Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Sorry - that was an xpost, I was answering Groovpanda's question.

To make amends for listening to too many 30-second bursts of songs in my DW archive thus throwing my DW into a rut, I've taken the step of leaving Spotify running on silent overnight with a long playlist of newish stuff by forkslcovetofu. I wish my life hadn't turned out like this.

Just come across this, which seems like it's right up my alley

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-05-02/five-ways-to-make-your-discover-weekly-playlists-even-more-personalized/

On the other hand, now I'm more confused:

Listening to a song once without replaying or “hearting” won’t affect your Discover Weekly selections.

I guess, glenn, this means in terms of working out what your taste is, and doesn't apply to the issue of whether a song will reappear in your DW or not

and this:

If you’re totally obsessed with a new-to-you track, add it to your own personally curated playlists. This lets us know the song is more than just a momentary obsession, and we’ll be sure to serve up songs in the same vein.

Which suggests that adding it to a playlist does act as a signal that you like it, though maybe it only works if you listen to the track as well. Anyway, I think I'm going to try and weed out that DW archive of mine a little more without breaking the 30-second rule!

I've taken the step of leaving Spotify running on silent overnight

maybe it knows if it's on silent and ignores all such plays...

DON'T TORTURE ME

I forgot to mention that one of the sections I quoted from in that Spotify listicle was titled 'Don’t Overthink It'

Can't you just select them all and drag and drop them all over to a new playlist at once?

Thanks for this - had no idea you could drag tracks on the desktop app. Worked a dream

didn’t know that either, thanking you!

now I can start saving my Release Radars, very cool.

Those tips for DW are all good things to do to influence your Spotify personalization in general. And the one about using Private Sessions when you're playing things you don't want us to think of as part of your tastes, that one does affect DW in the way it says. The others have a more indirect relationship to how things actually work. Adding a song to one of your playlists, for example, doesn't directly affect your DW in itself, but songs you PLAY from your own playlists get a higher weight in our calculation of your taste than things you play from Spotify editorial playlists or other peoples'...

is there anything i can do to stop my DW from being 50% repeats? do i just need to listen to a ton of new music or something?

Well, it's not supposed to be repeats. DM me your Spotify username and I'll pass it along to the right team...

ty glenn!

Glenn, I have observed that if I Follow an artist and then I click through the Artists page to them, I will see all songs from them from Liked Albums or in Liked Songs, but not songs in other personal playlists. Assuming this is by design, but might be nice to see others. In fact it would be nice to have some cross-section into to my bespoke playlists as well.

Seems like it used to tell me when I created a playlist but now I can’t find it.

― Together Again Or (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, May 1, 2020 1:57 PM (one week ago)

If there's one thing I've learned going through my old DWs, it's that there are lot of singer-songwriters whose names start with J that I never want suggested to me again. Get lost all you Jeffs, Johns, Joes and Jacks.

Ha!

This double J artist song managed to survive my DW purge:
https://open.spotify.com/track/4ZaAk3UJ0asITuGS7JvXPB?si=wwJJYXOJSzq1RqQaZG_tgQ

are any of them Jeff "Guitar" Elliot?

Glenn, any idea what happened here?!?

https://i.ibb.co/XxcvKWY/Untitled.png

(The recommended tracks all being a few seconds long, identified with strings of random characters, and all with random stolen cover art labelled with #hiddeninspotifyDVD, and which seem mighty odd suggestions for a perfectly pleasant pastorally ambient album)

Is there a way to export a playlist to a text file? (i.e. a list of the tracks that are in the playlist)

The methods that Google brings up don't seem to work anymore

The csv export function on http://joellehman.com/playlist/ doesn't seem to work any more, but it still displays a tab demited text version of the playlist on the screen that you can then paste into either a spreadsheet or a text editor.

Cheers, that worked

I use https://www.tunemymusic.com/ to export playlists to text it's excellent

Oh, that looks great.

Those #H1DDENinSpotifyDVD tracks are hilarious. Some weird 1D-related promotional stunt from 2014, which you're getting because your playlist is probably titled "hidden" and you either have <=5 songs or the songs aren't popular enough to have recs. If you hit Refresh a couple times you'll probably get something more relevant...

