Spotify - anyone heard of it?

love his pepsi logo

i got discover weekly for the first time last week and if a human being had put that playlist together and said "here are some songs i think you'd like that you haven't heard before!" i would have been profoundly offended tbh

i'm not gonna type all of them up but this is a good representation:

james brown - i feel good
blondie - heart of glass
rick springfield - jessie's girl
righteous bros - you've lost that lovin feelin
earth wind and fire - september
supremes - reflections
tom jones - delilah
omi - cheerleader (not the rmx version that i've listened to which makes this a lazy ass recommendation)
bananarama - cruel summer
chubby checker - the twist

FIRST of all i think all those were literally #1 songs? you think i need to "discover" these? don't insult me spotify, not after all the time we spend together.

second why are they almost all oldies (only two of my recs were from the last 30 years)? i realize i may be messing up my recommendations by listening to glenn miller and duke ellington for hours on end as my bg study music but i can't draw the line from that to bananarama.

i mean don't get me wrong these are all jamz of the highest order but i didn't need spotify to tell me that.

my playlist this week is an improvement in terms of newer stuff and stuff i haven't heard, but it still has macho man, love will keep us together and never gonna give you up on it so my final grade is

o_O o_O o_O three side-eyes out of four

yeah I think it wd be very nice if, say, it would use number of spotify plays total on a track as an argument against foisting ir on you. maybe even, the more youve listened to whatever is making it think you'll like an extremely popular song, the more likely it is to go, man, this guy is a serious grunge fan, so if he's not listening to 'smells like teen spirit' it's probably by choice.

It's been most interesting seeing how many monthly listeners some of my favorite artists have:

A Sunny Day in Glasgow: 38,000
Pinback: 133,000
Ariel Pink: 90,000
John Maus: 60,000
Nite Jewel: 31,000
Roman a Clef: 646

By contrast:

Drake: 14,000,000

I still wish there was a way to access the list that these numbers are stored in : )

Averaging 3 listens per listener and a $.007 royalty rate, this works out to:

ASDIG $798
Pinback $2,793
Apink $1,890
Maus $1,260
Nite J $651
RAC $14
Drake $294,000

More than I expected

do remember that's the amount that goes to the "rights holders" - there's a whole 'nother breakdown before we get to What's In Drake's Wallet

a nine month old condom, a receipt from tim hortons and a discover card

updated now; still trying to reverse-engineer what the hell keeps putting shit like HAERTS and such in here. my best guess is goldfrapp is responsible, but given that all I listen to from them is Tales of Us...

Wondering if it compensates for track lengths or if it's just the standard audioscrobbler 2 minutes = tick! algorithm. Listening to a 60 minute track represents just as much commitment to an artist as a 15 track album.

Some of our things are duration-sensitive, some are not. Most of our playlist-generation things also use constrained duration ranges, because sticking a 60:00 track into a multi-song playlist is usually worse than picking something shorter. For some of my genre-based lists I have specific exceptions to this, so 18:30 symphony movements are OK in classical, for instance...

LOL at that list above that starts w "I Feel Good"

well MY discover playlist updated, and while it's a TERRIFIC mix in terms of Other Songs By Acts You Like, And Big Hits By Acts Like Act You Like, the word "discover" feels downright sarcastic to describe it

Big Hits By Acts Like Acts You Like, rather

that's not totally fair, though. I count about 3 groups I haven't heard before, and maybe 5 or 6 big acts that I might not have gotten around to playing on Spotify yet. But one of those is "How Soon Is Now" by the Smiths.

I enjoy my Discover playlist. I finally listened to Magazine (like The Clash meets Joy Division!) and John Maus or whatever. Both artists I had heard of but never explored. Bonus points for throwing in Compulsion by Martin Gore, but with the two exceptions I mentioned above, none of the tracks or artists were Discoveries. It's a good start though.

i say this not to say "this sucks" - because i totally listen to this solid playlist. it's more that I would also LOVE a discover spotify playlist that avoiding picking songs and bands it should be transparent I've already discovered based on my listening history.

This will come...

cool!

I would love to see what hoary chestnuts are in mine, but it's doing that thing where you start the program and have to wait for 3-5 minutes of spinning animations before any of the panels populate with anything.

I know its been gone forever but getting rid of the starred feature is still almost enough to jump. I miss it every day. I try to use the plus sign in the same way but now don't have a one click way to add a whole album to listen to later without adding every track to my favorite tracks. I just don't get why that feature was removed, WHYYYYYYY.

the worst thing is that the Star list is still there but i can't make additions so it sits there and mocks me.

well i can add to it but not by just hitting a star so i,m not doing it.

glenn, feel free to cut and paste this to a higher up muckety muck if it's helpful:

I am a spotify power user and have the service running about 18 hours a day. Following repeated dissatisfaction with updated versions of Spotify, I downgraded to v.8.5 several months ago. It functions easier and the interface is far cleaner. Though I do miss some of the updated features, statistics and the ability to subscribe to artists, I have not been tempted to upgrade at any point.

yeah haven't added a single track to it since the feature was removed xp.

