Spotify - anyone heard of it?

Yeah I still buy cds too. Probably spend too much time on Spotify mainly as a podcast server. But I've been interspersing with single tracks of various music for the last few months.

I am intending to buy more music based on what I've listened to though.

Find the idea that they are anti music piracy but not pro paying the artist a ridiculous position. Would have hoped the principle behind the first part might inherently include the 2nd.

I do like having the packaging including a physical printed set of liner notes.

If only we had some explanation of Spotify's original business model to read, instead of some belligerent comments from a long ex-Spotify employee many years later.

Oh, wait, we do. From 2011. From that same guy.

https://startupbeat.com/spotify-101-the-freemium-music-model-why-it-works-and-the-vision-that-drives-the-social-music-startup/1947/

It's true, though, that for the first few years of its existence Spotify was not really focused on artists as a constituency, nor vice versa. It began very much as a desktop music-searching/library application, entirely focused on the listener, and on already-music-knowledgeable listeners at that. There was no editorial team or Spotify-curated playlists before the acquisition of Tunigo in 2013, and no personalized playlists before the acquisition of the Echo Nest in 2014 (which is how I joined). The reorganization that created a company division to focus on the artist experience was in 2014 or 2015, I forget exactly, and even then most artists weren't directly involved with their Spotify presence.

As streaming started getting enough commercial traction for the music business to start growing again, in 2016 and 2017, lots of other dynamics began changing, too, none of them specific or limited to Spotify. Desktop -> mobile; music geeks using streaming as a cloud library -> more casual listeners using streaming to replace radio; playlists as a cool sharing feature -> editorial/algotorial/algorithmic/personal playlists as the primary listening mode; subscription streaming as "an experiment" (as Taylor Swift put it) -> subscription streaming as most of the recorded-music economy; label-focused reporting -> artist controlled tools. Closer to global availability. Oh, and podcasts...

So the problem wasn't the piracy, or the fact that artists were losing their income from it--it was that the piracy wasn't slick and centralized enough, and random tech dudes weren't making fuck tons of money off of it?

Every day there's a new reason to hate Spotify, and more apologists inventing creative new mental gymnastics to justify it.

Uh, if that's your conclusion then I'm guessing you were always going to reach it. But you're missing a key stage in this story if you forget that it went: piracy (industry crashes) -> paid downloads (industry stays crashed) -> streaming (industry starts to recover).

(And none of these are new reasons or new "apologists". And it's not gymnastics to be walking in a direction you don't happen to like.)

Here's an interesting piece about the CDs -> Napster -> Apple power-shift (with a little bit about streaming and Spotify) from mostly the perspective of the old industry:

https://themusicnetwork.com/forget-napster-it-was-itunes-that-held-the-record-industry-to-ransom/

The labels may have gotten streamrolled by Apple to a certain extent; but visiting Sony.com to buy a Mariah Carey album was never a solution, and “why didn’t they just team up?” is way easier said than done…

Who agreed on the shockingly low sound quality, and why didn’t the labels rally for more hi-fidelity options, like FLAC and other lossless formats, especially when internet space and storage space were no longer legitimate issues?

I wonder if it's a technical or policy reason behind showing number of track plays only on album view and not on playlists or radio. I'd love to be able to see it in those other contexts.

Whenever you're not sure whether something is due to technical constraints or policy decisions, the answer is almost always "two different teams built those two things independently 8 years ago, and now that's just how they've always been...".

Ha - thanks glenn. So neither really, just: no one's felt pressure/inclination to make a change

That quote above... it's odd to think that the labels wouldn't have been all for the low quality* and the DRM and all that stuff. They knew they'd be able to sell better downloads (or streaming memberships or whatever... or I suppose vinyl) later on. It was in the best interests of Apple and the labels.

* I had to Google and refresh myself on this... originally the sold files were 128kbps with DRM, 99 cents each. They started doing 256kbps DRM-free in 2007. 256 or 320 is good for me but 128 is brutal.

*in 2007 for $1.29 per song.

Upgrades for previous purchases were available as part of a $25/year program? Yarg...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2015/01/18/itunes-drm/21964513/

anyway yeah, poor labels

I paid $25 for one year of iTunes Match just so I could convert all my crappy old Napster and Audiogalaxy mp3s to 256k

2021: https://i.imgur.com/5lhP2kN.jpg

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Sunday, June 20, 2021 5:51 PM (six days ago)

continued:

https://i.imgur.com/a4bRljp.jpeg

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

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

― bobo honkin' slobo babe (sic), Saturday, June 26, 2021 8:00 AM (two weeks ago)

having trouble reading between the lines here but I'll crack it

https://i.imgur.com/5La4c1I.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/EazQ5x3.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/0AFrZNC.jpg

Is this person from spotify?

recently deleted my spotify in an effort to cut down on my overall reliance on streaming - annoying and labor-intensive but overall it's a nice feeling tbh

(the labor-intensive part is organizing + ripping + transferring files, of course)

i gotta be honest sic i'm not really sure what the majority of your posts in this thread are even about. i'm guessing it's something along the lines of, there are some right-wing idiots who have podcasts streamable on Spotify, therefore Spotify is evil?

Yeah, I could do with a recap on who this CompoundBoss person is and what the connection is to Spotify

crut some spotify podcasts are exclusive to the platform and are paid millions directly by spotify. iirc this person whose disgusting tweets sic keeps inflicting on us was a guest on one of these podcasts (joe rogan).

Given that Rogan himself says stupid shit periodically, maybe picture-quoting non-Spotify-related tweets by a guy he once had as a guest is...not the most productive use of this forum?

I found a UI change that I like: the cluster of recently played stuff at the top of the Home Screen

Seriously though the 'I don't like this artist' thing in playlists like Release Radar just doesn't work at all right?

