Spotify - anyone heard of it?

If those are rhetorical questions and you just don't like it, carry on.

If you want some actual explanation, there's this: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/

Hit play on Discover Weekly for the first time in over a year. My guess is that they've been completely turning over the contents every week; would be cool if instead they just accumulated the highest-scoring tracks since my last listen.

So basically if you skipped a week, new tracks in DW would have to outscore old tracks to get a spot. I can see this being complicated - what if someone didn't play DW because they saw the playlist and didn't like it? In my case though, I hadn't even looked at DW.

But ... my DW kicks ass this week so maybe I should just shut it.

You can use IFTTT to auto save every Discover Weekly to a playlist. Very useful if you don’t have time to listen to it every week and don’t want to lose it!

tfw you pay $100 million dollars to someone to broadcast antivax propaganda and COVID conspiracy theories on your platform, insist that his opinions align with company policy doing so, and then he runs a three-hour ad for the white supremacist subscription service that launched the Proud Boys, run by a guy who was fired from his multi-million $ radio job after livetweeting himself harassing & abusing a black woman in Times Square, calling black people "not human" and "illegal savages."

https://i.imgur.com/mHcy4hy.jpg

apparently this episode also includes theorising that COVID was a Chinese bioweapon

Tidal pays 70% of their revenue in royalties, divided up by streams the same way Spotify and Apple pay. The "rate" is not a thing in itself, it's just the result of dividing total royalties paid by total streams. Tidal's main draw is the $20/mo HiFi plan, which nobody else offers, so presumably a significant share of their subscribers pay for that, but if 100m Spotify users all moved over to Tidal's regular $10 plan because Tidal's "rate" is higher, the rate would go down.

So does Apple’s announcement today that they’re not charging extra for their “HiFi” content – and Amazon immediately following suit – represent downward pressure in terms of compensating artists?

(Or am I still exhibiting the basic misunderstanding which Glenn was trying to correct with that post?)

Yes, I think that's accurate. Or, at least, it's a move that seems very likely to preclude any other service from using lossless audio as a higher-price tier.

Props to Johnny Fever for that tip re the desktop app, I followed it and it still hasn't auto-updated after several restarts. The only weird thing is that the version I grabbed from the old versions site was 1.1.39.612, but the version I have according to the help menu is actually 1.1.38.558.

why has it become so fucking painful to load my library after the recent changes

here’s another one and hopefully it’s as easy to fix as my total blindness to the “Albums” button in the Library.

i’m teaching myself how to play Moonlight Sonata right? right. it’s going fine. i’ve now gotten to a kind of funky part, and i want to hear it played. so i load up Spotify and search for Moonlight Sonata. well reader i am spoiled for choice. so many versions. so many playlists. the movements are impossible to distinguish - the names are so long that they truncate - but there are only three and if i choose the first one it’s the right one.

my problem is this: the recordings are TERRIBLE. even the deutsch gramophone ones with daniel barenboim which i’d kind of expect to be a gold standard (naively?) are muffled, warbly and accompanied by several assloads of hiss. it’s wild! this is a.... really famous song? across all versions it probably gets tens of thousands of plays a day. is there a trick to knowing which classical tracks are actually recorded well? i thought classical fans were sticklers for this stuff.

https://open.spotify.com/track/6MXUH2wFFk11v1piIIOiM2?si=523fecdaf557477d

This has good sound. Mari Kodama on Pentatone.

Unfortunately there's not really an easy way to sort the good from the bad other than by reading reviews or sampling for yourself.

With older piano recordings, sometimes remastering engineers deliberately leave in a fair bit of tape noise in order to avoid flattening out the sound of the instrument itself.

thank you!

god making playlists is impossible now

plz upvote:
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Desktop-Scroll-position-not-saved-when-navigating-through-pages/idc-p/5179146

wtf? Is this, please vote because: (a) until you do, we don't actually believe this is happening with our product; (b) until you do, we can't be bothered to take our developers away from the highly important task of counting Joe Rogan's alt-right blood money; or (c) we're harvesting clicks for our dark god.

Just fix the fucking thing.

I don't work for Spotify, but I do work in customer support for a tech company, and I can assure you that devs do not have infinite time and resources and cannot fix everything customers complain about in an instant. There are probably higher priority tasks the devs are working on right now. If people upvote an issue on their community support page then they're more likely to see it's an issue that users care about.

talking about "counting Joe Rogan's alt-right blood money" and "harvesting clicks for our dark god" is just unnecessary paranoia & brushes aside the fact that their engineers are probably working around the clock just to keep the damn thing running as seamlessly as it does

crüt I am sympathetic to your position but

just to keep the damn thing running as seamlessly as it does

uh

Mine is back to doing that thing where you press play on a podcast or whatever and it starts playing, but the playing area shows whatever song I was listening to previously and I have to force quit. They had solved this problem before but I guess it's back.

