification feed that updates as releases by artists you follow are released.

A few things are maybe making me contemplate dropping Spotify for the first time:

1) The lack of surround/Dolby Atmos/360Reality Audio support – this is something I really love to explore and the labels are making an effort to support. Spotify should as well.

2) Song titles in Japanese – in fairness, if you know the song title in English you can type it in w the artist name and it will come up. It’s just annoying to not be able to see it in English and know what song is what. Other platforms have these in English if it knows I’m an English speaker. Spotify should too.

3) The garbage artist payments – I get that the economics of streaming are messed up right now but I’m not sure why Spotify has to be dead last among the major platforms and it bothers me.

I’m not quite ready to jump ship just yet – but I am starting to feel these things more strongly. And while it would be annoying to start fresh on Apple Music or Tidal or whatever, my experience trying Amazon Music HD over the last month makes me think it won’t be that difficult.

On #3, all the major music-streaming services have basically the same deal: 70% of revenue goes to royalties, which all of them distribute by the same stream-share method. So none of them actually set a per-stream rate, it's the result of dividing the total amount of royalties paid in a month by the total number of streams. And this is actually done not only per-country, but per-product within each country (premium, family, duo, student, ad-supported...), so the effective per stream rates vary widely. But if you pay $10 to Apple or Spotify, both services turn around and pay $7 out in royalties.

Spotify has a lower global average than Apple because Apple doesn't have an ad-supported tier and doesn't operate in some of the countries where the local subscription rates are lower in US-dollar terms. But neither of those things affect you.

#2 is interesting. We actually tested that at Spotify a year or two ago (showing translated titles in your device's language if they're available) and it produced such a dramatic negative reaction that we ended the test early. It turns out that lots of people have their phones set to English for UI purposes, even if they listen to music in other languages, and showing translated titles made it impossible for people to find or recognize songs that they actually knew (and saw discussed everywhere else) by their original titles. So this problem really needs a different UI that would allow you to see translations in addition to original titles, rather than in place of them. But that's harder. One day...

Thanks, Glenn. Yeah, I was wondering about automatic translations and whether that would actually mess things up further. But I’m assuming it uses an auto translation in the background anyway if searches for the English titles turn up the Japanese ones, right? I wonder if this could be solved with an option in settings to enable (perhaps with a disclaimer that some translations may vary). I imagine the other (more expensive) way to do it is to just manually cross reference Japanese titles with any titles translated into English (which is what I presume Amazon did for records like the Yellow Magic Orchestra S/T record).

Thanks for the clarification on streaming payments.

Any thoughts on #1? I know a lot of the weird uncle hifi types have been clamoring for Spotify to make good on its HD commitment. But I’d be more interested in the surround stuff, especially since the immersive thing is beginning to take off on other streaming platforms and the music industry as a whole.

The YMO record has official English versions of the song titles, so it's kind of funny Spotify doesn't have those on the "US Version" issue of the record I'm seeing there. I'm guessing the record company could switch the titles to the English versions? There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason (to me as a user) on which language a Japanese release uses for song titles, when there are English versions of them. Automatic translation in their absence isn't something I'd thought of and would lead to some really odd titles.

But I think it would be nice if Spotify "knew" the romanization of the characters so it could display a readable version of the title, or at least find it in searches I can type.

In a weird uncle hifi moment, I did a trial of Apple Music to sample the Atmos etc... I didn't even find it worth the UI clutter.

sources on "beginning to take off"? :)

Deezer's pretty big in Europe and I think may have even pre-dated Spotify in France. They also aggregate streaming radio stations.

Well, said the weird uncle, you need speakers that are Dolby Atmos capable to hear the difference. I have a Sony HT-A7000 soundbar for my TV and rears that are all Atmos-capable. The easiest way to describe the difference between 5.1 and Atmos is that Atmos speakers have upward firing speakers creating a sense of vertical as well as horizontal movement.

As for “beginning to take off,” I’m just noting that there is def. an industry-wide push going on to mix in Atmos. New albums—think—The Weeknd, Taylor Swift but also Brian Eno—but also quite a few older records being remixed for Atmos. I have a playlist of things I’ve liked here. On Apple/Tidal there are releases being upgraded to Atmos almost daily. It’s definitely a thing that it would be nice to see Spotify be a part of.

Anything requiring upfiring surrounds is not about to take off. I used the headphone version of Atmos, making sure I was doing everything right, fancy DAC and everything. What a congested mess.

Not that I haven't had a bit of fun with surtound music, as a novelty...
Albums in 5.1 surround

I have no insight on fancy formats...

Automatic translations would add a whole extra layer of weirdness. The test I was talking about just used alternate-language titles that the labels were already including in the metadata...

I def. understand the skepticism. I can’t speak to the AirPods Pro thing, but in my experience so far, Atmos/360RA-compatible speaker systems are actually a lot less complicated to set up than the 5.1 system I cobbled together when we moved into our house.

One reason is that these formats are natively compatible with the soundbars that the big box stores are pushing on home entertainment buyers. Those have come along way, have more (and better) speakers inside them (including upfiring ones), connect wirelessly and don’t require a separate receiver you have to stick somewhere. They’re really slick, work with a wider range of listening spaces and speaker setups (you can use dozens of speakers and don’t need to be tuned to Lamont Young’s Theatre of the Eternal Music for it to sound right).

Another is that you are seeing film/streaming/music seemingly moving toward this format together (the latter of which which never quite happened with 5.1 pre-streaming). Collectively I think Atmos/360RA have more potential for a cross-media market than 5.1 ever did.

I would also note that the new albums with immersive mixes—like, say, The Weeknd stuff—sound pretty incredible, with the discrete feel of 5.1 where you get separation but also a much more enveloping feel (likely because of the upfiring speakers act as a kind of “glue”). You can really tell the difference between a record well-mixed for Atmos and a transfer from a 5.1 or quad transfer from the 70s.

At any rate, that’s a long thread hijack. It’s just something that I’d like to see Spotify offer as my main streaming platform. But I get the sense that they are looking at younger markets and less invested in hardware and stuff like HD (which I actually don’t care about). You never know tho.

Thankfully the tiktok style feed has fucked off.

Not for me it hasn’t.

Is the tiktok style thing how it just starts playing suggestions as you scroll down? It's annoying the hell outta me.

Got an email today telling me they're sunsetting my (quite) old version of the desktop client in May, so now I'm going to have to use the shitty nu-Spotify if I want to use it at all.

Why? Just let me live in the good old days.

so glad I quit, some free version is still stuck on my phone but it refuses to play in any other mode than shuffle

garbage platform that will only get worse

meanwhile I am easily spending over $50 a month on Bandcamp, suck it you Rogan enablers

listening to Television Personalities And Don't the Kids Just Love It and this sucks so much, it's sourced from a not particularly good vinyl copy, audible surface noise and distortion at point

had this experience with Roger Miller's Words and Music this week. :(

i found a few inconsistencies in song titles from the CDs i remember having -- one in swapped song titles and one with an extra word thrown in. it's the kind of glitch i feel like it would be hard to get anyone's attention about so i just move on.

with the swapped song titles the issue could be with the CD i have not having the titles in the correct order but what is the correct order then? (roy montgomery scenes from the south island) the other one was def an error. (the song as i know it is "you're still beautiful" and spotify claims it's "you're still so beautiful" which is not how the lyrics in the song go whatsoever.) again what am i supposed to do about this?! so i put it here.

Pretty sure all those issues will be down to the distributor that provided the audio/metadata