Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Really enjoying the slight lag on the desktop program

Has become really sluggish for me on my M1 Mac in last few days too. Can't be an update as I'm still on an old version cause I don't have admin access on this work machine.

So this AI DJ thing just plays basically the same tracks each time you try it out? Seems a bit of a missed opportunity.

THey still keep messing around with elements of the design for no reason . Keep messing around with how long a queue you can have , changing number by one or 2. Seems to be a bit of a weird thing to do. Is there a reason, is having a lot on a queue on my computer affecting anybody else. Would have thought things would be more autonomous per computer .

The DJ isn't meant to repeat itself like that, not sure why it is for you...

i'm also getting the "very short songs" thing in my artist radio! listened to "only for tonight" by TERR and (nearly) every song after was like 1 or 2 minutes long. strange!

Yeah, I'm not a fan, especially since I'm specifically looking for songs that are more like 6 minutes long.

fuck this garbage company forever

“Spotify has already learned that there’s no money to be made with exclusive rights to superstar offerings. “After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks to little effect,” explains tech journalist David Pierce, “it seems to have largely given up on the idea that exclusive content is the path to riches.”
The more profitable move is to manipulate listeners—prodding them to choose music the platform can use without royalty payments. As far as I can tell, this is the single biggest advantage to AI music. It’s a cheap alternative.”

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/nobody-will-tell-you-the-ugly-reason

"well, mainstreaming a fascist podcast didn't work, guess we need to force-feed our user base all the royalty-free music we can dig up or create"

All they need to do is start a faux Pitchfork site that reviews their AI artists

We don't have any AI artists.

https://i.imgur.com/seT1zcd.jpg

If you search for "daylist" you now get things like this.

I'm not sure I particularly listen to more emotional and symphonic work on Wednesday mornings but I'll go with it. Quite enjoy Spotify's endless iterations on personalised generated playlists, none of which seem to stick except for DW and RR.

the AI DJ is creepy

none of which seem to stick except for DW and RR.

The thing about menu commands moving around after you open the menu should be fixed now, by the way.

It is, thank you!

The DJ insists on playing me stuff off something called the “front left” playlist and I wish it wouldn’t, they’re all awful.

AI DJ's voice is awful BUT I like the idea of having a curated playlist that bounces around a few different themes BUT when he said he was going to play some deep cuts I hadn't heard in a while, he played three things from the discover weekly playlist that I'd listened to not two hours beforehand, none of which I've ever knowingly played before on spotify more than once.

Playlists and algorithms are the new payola.

I'm not sure the DJ queue is getting your plays in realtime yet, so those may have been picked before you played them...

in which case the algorithm must be identical to the discover weekly one, or more likely it's just picking them from that playlist.

Yes, the latter is likely.

TIL there's a genre on spotify called "lowercase".

Oh it's ASMR ambient

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowercase_(music)

Now I’m imagining Radu Malfatti jamming with mumbling cowboys

So they got rid of the little bell in the app that low key notifies you of new music??? What

I don't think anything intentional happened to the bell, and mine is still there and working...

Oh, if you're on Android there might be a test running where that What's New feed is in the sidebar you get when you tap your profile pic...

49min Discover Weekly this week! It won't last until Monday lunchtime.

Oh wow, yeah mine is brisk again as well, with just one track over 3 minutes

Oh, if you're on Android there might be a test running where that What's New feed is in the sidebar you get when you tap your profile pic...

Glenn, not sure what Spotify’s responsibility is as such but when all the music from the Tzadik label was recently added, it credited musician and label founder John Zorn with all of the compositions:

https://spotify.link/YU3BseIuMDb

And in a number of cases, it also credits Zorn as a performer where he is not (while also crediting the music writing to Zorn):

https://spotify.link/gPKPF7NuMDb

Does Spotify have a policy of reaching out to labels in instances where the metadata is all wrong? I get that Tzadik is a small label with limited resources, but a friend noted to me that you could probably enlist a superfan to correct all this for free.

Metadata is the label's responsibility, and technically their prerogative, but I suspect these are just oversights. I'll pass these cases along to the right Spotify team, and we'll see if we can get Tzadik to do a little cleanup.