I don't work for Spotify, but I do work in customer support for a tech company, and I can assure you that devs do not have infinite time and resources and cannot fix everything customers complain about in an instant. There are probably higher priority tasks the devs are working on right now.

Perhaps their devs would have more time to fix things if they didn't break them to begin with.

The blogpost Glenn posted upthread give a good insight into how these things happen for people like me who have a tendency to imagine a load of devs sitting around blithely breaking things:

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2021/04/07/building-the-future-of-our-desktop-apps/

are we allowed to call this thing shit without offending its employees

other evil corporations have to pay for their PR

Dunno, seems possible to complain about product without assuming it’s the fault of employees being stupid.

i don't assume that it's just weird when people take criticism of this app/service/empire as some kind of personal insult

Kinda weird that that (absolutely amazing) Basement Tapes Complete only registers a few thousand plays for most of the songs?

https://open.spotify.com/album/5a8SaZSkhxar6eYgd5u3o9?si=wNRMuRqvRgS5hZ2bJRZahg

A handful have over a million plays, though. I checked and none of them are on the standard Spotify 'This Is Bob Dylan' playlist - I guess that means they're on some other big playlist or other. (NB It would be amazing if you could right-click and see where that song appears...)

Anyway - huh? This is a serious motherlode that got long glowing reviews when it appeared - and most songs only have a few thousand plays? Feels like that's not correct.

i don't assume that it's just weird when people take criticism of this app/service/empire as some kind of personal insult

― rebrand on hold (Left), Tuesday, May 25, 2021 4:18 PM (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

FWIW I was speaking from my own experience working with devs in general, not defending Spotify as a company. It's never as easy as "Just fix the fucking thing."

And as someone who works in tech support, I think it's really nice that Spotify have a community support page where users can directly cast a vote for issues/features/improvements, and that they note when said issues are under investigation. I'm not doing "PR" for them when I say that, it's just my opinion!

i am attacking spotify as a company

this is like when people would get defensive over any criticism of apple, i don't understand it. must be a tech thing

The blog that Glenn linked makes it pretty plain they pushed out their re-design way too early.

i am attacking spotify as a company

that's fine! I thought maybe you were referring to my posts, but I guess you weren't. sorry I misunderstood!

Kinda weird that that (absolutely amazing) Basement Tapes Complete only registers a few thousand plays for most of the songs?

Tracer, I'm pretty sure that last time I looked for them, the Bootleg Series albums weren't on Spotify so that might explain it, if they've just been added recently. And I'm less sure of this, but I think there was a sampler on there before, which might explain why a few tracks do have millions of plays.

The blog that Glenn linked makes it pretty plain they pushed out their re-design way too early

I don't see that in the article at all, fwiw.

It was written before they pushed it out. Glenn was helping to illustrate the scale of what was up. We can draw our own conclusions.

Just a comment - I use Spotify for Roku on my tv, which is hooked up to an amplifier and speakers.

As this is the best set-up for my needs, it would be cool if I could add to playlists from it, or even make playlists.

It's not a crisis or anything - just something that would be cool further down the road.

the roku app is frustratingly limited. I'm in the same situation where it's the one connected to my stereo, but I tend to bluetooth from my phone instead because it gives me more control. The thing I really wish they'd bring back on the roku app is menu options on tracks. Would be great to be able to go to an artist's page from their track. The old roku app had this.

Can you use Spotify Connect to control the Roku's playback from your phone? I've always found that an easier way to work with Spotify on TVs than fiddling with the built-in interface.

yes you can

Yeah, I use Spotify on Roku all the time, and just control it from my phone or laptop.

You can barely make playlists with Spotify itself right now, good luck doing it via another intermediary

i have a bunch of issues with spotify but no issues whatsoever with making playlists now or ever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seems to be making a playing queue ok now but still not allowing scrolling if I'm bringing something new up from bottom. So have to do it in short steps.

& has brought up a couple of options of accessing recent searches etc though have to go to home page.
Do wish they would return search box to active page instead of menu.

my workaround for adding tracks to playlists rn is to play the track i want to add, scroll to the spot in the playlist where i want to add it, and drag the playing track in

I know the fix for that dragging-up problem, specifically, is in the next version...

OK, I'm not sure if I've just discovered or rediscovered this service (its name is so similar to Organize Your Music, which doesn't work in the same way, but http://sortyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com is brilliant.

Specific use case: sort a playlist by release date, then save it as a fresh playlist with one click. Yes, Spotify's release date for back catalogue are hit and miss and often feature the rerelease date instead, but it seems like that's less the case than it used to be and in any case it's a whole lot better than nothing when you've got a mega playlist like this one and just fancy listening to the early stuff.

Here's a question for somebody like, say, glenn- Where did the Chuck D Clash podcast go to? Stay Free: The Story of the Clash, I believe it was called.