I think my top feature request would be to filter my library with the normal search filters you can use on the greater collection: genre, year, etc. I've completely lost control of my library - there's so much in it that I keep forgetting to listen to, and have to put albums into playlists to keep visibility on it.

turn the label information at the bottom of an album/single page into a live link that pulls up a label's catalog

Yeah, I really want to do that with (and for) labels, but the data is a mess. "Label" is submitted as an unstructured text field, so there end up being countless spurious variations and compound credits.

You can experience the erratic data yourself here: https://everynoise.com/research.cgi?mode=label

btw, I use your new releases by genre page every week to find tracks for DJing

Anyone getting a short loud static clip sound between tracks? been doing it all day and it's very unpleasant

How weirdly analog. I haven't seen any other reports of that. What platform are you on, and how are you listening?

this is happening for me at the moment with gescom's minidisc on various platforms (chromebook web player, mac app) but nothing else so i assumed it was a problem with that release. not a major issue as there is really no reason to listen to gescom's minidisc.

For some reason I keep winding up with an invisible display. it just says Queue then has nothing else visible. I corrected that last week by reinstalling Spotify but it's gone back to that like a week later.
Anybody else come across this?
I thought it had actually turned off the rest of a queue of podcasts and tunes I had set up but it is still playing now.

I had just swapped over from my mbile phone so do wonder if that has anything to do with things. Can see queue on phone still.

Oh yeah, does give full display for Recently Played but blank for Queue.

restarting worked this morning. It didn't last week hence the reinstallation. But it is a pain that it does that cos it means you can't see what's coming up or anything. Or see how to reshuffle the queue by hand.

Is this old news?

Spotify now displays this "About recommendations" section in the menu for all its official and algorithmic playlists

The standout line: "In some cases, commercial considerations may influence our recommendations"

Strange but really illuminating disclaimer pic.twitter.com/ftZCgwiGtT

— Cherie (@cheriehu42) August 2, 2021

well that certainly seems like what happens and this feels a bit like transparency but i don't trust that feeling and i want to know more about what kinds of actual or anticipated challenges this is responding to

we're keeping track of you because your taste is truly unique and by the way, it really suits you, and we know these other things that will suit you as well because we're so in tune with your unique snowflake vibe that we're basically giving you a shortcut and wouldn't you rather hear it framed like this than in some other more sinister way?

https://www.midiaresearch.com/blog/the-record-labels-are-weaning-themselves-off-their-spotify-dependency

Glenn, what do you know about this new "Tracy Chapman" single? It's just a cheaply recorded piano piece, which sounds like improv, and cuts off after about a minute. I suspect someone has gamed the system, but who knows. May want to look into it, though.

https://open.spotify.com/track/2wP4TiA63jULmnT44hZyni?si=R3NQTDgJSJKM2cYfob3dNw

stuff still gets uploaded to the pages of established acts all the time somehow, sometimes it's just an unrelated act that shares the same name as a much more famous one & sometimes it's deliberate gaming of the system

The core problem is that "uploaded to the pages" isn't even vaguely how it works. Everything on Spotify is delivered via bulk feeds from licensors and/or aggregators, often with incorrect or missing metadata even before we get into the possibility of malice. It's kind of a wonder the system functions at all.

so, big surprise, Spotify has been doing some shady shit. spoilers: things are going in an *even more* artist-unfriendly direction.

— Fourth Strike Records (@StrikeFourth) August 6, 2021

we have been given access to the new Campaigns beta feature. essentially, artists will be required to pay to show their *own followers* that they've released new music.

if you tap on one of these screens, Spotify takes 50 cents straight out of the artist's pocket. pic.twitter.com/E4VKl9CFwk

— Fourth Strike Records (@StrikeFourth) August 6, 2021

They’re also testing a .99/month, ad-supported plan, which I suspect (if rolled out broadly) would likely cannibalize their 9.99 plan and drive down artists’ rates even further?

There's a problem with tryng to move things around in a playlist of podcasts if tehy change the thumbnail that goes with the representation of teh show in the interface once it's added to the playlist. ON the podcast's own page there is a photo of the guest, once it's added to teh playlist it becomes the generic photo of the host. & the way they have the title printed for at least the show I just added you don't get to see the episode number because there appear to only be a certain number of letters allowed in a playlist title before cut off.
So bah and indeed humbug. Stupidly making things more difficult than they need to be.
Surely easier to put series and number down numerically at the beginning of a title.

Those pop-up notifications are in addition to the normal What's New feed and Release Radar, so it's not charging artists for access to their own fans, it's charging them for a very limited extra resource (I think we show only one pop-up per user per day). $.50/click is more than I would pay, personally, but I have no idea what the range of rates is, and the blacked out listener-count in that Twitter thread might be a factor...

I thought that once New Episodes had returned for podcasts it might be a permanent feature like I think it used to be. It was around constantly for a couple of weeks I thought and I found it useful.
So I'm disappointed and a bit frustrated that it's vanished again.
Could do with it being a user defined option to keep it. Otherwise have to permanently try to keep abreast of what shows may have a new episode which doesn't appear remotely easy with the current interface. Ho hum.

does anybody use Daily Drive?

i looked at it again and i just find it basic af

they steal other people's news programming i.e. NPR Up First and Ny Times' The Daily, and stick some songs inbetween

as an experience it's not bad - public radio style news and current affairs with skippable songs as filler. but all NYT and NPR have to do is withdraw consent for those podcasts to be used and suddenly Daily Drive is a pretty bereft little playlist

Presumably NYT and NPR want the audience?

Are their ads stripped out?

no but they may prefer their audiences to listen via their own ecosystems one day. in NPR’s case via NPR One, or in NYT’s case via the NYT app. they’d get better data, attribution, etc.