Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Austin, you can drag the song to the top of your queue but I guess that would still be unwieldy if your queue is extremely long.

Another workaround would be to add the songs you're listening to to a playlist instead and then when you clicked add to queue on a song it would be the next track to play

if you’re going to do that you may as well just not use the queue at all

the podcast app Castro allows you to add episodes to the beginning or the end of your play queue. which is nice. 99% of the time i'm adding to the beginning.

I have that on PocketCast too but the concept of queuing up more than one podcast is, to me, like making a three-course dinner in my hands

i do it. it is a never ending playlist though

Smart Shuffle seems broken at the moment, in that when you have to cycle through it to turn shuffle off in a playlist, the smart shuffle recommendations stay in your queue (and often the shuffle button turns back to green once you click out of your queue)

ever since the most recent update, if i leave the app open on my phone, it will never let my phone sleep. the screen just stays on. if i minimize the app or switch to something else and let it idle, it works like normal and my screen goes dark after a certain period. but if i leave spotify up and idle my phone, it'll never sleep; just sit there, unlocked, screen fully illuminated. mild annoyance but kinda crucial?

Hmm. I haven't seen other reports of that, so maybe Support could help you...

That's not happening for me and I also have the most recent update for Android. However, it's a feature I'd like to see implemented (i.e. the option to keep the screen on when Spotify is playing). It would be good to be able to glance at the screen and see what's playing at any time.

^try these hacks(?): https://www.uubyte.com/blog/how-to-disable-screen-timeout-for-certain-apps-on-android/

Probably a totally unnecessary request but when the white 'blah has been added to blah playlist' box comes up, I *always* want to click on it and a) be reminded of what else is on there and b) check I've not added the track before.

ime android and ios both have the feature that tells you if you're adding a song to a playlist that it's already on; a prompt comes up giving me the option to "add anyway" or cancel and go back to the previous screen.

it's very handy.

It's wild to me that the random button on a playlist doesn't really randomly play songs from the whole playlist and just assumes you like certain songs and prioritizes then in the queue. So if you have a big playlist there's tons of songs you'll likely never hear.

I really wish you could turn that off.

it was called "smart shuffle" or something and you used to be able to turn it off. just checked now and if it's still in there, idk where they put it.

lol

https://i.imgur.com/in7ZW5y.png

excellent

And yet they could presumably remove their music from Spotify, if they wished.

I believe they want to but their label has the contractual right to override these wishes.

They’ve had that up for nearly two years

https://www.stereogum.com/2174490/belly-make-delete-spotify-their-spotify-header-while-exploring-difficult-process-to-leave-platform/news/

I think it's just an edgy way of lobbying for people to use the web interface.

Ah, fuck, they got rid of “Create similar playlist”. That's some bullshit right there.

Running that on my top songs of the year always turned up lots of new gems.

Can’t see the hearts/pluses on liked songs in playlists and albums now. Bout ready to switch to something else that’s a dealbreaker for me

the new add to playlist functionality is pretty neat, let's you easily see which playlists a song is already in

Queue is a pain. Adding to it puts tracks at the end and my version of Spotify won't let you move the bottom most tracks upwards without substituting a track it highlights from further up the queue.
I didn't know you could move tracks in the queue on the mobile. Has that got to to with the phone it's on.

& more recently I've transferred my listening from my phone to my desktop only to find that it keeps flashing up a message saying this track can't be played at this time and flying through the queue. Which only corrects if I restart the computer.

I move songs up all the time but it isn't very ergonomic when you have a giant queue.

good piece here, providing there are any skeptics left itt:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/30/spotify-smaller-artists-wrapped-indie-musicians

Krukowski’s podcast “Ways Of Hearing” about sound and music was really good and I suspect he made far more from it than he’s ever made from Spotify

Laws are useful. For example, the songwriting portion of royalties is controlled by laws, so it can't be changed (and wouldn't be in this proposal). If the recording portion of royalties were set by law, the same way, they couldn't be changed like this either. Or maybe laws could even streamline the whole insane system by which recording, mechanical and publishing royalties are all now paid and managed separately. Tower Records didn't have to pay three different ways for every CD they sold...

FWIW, the "rate" Damon describes as a "MAX" is an average, and the user-centric model he advocates would have the exact opposite effect from what he claims. Also: if you spend your time relentlessly tell your audience that Spotify is evil, it maybe shouldn't be shocking that your streaming numbers are low.

what are you saying glenn? it's not spotify's fault, it's the lack of laws that is forcing them to screw over the artists?

For years I’ve been saying that Spotify’s streaming model would work if they adopted a tiered payout system, but one that is the opposite of that they have adopted— smaller artists get paid more per-stream, bigger artists get paid less. I’d say it’s unsurprising that they’ve done the opposite, but I still find myself surprised at the brazenness of it all

Pretty hard to make professional sports owners look like altruistic saints in comparison but somehow they've done it

Also: if you spend your time relentlessly tell your audience that Spotify is evil, it maybe shouldn't be shocking that your streaming numbers are low.

