Spotify - anyone heard of it?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/4/23670193/spotify-live-shut-down-obamas-audible-amazon-jay-shetty-iheart

Use Spotify most days. Never heard of Spotify Live. It was another app? Hey how about throwing podcasts into another app?

I see they are still semi arbitrarily messing around with the interface. They cut off the queue at 80 which wasn't true a couple of days back I think and certainly not a couple of weeks back. Had the queue I was listening through disappear on me afew days ago and only built up over last few days so not sure exactly when it changed.
But now won't add titles beyond position 81. So is this another temporary move or what.

THink it has been changing a bit over the last few weeks but is it still semi random or is there some hierarchy of permissions to set controls

It's incredible how we're nearing a time when stunning architectural and interior design renderings come at almost no cost! 🏠 Imagination once meant visualization, but with AI, it's becoming moot. What will we still have to imagine? 🤔 https://t.co/YcrPuen9LP

— Daniel Ek (@eldsjal) April 13, 2023

Something I really appreciate on Spotify is old singles appearing on it (often with photos of the original label) and the correct date of original release in the metadata. I'm surprised it happens, as it seems far from the usual ebb and flow of catalogues getting dumped on and off there. I can't imagine what the commercial context is for things like Mark A Mitchell's 1983 single 'How Can I?' suddenly appearing, for example.

https://open.spotify.com/track/643ojjjenyR15q32CkaQmg?si=d7c751ad90234428

i've officially stumbled upon the weirdest thing i've ever seen.

on a spotify radio this week, 1 song annoyingly kept playing. except every time I looked, it was a different song name and artist entirely.

so I started keeping track. here's 49 of them.https://t.co/VrmYPyQQqg pic.twitter.com/ejrwf11Oc6

— ADAM FAZE (@adamfaze) April 18, 2023

spotify down for anyone else?

everything seems okay on my end?

There were issues, but they've been fixed.

The crapfest that Adam Faze stepped in is far from the only weird cluster of stuff people deliver to Spotify. Not our doing, but I agree that we attract blame for it if it finds its way into radio...

I wonder if that's really the weirdest thing he's ever seen. If so, charmed life

^ this, yeah

Feel like having utterly shit taste is the only way you’d ever stumble on that.

I’ve never listened to “Spotify Radio” but I’m sure they stream all kinds of crap

i'm sorry if this has been addressed either in this huge thread or elsewhere—

why are there so many instances of multiple listings for the same album? i'm looking at the eurythmics catalogue right now and there's three listings for their first album: one specifies that's a 2018 remaster and has ten tracks, one has no extra indicators and poorly cropped cover art, and the third also has no extra indicators but bonus tracks. their whole spotify is like this and it's ridiculous. WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS????

yep I hate it

Licensing is complicated. There are actually 7 versions of In the Garden, but only 5 of them are available in the US, and we manage to group two pairs of those to whittle the visible list down to 3.

https://everynoise.com/artistprofile.cgi?id=0NKDgy9j66h3DLnN8qu1bB

Yeah complaining that “too many things are available via streaming” makes it seem a bit like a no-win situation (and you’ll run into the same issue if you’re trying to buy the CD or whatever).

Also, can’t you figure out the one you want and save it to your library or whatever?

thanks for the link and for your time glenn.

also sorry if my earlier post came off angry. should have added a lol or two because it wasn't meant in an irritated way.

I don't mind too much about the duplicates, except that, as I moaned upthread, sometimes you find you've liked a track twice from two versions of the same album and you unlike one for tidiness and then both get unliked.

It can be equally annoying if an album is ONLY available in a deluxe 72 track version

I've had an update today - desktop & web player - with a total redesign of how the Your Library section functions. Essentially, all the functionality of the library is now managed in an expanded/expandable left-hand column, with buttons across the top for Playlists, Albums, Artists & Podcasts (FFS). Each element of the library opens within that left-hand column; there's also a 'search library' function, separate from the usual Search function, that works within the left column, too. You can organise by recent/recently added/alphabetical/creator. There's a fair amount of autonomy with real estate, as in you can stretch the library as far as you might want to.

Individual albums/playlists then open in the right-hand column. Home and Search buttons are in the left column but once clicked functionality is managed in the right-hand column.

I don't hate it actually.

Brought to you by a very bored and boring man.

It looks nice but I'm so used to the tree view (which is still on the web player for now) now I'm finding it takes more clicks to navigate to playlists and end up typing to get to some. Poor response times also.

The arrows still open folders in the tree view...

^ took me a while to realise that admittedly (because clicking on the rest of the playlist 'button' opens the contents like a new page if it's a folder. To be a little more constructive, I guess it's just not being able to see as many playlists at once in that view now irking me but I'd be cooler with it if instead of showing the playlist creator's username with very playlist (not useful if most of the playlists are your own) it showed the number of tracks in it (again just personal preference but I'd love this).

Could you maybe have stuff in your queue?

― glenn mcdonald, Saturday, March 4, 2023 8:19 AM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Since this post, I have caught myself accidentally putting stuff in my queue from time to time. Thanks for the troubleshooting, glenn.

Just fat fingers, I guess.

New menu is a bit hair triggered. I just tried clicking on a space within the designation to find taht it started playing instead of what I was trying to listen to. I had just been trying to see if a show on my library list had any new episodes that I wasn't aware of.
Haven't liked the interface being very iffy about picking up a track/episode and shift it up the playlist queue for a while. Either doesn't pick up or may start playing and feels like the process is only minutely different. Also trying to pick up a specific track and finding it crosses a highlighted one to be replaced, or just gets left behind without you knowing. Is there a feel I'm just not getting so far, like trying to avoid one thing you wind up doping another. Ho hum. & if it's anything it's level of pressure of touch which doesn't seem to be a constant.

