Spotify - anyone heard of it?

If you have autoplay on is there any way to stop it playing certain tracks/artists? When we play wheels on the bus it follows it up with kids bible songs :/

We get cutesy ukelele versions of popular classics :(

No, there's no current way to influence autoplay, and you're not the first person to discover that the current algorithm often matches non-religious kids songs with religious kids songs. I've looked at the listening patterns for these, and they basically make sense: those songs share a LOT of listeners, and it's not simple to tell from the numbers that this is because religious-kids-music audiences are happy to hear "Wheels on the Bus" but non-religious-kids-music-audiences are not as happy to hear bible songs.

Hopefully we'll eventually get artist/song banning working ubiquitously across all parts of the app, which will then give you the ability to get rid of individual things you don't want, but if we don't solve the underlying problem, banning the bible tracks you're hearing is likely to just get you different bible tracks. And solving the underlying problem means modeling the asymmetry of religious-music listening, which is a serious problem in both cultural and technical terms. It's doable, we've done similar efforts for Christmas music and kids music in general. But that's how I know it's hard.

My practical recommendation is to use the songs you LIKE from Autoplay to build a playlist, and then use the Recommended Songs at the bottom of that playlist to fill it out with more things you like or at least tolerate, and then turn Autoplay off and go with your own longer list.

Is the autoplay the 'Radio based on' type thing that starts when you get to the end of a playlist?

If so have nothing but praise for it as have made some fantastic discoveries listening to it

It's also a really really useful on smart speakers: just being able to ask for a single track and let it run from there is a lot less fiddly than specifying names of playlists.

thanks for the info and tips glenn, very informative. i guess the large religious-kids-music user base in the states is also a factor.

might be easier to be a devout follower for awhile, stopping immediately when the algorithm is fixed

i thought about exclusively listening to kids religious music for a few weeks then hitting "i don't like this artist" when it starts showing up in discover weekly.

Ugh, I apologize on behalf of the entire software industry for uncontrollable algorithms you're forced to try to game indirectly...

I was impressed when a ~700 song playlist shuffled from Smiths' "Rubber Ring" into Kenny Chesney's "I Go Back"

Ugh, I apologize on behalf of the entire software industry for uncontrollable algorithms you're forced to try to game indirectly...

we suffer, it's true.

hey, maybe wrong place to ask, but is there a way to put my music on spotify and just decline any royalties or possibilities of monetary compensation?

(not that i have any delusions of making money, i just 100% don't care about getting any money from the music i make. just want to make it available on another platform besides bandcamp.)

also it's 1000% bee ess that aaliyah's second and third albums aren't available. that's classic material. never should have traded those. i had the self-titled on double vinyl, too. regrets.

OneRPM has a free plan, that's what I use for my own music.

Discographies of the surf rock band and afro-jazz group both named the Pyramids are mixed together

disappearance of “appears on” listings is a bummer

seriously though. Glenn? Help!

I still see "appears on" listings...is this on a newer version of the desktop app that I don't have yet?

yeah, it's not on my desktop.

The Appears On thing is a temporary casualty of a complicated situation I can't get into, but it will come back. Nobody wants it gone.

I reported the Pyramids page, thanks. It should get cleaned up in a day or two.

thanks for that update. i really would hate to see the "appears on" feature go away permanently, it seriously hobbles usability.

The badge that appears on the play button if you have shuffle on: heroic ui move, applause.

Does it always appear?

I see two different buttons a regular play button near the bottom and a shuffle play button that appears closer to the top

Hmm maybe it isn't what I thought it was. It's at the top below the album or playlist image - is it just shuffle play then? It does show whether I have shuffle on or off. This is in the app btw.

Was this a recent update? I don’t see it there.

version 8.5.65.852 ¯\(°_o)/¯

further investigation confirms it is just shuffle play :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipgtPCrd1O0

Wondering why the list of releases an artist Appears On stopped appearing in reverse chronological order recently - now seems to be random.

see upthread. Glenn keeps reassuring us it will be alright.

The Appears On thing involves issues that have nothing to do with what you're seeing. Hopefully it'll be back soon...

― glenn mcdonald, woensdag 27 mei 2020 2:16 bookmarkflaglink

The Appears On thing is a temporary casualty of a complicated situation I can't get into, but it will come back. Nobody wants it gone.

― glenn mcdonald, donderdag 2 juli 2020 21:30 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe it's dependent on Trump being voted out of office in November?

I said it would be back, and it is. The sort order is different now, that part is correct. There may be further developments there, eventually, but sorting by popularity is what allowed the feature to be reenabled...

Okay Glenn, now you’ve got me confused (and worried). The reordering/sorting by popularity instead of (reverse) chronology was precisely the issue longneck and I complained about back in May. You then said in reply this was a temporary issue.
The actual disappearance of the feature only came up here last week ( I never experienced it myself). So now you’re saying the sorting by popularity is a permanent thing? That’s... very bad news, for the reasons outlined back in May.

Could you possibly leave Glenn alone? He's not ILX's personal Spotify troubleshooter. Take your complaints to the Spotify forums, please.

People air their opinions (positive and negative) on and issues with Spotify here. Glenn pops up here sometimes to respond or weigh in, which is great. He does this of his own accord, as far as I know. It’s not that people are summoning him or something. He happened to weigh in on this specific issue (which has nothing to do with troubleshooting) as well. I’m just responding to his responses.

It's OK. The feature was removed entirely for many people, that was the bigger issue. It's now back for everybody. For now, the thing that allowed it to return was sorting by popularity (so that certain recent-but-not-popular compilations are not so prominent). Whether this is permanent, I do not know.

(I mean that no permanent decision has been made yet.)

https://open.spotify.com/track/0EXW6qWbVvS6KSRG9zbZyg?si=r5tYOioZQVmn2coAdKTlyw < listen to the end for a surprise. never encountered this before !

That version isn't available in the US, and all the ones that are have shorter durations. So now I really want to know what the surprise is!

Lol, couldn’t have guessed that would happen.

almost as rude as when i bought nine inch nails' broken on cd and on playing was greeted with some smooth soul music.

what's supposed to happen here?

Tubgirl shows up in a Flash animation

For the first 2.55, it's what it should be - Jelly Roll Morton "Red Hot Pepper Stomp" - but then it cuts abruptly into the last 45 seconds or so of Steely Dan "Bad Sneakers".

Awesome. I've reported it to the team who will ask the licensor to try again...

ugghhhh why are they taking away the "Recently Played" list on the iphone app! First "Recently Played" went from a long column to a shortened row, now it is completely gone. I understand there are all these other cool records, playlists, past listens brought back from the dead by Spotify's algorithms, etc....but why can't I see what I recently played anymore? It was my favorite organizing principle on this thing.

What? Is that for real? Cuz yeah, for me too, it’s a no-brainer, super-useful

But I still see mine

I don't think I ever found where Recently Played was on the app!

on my iPhone, Recently Played is the second item on the Home screen ... I can swipe the visible part of the row to see a fairly long list

Oh yeah - for me too. I guess I don't pay much attention to the home screen and spend all my time in library and search. Also, I'm frequently changing between devices for Spotify playback so a phone one only reminds me how annoying it Spotify doesn't let you see my playing history across devices.