Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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...)

I don't know why we haven't done multiple windows. Probably just never seemed as high-priority as other things...

It would be so nice to have "playlist I'm listening to right now" and "artist discog I'm pondering for future listening" both visible at the same time, or in tabs I can jump between without losing my spot in either one. This has been at the top of my wish list for a while now:

Still hoping for multiple tabs/windows in the desktop app UI.

― WilliamC, Thursday, April 3, 2014 10:45 AM (1 year ago)

You can have multiple tabs/windows of the web UI open at once. Not the same thing, I realize, but better than nothing for some purposes...

the burger menu concept on ios is a headache. having to climb all the way back to the top just to do something like toggle offline mode drives me insane. (the fact that i even have to use offline mode also drives me insane but spotify support had no answers for that.)

Yeah it's pretty terrible. It's like you've driven a car into a dead-end alley and you have to brake, change the gear, look behind you, and reverse around a couple of corners just in order to get to the next place you want to go.

I mean, burger menus are fine if they're always present, or invokable with a simple gesture.

or always present. if spotify's burger menu were at least accessible from all screens, not just the top-level ones, it'd be heaps easier to work with.

really it should go back to tabs tbh.

ahh those graphs are brutal!

for a couple weeks everytime i pulled up the play.spotify.com web player it defaulted to a smoking popes album i'm pretty sure i never listened to in the first place, it was quite distressing as you can imagine

Spotify should deliver burgers

dis burger weekly

"Posted: September 24, 2015 at 5:59:02 PM
Yeah it's pretty terrible. It's like you've driven a car into a dead-end alley and you have to brake, change the gear, look behind you, and reverse around a couple of corners just in order to get to the next place you want to go."

Back on Spotify on Ios5 there was a persistent bottom bar with search, etc. very convenient

I spend way too much time in this thread on entitled complaining, so here's the running playlist of pleasant *actual* discoveries from it:

https://open.spotify.com/user/1239159458/playlist/2b8qsigIW5aigW6lTGjcoI

(this week's entry is Springtime Carnivore. this particular track I like, even though when it starts I keep expecting it to turn into Cathy Davey's "Clean and Neat" and am let down for a few seconds)

Are you guys talking about the Spotify Hipster Boyfriend app?

I love, love, love him. Never change him. He is a source of endless amusement and WTF-ery. Seriously, the idea of having an automated suggest function which acts like your own personal Hipster Boyfriend popping up in the middle of your listening to something to suggest something like "I see you're listening to (let's say New Order). Have you heard this band... They're really obscure... you might not have heard of them... called Joy Division?" He is *so* smarmy and irritating, I love him to bits.

I've followed him since he moved from sending me weekly emails to popping up while I was playing albums, and now he makes me a terrible-brilliant-awful hipster boyfriend mixtape every week. The mixture of so-obvious-it-hurts plus WTF plus every now and then he gets something so absolutely *right* (I'm actually shocked when he introduces me to something genuinely brilliant i hadn't heard before.) that redeems his entire existence - earlier this year he made me listen to a Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith thing which was a synth-prog concept album about Euclid's Axioms? And I was like SHB!!! YOU GET IT! YOU TOTALLY *GET* IT!!!

But then he'll turn around and be all "I see you're listening to tons of Kraftwerk and Cluster. Might I recommend a band... really obscure... you might not have heard of them? Called... Popol Vuh?" and I just laugh myself sick and want to pat him on the head and say "thanks for coming out, love". (Tho someone on Twitter said that it was actually a helpful call, because there used to be no Popol Vuh on Spotify at all, and actually he might just have been calling my attention to the fact that there was music of theirs at all, on Spotify now?)

Whoever invented Spotify Hipster Boyfriend, thank you. You have enriched my life in so many ways! Endless amusement!

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...)

― glenn mcdonald, Thursday, September 24, 2015 10:02 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And now Arstechnica fixed the headline (but not the URL) for http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/09/songwriter-tells-us-house-he-made-5679-from-178-million-spotify-streams/ and added this note at the bottom:

This article's headline originally stated that the payments in question were made by Spotify, when they were in fact made by Pandora.

I suspect that if they'd written about Toyota or Ford cheating on diesel emissions tests, the "correction" would be a little more involved.

Looks like Spotify Discovery has decided to give up on recommending me new music. This week it has recommended 5 songs that it already put on past playlists, and 6 other artists that it put other songs on by before.

Did you listen to them on the previous playlists? I've had a couple of duplicates but I figured I maybe skipped over them last time they came up.

Mine is much improved this week - a decent number of keepers.

carpenters
florence + the machine
barbara streisand
jack savoretti

in mine :(

http://i.imgur.com/pG8rCw1.png

Like, this message just shows all the time, every day. Does turning off the computer not count as restarting? I couldn't give a fuck what version I'm on - just let me go a day without this message please.

Neu! Sonic Youth Blur My Bloody Valentine in mine. But if they didn't call it 'discover' I would probably be ok with it, it's good.

Weird thing: I listen to a lot of rap on spotify, but there's never any rap in my discoveries.

I got "Girls Girls Girls" recently but that's it

i kinda love how if i played the Violent Femmes' 3 and Hallowed Ground discover weekly would be like, "hey...you ever heard Blister In The Sun?"

"Weird thing: I listen to a lot of rap on spotify, but there's never any rap in my discoveries."

weird indeed: I never listen to rap but there were like 6 rap songs on my list this week. wtf

one of you needs to discover rap, the other doesn't

point taken

lol

another article on Discover Weekly @ Spotify

TASTEMAKER
How Spotify’s Discover Weekly cracked human curation at internet scale
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-weekly-online-music-curation-interview

On, Discover Weekly

Spotify has built a taste profile for each user based on what they listen to. It assigns an affinity score to artists, which is the algorithm’s best guess of how central they are to your taste. It also looks at which genres you play the most to decide where you would be willing to explore new music.

The algorithms behind Discover Weekly finds users who have built playlists featuring the songs and artists you love. It then goes through songs that a number of your kindred spirits have added to playlists but you haven’t heard, knowing there is a good chance you might like them, too. Finally, it uses your taste profile to filter those findings by your areas of affinity and exploration. Because the playlist, that explicit act of curation, is both the source of the signal and the final output, the technique can achieve results far more interesting than run of the mill collaborative filtering. ......

In Discover Weekly, each time a user with similar taste playlists a certain song, it’s a vote that the song will sound good to you when paired with other tracks on that playlist.

Ajay Kalia, the product lead for Taste Profiles, says its crucial to keep humans in the loop. There is a camp that believes if you just have enough data, and smarter algorithms, a curation machine will emerge discovers new and innovative ways to predict your taste. That might be true when sorting data on weather, says Kalia, but not for something as emotional as music. "I think we'll always have to start with patterns that map to the way people actually relate to music."
It’s still humans who are doing the song selection and arranging, but instead of outside experts, it’s users like you and me. Generating a human-curated playlist for each of Spotify’s users would be a challenge of mammoth proportion. "We probably can’t hire enough editors to do that," says Ogle. So Spotify uses each of its users as one cog in a company-wide curatorial machine. "The answer was staring us in the face: playlists, since the beginning, have been more or less the basic currency of Spotify. Users have made more than 2 billion of them." In effect, Discover Weekly sidesteps the man versus machine debate and delivers the holy grail of music recommendation: human curation at scale.

also, there is a picture of Spotify's New York offices, is Glenn's desk in view?