Ah, right, thanks, the album has the word HIDDEN in the title.

lately I've been unable to skip around in a track I'm playing or alter the volume on the desktop app, although I can do the volume with the scroll wheel. I have no idea how this happened. I have to open the app up on my phone to skip ahead in a track

This sucks: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263927/joe-rogan-spotify-experience-exclusive-content-episodes-youtube

Don’t platform the guy that platforms alt-right shitheads.

and ppl say spotify doesn't pay artists. deal must be putting ~50mil on rogan

spotify has trained an algorithm to send cease and desist letters to fraternity brothers just doing a bit o' speculatin' on youtube while high

xp egg on my face, 100mil+

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/spotify-strikes-exclusive-podcast-deal-with-joe-rogan-11589913814

On Curtis Mayfield's Curtis Live! (US Release), the track "We Are The People Who Are Darker Than Blue - Live @ The Bitter End, NYC" is from an entirely different concert recorded I would estimate, 15-20 years in the future of the rest of that album.

Also stop putting the metadata into the track titles.

Tangentially related to putting metadata into the track titles: one thing Spotify gets right that I would like to give them props for is the handling of multiple artists. Particularly in the indie/non-hiphop world where "Song Title (feat. Female Guest Vocalist)" never really became the norm, it's cool to be able to instantly click through to Female Guest Vocalist's own page and start listening. That's how I discovered the AMAZING Miya Folick: even though I must have listened to Fucked Up - Dose Your Dreams a hundred times or more in the Bandcamp app, the credits for that album on the band's page are so massive and so badly formatted that I had never taken the time to sift through them to find out who was wailing so beautifully on track 18. But the first time I played it in Spotify, that info was right at my fingertips. Thank you, friends!

Putting metadata into the track titles is done by the labels, not Spotify. Crediting the featured artists individually is also done by the labels, although obviously we have to do a little work on the Spotify end to show that information accessibly.

I've settled on what I think it the right procedure for dealing with songs that appear in Discover Weekly that I like but aren't new to me and I don't to reappear in my DW a few months later: listen to 30 seconds of it (not in private mode). That sound right, glenn?

don't to reappear = don't want to reappear

Don't Fear (The Reappear)

Yes, if you play :30+ of a DW track it should not be recommended to you again...

> On Curtis Mayfield's Curtis Live! (US Release), the track "We Are The People Who Are Darker Than Blue - Live @ The Bitter End, NYC" is from an entirely different concert recorded I would estimate, 15-20 years in the future of the rest of that album.

I noticed this on another streaming platform (Google Play) and assume this is an issue with the files the label provided the streaming corps. Still, somebody at spotify should verify it's wrong by listening to it for a few seconds (it's obvious and horrible) and then gray out the file and ideally ask the label to fix it.

Thanks for the confirmation, glenn. I can't believe how much mental energy I expend on feeding the DW algo correctly. I suppose it's a hobby I enjoy.

Personally, I despise negotiating indirectly with inscrutable algorithms like this, and refuse to do it. Which is why http://everynoise.com/new_releases_by_genre.cgi exists at the other extreme of control, in at least some sense...

Ah yeah, I haven't played with that for a while. It's kind of overwhelming.

I assumed it was the uploaders putting the metadata in the song titles rather than Spotify themselves. Maybe there's a big fancy version of Cmd+F they could do to strip it from the titles and put in an appropriate place.

I'd also forgot about http://organizeyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com which is a great tool for playing about with my Discover Archive

wild stannery from Rogan listeners in the comments here:

A musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they're paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights (assuming a typical $.00437 payout per stream). In other words, Spotify values Rogan more than any musician in the history of the world. Sound fair to you? pic.twitter.com/zvMdY3mIQA

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) May 20, 2020

I'm not a rogan fan, but clearly they value his product more because it is a very different thing than an album of music and is worth more.

A musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they're

ok.. and rogan has 23 billion streams
what is the point of this tweet??

"a musician would need billions of streams to make what Drake makes from Spotify"