Re: starring, you can just drag the album cover over to the Starred playlist. Or any other playlist.

The new client has been dramatically improved since several months ago, so a) you could try it again, and b) if you aren't willing to try it again, you're kind of saying you don't care whether it's actually better now, which is totally your prerogative but kind of makes your feedback moot.

Still waiting for DW update. Not really expecting Roborec to be like the proverbial cool kid in high school back in the day, just want it to be basically in the right direction with a couple of new Topics For Further Research. Still, lol at the "I Feel Good" playlist.

xp I will likely retry an upgrade at some point to see what's improved; my point is that feature bloat and functionality wavering is scaring me off

Re: starring, you can just drag the album cover over to the Starred playlist. Or any other playlist.

The new client has been dramatically improved since several months ago, so a) you could try it again, and b) if you aren't willing to try it again, you're kind of saying you don't care whether it's actually better now, which is totally your prerogative but kind of makes your feedback moot.

― glenn mcdonald, Tuesday, September 22, 2015 9:33 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's ways around all of this of course (with a couple steps) but being able to star a track on the phone at a stop light or on my desktop without having to drag anything around was my favorite feature. idk whatever i should get over it probs but then i start messing around on apple music and see that little heart that I can click by the track and start to wondering...

I haven't gotten over it. Stars forever.

http://www.searchviews.com/images/sneetches.gif

people complaining itt will receive aaron neville's cotton jingle repeated 12 times in their discover playlist next week

Latest playlist looks okay. Mostly reasonably familiar, some novelties, one band I hate. I'll take it.

Lol at Sneetches.

i still love spotify! i probably won't leave it xp. DONT MESS WITH MY DW PLAYLIST OK

Have to say, in the 6(?) weeks of Discover Weekly, I have been led to at least six albums I love that I didn't know of before, including at least one band I had previously ignored due to their shitty name

spotify sent me spotifymail in Portuguese because I listen to some Brazilian music?

Legal.

does one need to upgrade to Spotify Premium in order to get this 'about' tab and the information about monthly listeners and stuff? I have Spotify Unlimited and I can't see it

xp don't get me wrong. i love that i can trick spotify into believing that i am a bilingual person with an interest in exercise. but it'd be nice if spotify knew that I am neither of those things. and if spotify could also interpret my dreams. so many sheaves of corn in there doing myriad things.

I also loved the star feature - adding something to my library isn't the same, and going through multiple steps to add something to the star playlist isn't nearly as convenient and quick, particularly if I'm distracted. I have no idea why that feature went away.

One feature I do like that Spotify added was the quick scrolling index on the right when you look up your albums/playlists/artists. I've built a big collection of saved music and it was a pain getting to the bottom of the list manually.

Things that are still on my wish list:

-Spotify automatically adds music from your iPhone to Spotify
-Local files can be integrated into your saved albums (right now I have to access all my personal music via saved playlists)
-playback history that's more substantive than just a short list of "recently played" albums - if I'm listening to an 8 hr playlist that someone put together I'd like to know where I left off when I come back to the app.

http://www.spotify-mixmates.com/

Kinda wish they'd just do this by checking out both yours and your mate's listening history. Like a mash-up of the intersection of both of your DW lists...

Things that are still on my wish list:

For me, multiple tabs/windows. If I'm browsing through a huge artist discography, click away from it to play something, and go back to the huge discog, I've got to scroll through the same mile of stuff (that can't be counted on to be in chronological order). Is it to prevent people from gaming the royalty system by playing multiple streams simultaneously? Seems like it would be pretty easy to write a safeguard into the app so that only one stream can play at a time.

^^^ yeah, this

Def

Glenn, is that anything that's ever come up in Spotifyville?

"For a song like 'All About That Bass', that I wrote, which had 178 million streams.. I mean $5,679? That's my share,"
"That's as big a song as a songwriter can have in their career and number one in 78 countries. But you're making $5,600 (£3,700).

http://www.nme.com/news/various-artists/88542

So there is a God after all.

I suspect, as with the referenced similar Aloe Blacc complaint, he's actually talking about Pandora, not Spotify. "All About That Bass" has 290m streams on Spotify, which would be worth about $290k in publishing royalties. Dunno what his deal is like, but if his publisher takes half and he splits the rest with Meghan, he'd get $70k+ just from Spotify.

Plus, if he gets any part of the performance royalties, from producing the song, those are 5x the publishing. (From Spotify. Pandora is different...)