"The heart is now a plus." True words.

so the checks on the right side indicate that a song has been added to a playlist, but do not indicate that it’s been downloaded or added to your library. the checks on top of playlists that appear after you click on the plus sign mean that the playlist has been added to your library. meanwhile, there’s still no way to add individual songs to your library without first adding them to a playlist

cool

its maddening. why are they so insistent on getting rid of the heart.

... and now it's back?

My heart will go on

The other day I was listening to Low, and when the album ended the default algorithm suggestions started playing, and while it was nothing I would have necessarily put on myself, I was impressed it was all stuff I was happy to hear: Palace Brothers, Smog, Dirty Three, Codeine, Papa M, etc. But a few minutes ago my wife shouted at the robot to play "ska," and it delivered a weird Spotify playlist that was I assume at least loosely based on my own listening habits (so a bunch of legit Jamaican stuff as well as reggae/ska adjacent stuff like the English Beat, Clash, Bad Brains, Specials) but also a bunch of veeeeeeery loosely reggae adjacent stuff I've literally never played (No Doubt, Sublime) and third wave+ ska stuff that is not remotely to my preference (Reel Big Fish, Bosstones). Wonder what the algorithm was thinking, choosing that stuff even though there are hours and hours of better options that I've actively "liked" or downloaded.

It’s the mostly popular stuff labeled ska?

Yeah - if the "similar to Low" stuff wasn't based on your listening habits, why would you expect the ska to be?

I’m impressed by how the algorithm has a good sense of flow, i.e. a bunch of quiet ones then a loud one to break the mood, or vice versa, and so on and so on

I don’t really care about whether it’s a tick or a heart, but it was good having the heart in the right hand column in playlists on mobile, so you could see what you’ve liked already

xpost I suppose the difference was that the Low related stuff, while nothing I might have played myself, was stuff I liked and enjoyed, definitely capturing/continuing the mood, whereas the "ska" playlist was packed with stuff I literally never want to hear. So, one generated playlist made me want to keep listening and add stuff to my likes or downloads, the other made me turn it off. Some of the tracks, like Bad Brains, were clearly because I'd just been listening to Bad Brains (not the first group that comes to mind when you think ska), so if they know what I'm listening to and what I like, I'd expect a generated playlist to be more hits than misses, like the Low one, and not half big misses, like the ska one.

But Low is band you like and Ska is a genre that contains stuff you don't seem to like

But yeah, if I ask for a ska playlist it mostly gives me 80s hardcore stuff so there must be some taste factor involved

Genres have the canonical Spotify playlist and then the "made for you" version. I'm not sure which one you get by default if you use voice control.

Actually I'm having trouble finding the canonical ones now so maybe they are all more specific than a general genre like ska

If you got Ska Mix (https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EIga94c2zaOqu), that one, like all the "Mix" ones with that same graphic treatment, has a pool of potential tracks picked by machine learning from what listeners put in playlists with "ska" in the title, and then is algorithmically personalized to try to approach your general taste and include some things you already like. This approach is not designed for purism.

There's also https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7WJ4yDmRK8R (and a few others), which has a pool of tracks picked by a human editor, and is then personalized. That approach produces a lot less non-ska, but might also have less stuff you already know. It doesn't look like there's an official straight hand-programmed Ska list without personalization, which is too bad.

And then https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2aKMOs9FxzuCX6kdylLX94 (and the other flavors linked in the description) is the genre-system version with no personalization. These sets are meant to be the most internally coherent of them. The tracks and sequence for each are picked algorithmically, but based on human genre-guidance and oversight.

This is fascinating

Glenn can you say more about “based on human genre-guidance”?

Every genre in the Spotify genre system (which is what I'm mapping on everynoise.com) gets there by a human deciding a) to include it, b) what to call it in this namespace, and c) what core artists define and demonstrate what it means. Algorithms can pick up from there and do interesting further work, but there are always humans checking their extrapolations and overriding them (or tweaking the inputs further) when needed. None of it is unsupervised.