I find this interface really dodgy.
I thought you could click on the icon or below where the text was and just wound up with the show starting. So not sure how you get this menu thing to work if you're only seeing thumbnail for whole show as in not episode specific.
Again was trying to avoid things that worked negatively before.
& did think these menu items were there to allow further investigation not just as play right now. Like trying to work out what to cue vs arbitrarily going for anything within the designation. JUst seems a bit full blown wrong really

I'm not really following you, sorry. Which "menu" are you discussing, and what do you mean by "the designation"?

haven't tooled with desktop a lot since this change but I'm surprised they saw fit to make it this complex

New set up has what was a different page called Library incorporated into teh left hand column of the main page menu.
I think people had been talking about taht over teh last few days.
I'm not getting all updates of new episodes so thought I would check the titles/thumbnails of the shows and instead of being able to look at theings at teh same time as listening to the show or track I was playing it just switched the audio onto an episode of the show. Not sure if tehy were even current episode and thumbnail should take you to a place where you could choose the episode you listened to since the library page had that option.
So again, hating the interface. THought it looked ok when I first saw it but seems to be pretty flawed .

a thing i was curious about is whether the recent big jumps in large language model power can be used to radically optimise recommendations. it feels somewhat uh instinctively (i'm not a data scientist) like they should, given the large amount of a) structured data and b) user insight spotify has. apologies doing a shameless 'hi glenn i has a question' post. a friend of mine was moaning about spotify recommendations saying 'last.fm was better' - that hasn't been my experience particularly - 'ze algorithms' will often surface something that counts as a proper 'discovery' for me and this particular gripe felt more like 'person moans about thing not being like another thing' but it did generate this question!

I've enjoyed getting recomendations from teh program but since they keep changing everything around continually the space taht used to have the recommendations on disappears for months. I see it has returned recently but i think it is so far repeating things i already know. Have been surprised in teh past. Which actually surprises me since I am already aware of a large amount of music.

actually that’s a good point: discover weekly used to be generally v good for me. i just went hunting for it, and it’s completely off beam now. though that may be because i’m listening to a lot more cds and bandcamp these days, and spotify has become more of an erratic “ok let’s see” place.

Is the interface in Spotify still being semi randomly updated to check out what individual designers want to have a go at as it has seemed fro teh last couple of years or is there a more organised process by which things are being done.
& is everybody else having teh same experience with thumbnails not leading to menus but starting new tracks/shows playing.

Again I tried to get to a menu for a show that should have had a new episode today and tried to click on an area of the box designation for the thumbnail plus details that had worked before to get to menu to have the audio flicked over to a semi random episode. New episode hadn't come in yet anyway. So is that happening to everybody else too or is it a fault in the set up I'm using. & not sure how I'd break taht down further, Ubuntu through a computer that's a few years old or whatever. Would hope that an interface that worked on several layers of menus wouldn't arbitrarily bypass them. Would think that would be recognised to be a design flaw.

I had actually fgully extended the library section of the menu to try to avoid hitting a point that might trigger the switch.
Also the designated list area for each thumbnail/show changes due to amount of text in it which can be down to length of show name or something as simple as that. It looks like somebody took what worked on a separate page and just moved it so that it formed a column without taking into account functionality. Or that's the way it seems to be working here.

So I guess poor old Marti Caine's artist page has somehow got hijacked

https://i.imgur.com/SpLSU8m.png

Well, I got the new update and it sucks shit.

Why are my saved albums all in one column down the left? I have hundreds! I know most people on Spotify save individual songs and not whole albums but this is ridiculous.

lol does spotify have a bunch of designer-developers that get fired if they're not making changes every two months? They keep making changes that rarely make any sense. If it ain't broke leave it be.

Have they binned the TikTok style home feed then?

Mine's back to the old one after this most recent update

glad to see I'm not the only one finding these things to be a pain.
THought frequency was possibly higher than every couple of months with continual change. & I would think that motivation would be similar to my take on it. What is making things change, fire everything at teh wall and see if it sticks. Continual Beta with no user feedback or control. & several negative points repeated several times.

The left hand menu thing is bad enough with 20 odd podcasts as the content. Can see it being even worse if exponentially more albums instead. But just think it will inevitably be changed within days. It has been up for weeks already.

Are they trying to shed more people. I thought loads left at the time that MSW jumped ship opposing Joe Rogan, that group did come back at some point I still haven't worked out when. Are they thinking people will return and you will get loads of make up aural sex or something?

you can click on 'playlists' in the left hand menu to make it more or less like it was before.

I quit Spotify after Rogan and signed up for Qobuz. But Qobuz’ search function is shit and Spotify has a larger catalogue so I re-subscribed to Spotify (whomp whomp) and now I have both. May ditch them both for Apple Music now that they have the classical service, but I like also being able to buy albums from Qobuz.

you can buy albums from apple music too iirc, they still have the download service

when I said that group returned I was talking specifically about the MSW podcasts which I was surprised to find back on Spotify after making a big point of leaving in protest. Not sure what their return decision making was, them being on their own website meant I wasn't adding them to play queues and subsequently wasn't listening to them much for months. & don't know when the show reappeared on Spotify. Anybody come across what brought them back and when? I thought their reason for departure was still pretty featured on the platform.

This new interface is absolute fucking trash.

you can buy albums from apple music too