I don't think that's the point, and I don't think people like Krukowski are upset about their streaming numbers as much as the payouts those numbers represent. Which, as of January, will be zero for the majority of working artists.

this point comes up constantly ott without being addressed in any seriousness by the one man PR team

I'm sorry i know I'm not supposed to say things like that about people's friends but the constant dissembling and derailing on this particular point is very hard to ignore

Something else that comes up constantly is that Spotify negotiates with the labels, not those labels’ artists. The labels choose how the pot of money gets divvied up. Something I’ve never understood though is how self-funded and boutique labels work in this system. If you run your own label, and that label has one artist: your band, how do payments work?

It is not my job, nor hobby, to make or defend Spotify business policy, but I've been on ILM for longer than I've worked at Spotify, and I've worked at Spotify for almost 10 years, so I do at least have useful information sometimes. "Spotify should pay artists more" is not in itself a substantive assertion. Prices and royalty rates are all negotiated. If you want to make a serious proposal for how they could change, you'd have to understand whose power controls how they currently get decided, and have ideas about how to change that power-structure.

My point above was that laws are a way to change the structure. This is particularly relevant to Damon's op-ed because a) he has been advocating for legal regulation of streaming (although he doesn't mention it in this piece, perhaps because it would clash with his complaints in it about laws preventing his "Union" from being a union), and b) the existing laws about publishing royalties prevented them from being affected by this proposal (which he misrepresents in the piece by claiming Spotify "will stop paying anything at all", his italics, which is literally wrong).

To answer the question about labels, the business deals are actually done between distributors and streaming services. In the case of the major labels, they're both label-groups and distributors, so they deal individually. Indie labels are represented by collectives like Merlin.

(I've also been on ILM long enough to know that there's a limit to how seriously any complicated question can be addressed in this format, but if you want to read me taking on the broad topic of fears about streaming at the scale of about half of a book, hang on until June...)

What I want to know is why my Wrapped (which my daughter made me check out) included songs in my top played list that I have never intentionally played, and listed as my top song a song that I'm sure I have played, but nowhere near as much as some other songs. Is it based exclusively on streaming numbers, as such, or does it include plays of songs I have downloaded to my device?

If by "songs I have downloaded to my device" you mean offline streaming, then yes, those count. If you mean local files, then no.

Either way, Wrapped isn't conjectural, it's just counting. Your account played those songs the most. You might have fallen asleep or left your phone playing in your pocket, so whether you appreciated them or not, the data doesn't know.

how about API plays?

(which my daughter made me check out)

hehe

Yes, API plays are plays.

It sort of waters down the significance of the Wrapped data. I mean "Red Clay" starts auto-playing every time I finish listening to a Jazz album, but if "Red Clay" ends up as my top track then what value is that info?

you can turn off autoplay for the pure wrapped experience

It's super weird. For example, it says I listened to the Cure more than any other single artist, putting me in the top 3% of Cure listeners. I did listen to them a bunch this year, because the band was touring, but I'm kind of surprised they were the top act I listened to all year. Likewise, toward the top of my songs of the year, there's a track by Justin Townes Earle that I've literally never played on purpose (afaik). So sure, it's possible the automatic player played it multiple times throughout the year, but you'd think there would be songs I played on purpose that I heard more, asleep or no, than songs picked for me.

3108 different songs played this year, the majority of them probably only once or twice, but out of that number surely songs I've played on purpose would place higher than songs I accidentally heard. Right? The most played songs list doesn't say how many times I listen to each song, does it? I assume the vast majority of them are tied at one listen.

I will say that I've spent the last two days investigating Wrapped complaints, of which "my top x is wrong" is a common form, and the data is always what it says it is. The real-world explanations are various, including one person who concluded their phone was left playing Spotify in the purse of their bridesmaid during their wedding.

One weird thing--my kid has been playing a Spotify playlist of Dan Bull minecraft raps over and over for months through the Alexa device. I was certain those would be my top songs, but they weren't. Thank god. Still, odd.

re: The most played songs list doesn't say how many times I listen to each song, does it?

it does if you pay attention to your Spotify Wrapped promo results, only for Number 1 though

x number of plays starting on X date

xpost That's the sort of thing I wonder about, too. There are a few songs I'm pretty sure I played a bunch this year as a joke/punchline, like Uptown Funk. (I actually still like that song a lot, but I find it funny to interrupt/disrupt my daughter's Taylor Swift listening with it.)

I wonder if anything is thrown off by the fact that I mostly listen to albums? If I listen to two albums by one band, and each of those albums has 20 songs, and listen to three other albums by a second band, and each of those albums only have 10 songs, will the data say I listened to the first band more than the second?