Spotify - anyone heard of it?

nice, ty

it bugs me that this one track by the Lightcrust Dough Boys isn't on Spotify. i'm sure that it's not some kind of legal thing, but probably nobody has bothered? doesn't it seem likely that the legal shit has already been approved a long time ago by whatever cell phone conglomerate owns the rights? can i request it? is that how it works?

hi i have a serious suggestion. maybe someone else who sympathizes will understand the importance of this. it's in regards to the queue function thanks for listening. i know how tedious i am.

i would like to request a "play next" option in song and album menus. it has "add to queue" but that puts it at the end. if you're like me, you use the queue almost exclusively. and it gets long. oftentimes, i'm discouraged from checking out new songs because it would require me to disrupt the queue. if i want it to play next and not disrupt the queue, i have to add it to the queue, open the queue, scroll all the way down, geab the song, scroll all the way back up, and put it next. i make mistakes frequently because i'm doing this entirely on mobile. a "play next" function (in addition to the "add to queue" function) would be incredibly useful for me.

yes Play Next would be great

this is literally why i don’t use the queue

TRACER YOU GET IT I FEEL SO SEEN OMG TY

"add to queue" always adds it as the next song in the queue for me?!?!?!

I use my hands to pick up and eat a sandwich, but I don't MAKE the sandwich in my hands. That is analogically how I feel about the queue.

i am baffled by that analogy.

but i've just had a go and on desktop and on phone 'add to queue' adds it as the next track for me, definitely, no question. i can't see any settings that would affect this behaviour.

But was your queue empty?

nope, full queue. playlist or album or autoplay. adding a song or an album or a playlist adds it as the next track or tracks. if i open the queue i then get a 'clear queue' button which clears only the tracks added via 'add to queue.

oh ok i get it. an album or playlist isn't 'the queue'. even though it shows up in the queue. ok. ignore me. carry on.

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.

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.