Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Guys remind me is there still a way to see the total time of your playlists?

I see a tiny little figure in the top right of the playlist screen, above the switch for making "available offline"

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140223/22200926326/musicians-increasingly-realizing-that-streaming-services-are-actually-really-good-thing.shtml

Thanks for that article, interesting read. Sounds like the key is to lose a label that will suck most of the money before you see it (duh!) and get hugely popular in Scandinavia.

interesting read, sure, though i'm not sure two musicians writing pro-spotify articles means that musicians in general are "increasingly realizing" anything. it would have been just as easy to find two or three or twenty or thirty pro-spotify articles by musicians three or four years ago.

I think it will be interesting if streaming gets really popular in the US to see if the money actually starts rolling in for people.

it is really popular, it's just mostly those darn millenials on youtube

I think I've seen AT&T plugging their new download and streaming service Beats Music with TV ads. Subscriptions are $14.99/month for a family and $9.99 for an individual.

it's a service with a deal with at&t. it's $9.99 each per if you are not a customer of at&t. there's a thread

Annoyingly, just as I was getting into the surprisingly good Matt Berry albums, they've vanished from spotify

Glenn can explain what it means of course

http://blog.echonest.com/post/78749300941/the-echo-nest-joins-spotify

It may be a little while before I can actually explain anything beyond the fact that on your first day you get green headphones and a t-shirt, but yes, Spotify just bought The Echo Nest, where I work!

I didn't realize you work there! I love me some data mining.

I feel honored to have been a part of the Echo Nest experience since the beginning, and I wish you and your coworkers the best of luck as you embark on your incredible journey with Spotify!

If this could somehow lead to that insane genre map you produced becoming accessible as a Spotify app with all the relevant linking, well that'd be pretty much the best thing ever.

yep. fix it please.

The soundrop app (works with spotify or deezer) now has an Official 80s Underground/Indie room for all you old goths and noise rockers etc
http://open.soundrop.fm/s/80sunderground

Web version that uses youtube - http://play.soundrop.fm/s/XRp57NhZKZr7ZEGH

Onimo * others come play some of your faves!

http://f.cl.ly/items/2O0O1B452m2x0N3s0r0Q/ClouDrop%2013%20Mar%202014%2016%3A21%3A14.png

yes please

Grr. I promise I will try to get these fixed...

Maybe they are "fixed", and that Spotify is paid to push those artists?

No, that's not it.

I love how for so many artists who I want to hear an 80s pop song by I get some re-recorded 2000s version of it and can't find the original. namely The Jets's "Make it Real" or Benny Mardones "Into the Night"...

Jets "Make It Real": http://open.spotify.com/track/3sasIFIs1FUbB9gp03JUts
Benny Mardones "Into the Night": http://open.spotify.com/track/0rhyBUAgNXwdyvGVXSrLzc

These sound like the right versions. All I did was search on "jets make it real" or "benny mardones into the night", and these were the first results in both cases...

nope, it's a decent reproduction, but that is definitely not the original version of "Make It Real". This is the original, and you can tell it's different as she uses slightly different inflections in the chorus, plus the keyboards are slightly different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouOfSl2CFbY

that is the orig (1980) Mardones version tho, maybe I missed it several months ago or they added it in. when I last tried it was always a newer 2000s version.

Yeah, I buy that they're slightly different versions of that Jets song, but I think the one I linked is also from the original era, not a later re-recording. Album vs single mix, maybe? The actual Jets albums appear to just not be available on any of the commercial online services. Not iTunes, and not anything the Echo Nest tracks. Everybody only has comps.

possible. the guitar solo though sounds a bit like a modern reproduction, but I can't place the era.

mardones records a new version of 'into the night' every few years to mark the passage of the years, a real time demonstration of 'i keep getting older but they stay the same age'

hah yeah that too

that jets track is DEFINITELY a re-recording. Pretty much everything on K-Tel on Spotify, except for the occasional '60s indie thing, is a re-recording.

the original is available on a 20th century masters comp from Geffen, though. Helps to look at the label on these things.

the k-tel stuff apparently was recorded in 1998 - their wikipedia's pretty straightforward about it

fyi glenn i'd also avoid recommending tracks from goldenlane records and deadline music - all re-recording compilation pushers

it's funny, i went to great lengths to try and keep re-recordings out of my top 40 playlists, but every once and a while when the original disappears from the site they'll just link to some crap redux version.

like this shirelles reissue went away - http://open.spotify.com/album/1tF35RmMriESRkYvn4VrEZ

so now links to "baby it's you" from it feed to...this: http://open.spotify.com/album/7drJ2KUsPcmRcmcYv77FK2

lol apparently goldenlane and deadline and purple pyramid are all just names for cleopatra, the guys who bring you those "Tracii Guns and Mark Slaughter - Stairway To Heaven" comps

someone posted this on fb

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/t1/1896987_10151918266737245_976104548_n.jpg

rofl

I have 100% faith in Glenn to get that all fixed

Could be an experiment/glitch/weird data...on the whole I think Spotify recommendations are pretty good! Apart from the ones that tell you about artists you already listen to.

You should never have 100% faith in anything. But 95% faith would be heartening. Thanks!

can any UK-ilxors check Spotify to see if they have Debbie Friedman's miracles and wonders album? for some reason i can access her catalog when going thru old playlists and other ppl's direct spotify links, but not directly thru search function.

no, a search on her name here just gives 'Songs of the spirit', a 2-cd anthology.

Search is weird for some albums. Try searching for a song title and then click more info and view album details. If necessary, make a playlist for the album.

oh man, i just looked at the "related artists" for kesha and they include shitty mp3-only cover shit with titles like "cover pop," "tribute mega stars" and "rainbow mix" in between austin mahone, rihanna and katy perry.

never looked at the "related artists" to a big modern pop act before, i knew it could be a little clunky and repetitive when it came to more obscure stuff, but i didn't know they'd straight up point you towards karaoke-style covers.

that said the related artists for lesser-known acts are actually genuinely fascinating/useful!

totally - i just didn't realize how absurd whatever algorithm they use gets when karaoke-style shit was in play.

the top 5 "related artists" for tribute-makers Radio Waves are: Big Hits 2012, Don't Wake Me Up (literally just a single anonymous cover of Chris Brown's "Don't Wake Me Up"), Hit Makers 2012, Phat Tunes and Paris Hilton.

eagerly anticipating Hit Makers 2012's followup

I listen to Spotify on my MacBook at the office, and sometimes on my iPhone, but at home I mostly listen to it through my living room home theater system, which has a Squeezebox attached. Recently I was showing this system to my father, who is in the market for new TV and music gear, and now he's all about getting something that will let him use Spotify the same way.

What kind of equipment are people using for similar purposes? There's got to be something really simple I could set up for him, judging from the number of receivers and receiver-connectable devices that now support Spotify.

Wait does that Squeezebox still work?