Spotify - anyone heard of it?

we've gone from a society that reads books to one that watches 20 second videos, from a society that listens to or god forbid sings and plays music to one that listens to literal static /uncool conservative opinions

I guess the Spotify response is "What about it?" and an implicit confirmation that playlists are product placement and that the competition is biased / flawed / nepotism.
I would say Johan Röhr is an actual musician, I'm not shocked that stock nature sounds are on the platform, and I can even accept that different business models for different customers cohabit on the platform. But allowing for money-making schemes / free-loaders appears more significant than they're admitting here.

Yeah, I do feel the "fake artist" angle is flawed, like... it's pretty common to release music under assumed names

the playlist placement thing sounds an awful lot like payola, but hard to tell if Röhr's distributor is on a discovery mode type deal https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/3-things-to-know-about-spotifys-controversial-new-pay-for-influence-tool-discovery-mode/

In any part of the Spotify Service, the Content that you access, including its selection and placement, may be influenced by commercial considerations, including Spotify's agreements with third parties.

I'm surprised if paying for playlist placement isn't illegal

"Swedish chillout playlist scam" worthy of the next We Didn't Start the Fire

Swedish chillout playlist scam
Houthis funded by Iran
Blame it on the TikTok ban
Desantis and his boots

payola is the weed smoking of the music industry: some people do it proudly, others on the dl, others fiercly opposed. its legality is always a grey area, everybody has an opinion and, more importantly, everyone does it.

also that was incredible, table.

I thought payola was illegal because it was happening on the public airwaves. This is more like publishers paying for bookstore displays or something.

Yeah I am not a Swedish lawyer, but I wouldn't assume it would necessarily be illegal for Spotify to make $$ deals for playlist placement...

haha irl lol Austin

also beautiful work by table and Keyes

tbc I was lolling bcz of yr description being delectably otm

Each week, more and more of Discover Weekly being cluttered up with bullshit forgettable winsome little 2-minute tracks that credit (and maybe sample, minutely?) 6 different artists, 1 of which I follow, and that nobody ever needs to listen to, called things like 'Sip and Groove'.

Even worse, mine has Catatonia songs on it

yeah I stopped using mine a long time ago, kinda sad since in the beginning it was quite useful

I hesitate to use the term enshittification, but all the same it seems like there's a big algorithm supported move towards unobtrusive mellow vibe music, not necessarily ambient, but very functional

Curious if anyone else has noticed Spotify pushing the same artist to them on autoplay over and over again recently? Regardless of what I play, when it ends, they seem to throw a Beck song on for me. I have nothing against Beck but rarely listen to him and don't know why the algorithm thinks I am constantly in the mood for more Beck.

turn autoplay off maybe

Despite having a multi-billion-dollar net worth, you decided to stop paying artists for songs with less than 1,000 streams (months before giving Joe Rogan $250,000,000). So I made a playlist of 300+ great songs with less than 1,000 streams to give them more visibility and plays. https://t.co/IwLJ8lgT01

— Micro-Chop (@micro_chop) March 29, 2024

xp I have, and I have verified it's off! It just autoplays anyway.

yeah same

the spotify interface has become a nightmare that actively discourages me from doing what I want to do (listen to full albums at once), should I just switch to Apple Music?

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) April 16, 2024

Spotify is absolutely desperate for me to never seek out the thing I want to listen to specifically and instead just take one of its recommendations or play something again that I played recently. This is the "music" tab pic.twitter.com/bfEFuaDj4t

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) April 16, 2024

I don't think it's too much to say that this algorithmic interface is absolutely wrecking our relationship to culture and turning us into passive consumers who don't pay real attention to anything. I wrote this in 2021 but it's so much worse now https://t.co/c5E6KpyzmK

— Kyle Chayka (@chaykak) April 16, 2024

I don't get it. Did Spotify get rid of search?

Is he asking for there to be a menu of albums to choose from like when you pull up Netflix?

sounds like a skill issue

i think it's a complaint about the way you _browse_ (not search) for albums being a moving target that is increasingly hard to find and difficult to use.

I guess the idea of Spotify as a browsing service is foreign to me, but I suppose now that record stores are gone it's what's left.

Yeah, I'm not getting his complaint either. Is Spotify supposed to know what he specifically wants to listen to?

And my music tab/home page/whatever will often have recommended albums based on my listening history, which seems like a good thing to me 🤷‍♂️

I see people complaining that it's getting harder to discover new music on Spotify. I don't know if that's true. I mean sure it can be annoying that anytime I listen to an electronic album I can tell it's over because "Xtal" starts auto-playing.

The weird thing is that he has a book about how algorithms are flattening us into passive consumers, yet he's looking for a streaming service to offer up recommendations rather than actively seeking out new music.

But given that his listening history is all Vampire Weekend albums, he probably does need some help.

Lol

And yeah xp

The algorithms occasionally throw up something interesting but most of the new music I discover is the same way it's always been: recommendations from friends, threads on here or other forums, magazine and website reviews/features etc etc

I use Tidal myself, but do keep a (free) Spotify acct, and I think he's putting his thumb on the scale by visiting the "Music" tab... the "All" tab seems to have what I assume he's looking for (Recently Played, Popular Albums, Your Favorite Artists, etc.). The "Music" tab is weirdly anemic for me – it has nine different selections (a grab-bag of playlists and albums, only a few related to what I've liked / listened to). Not a tab I would visit!

also might be "putting his thumb on the scale" by cropping out the search bar and then saying "Spotify is absolutely desperate for me to never seek out the thing I want to listen to"

"I want to listen to a specific album. Why doesn't it magically get suggested to me on the home page?"

The people who don't care that much are the passive consumers, and a minority of people are actively seeking/curating, and I think that's fine? Most people over 25 don't care that much about music.

Also in what imagined past was this situation better? Does this guy miss the monoculture?

I basically only ever use Spotify to listen to specific entire albums, and I'm pretty sure I've never felt "discouraged" in my quest.

performative stupidity, he’s just doing that passive aggressive thing, yknow like people who say “hmmm what does gratuity fee mean? where’s the line for me to put the tip?”

“should I just switch to Apple Music?”

The people who don't care that much are the passive consumers, and a minority of people are actively seeking/curating, and I think that's fine? Most people over 25 don't care that much about music.

Yeah, in the past most people just listened to the radio, how much has really changed? (On the consumption side, as opposed to the remuneration side, of course).

They did finally add the thing to tell you what playlist(s) a song is already in at least.

That's been a big improvement for me. It also makes it much easier to remove an entire album from a playlist when I'm using the mobile app.

keep having thumbnails for shows I listen to a lot not connecting. being told oops can't find that page. rotten set up.

this isn't even the first time that Kyle Chayka had vern

muscle memory that builds up when you use a piece of software every day, like your thumb going directly to the Instagram app button on your phone screen. Spotify had updated its interface and suddenly I was lost. I couldn’t put on the jazz record by Yusef Lateef that I play every morning when I start writing and I couldn’t figure out where to find the songs I had saved by pressing the heart-shaped like button. The sudden lack of spatial logic was like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. Spotify’s new “Your Library” tab, which implied everything I was looking for, opened up a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense.

oops...posted too soon

this isn't even the first time that Kyle Chayka has been disoriented by Spotify.

an excerpt from his book:
https://kylechayka.substack.com/p/essay-the-digital-death-of-collecting


"I opened the Spotify app on my laptop a few weeks ago and found that everything I had saved was in disarray. The albums weren’t where I thought they were. I couldn’t flip through them with my usual clicks, the kind of subconscious muscle memory that builds up when you use a piece of software every day, like your thumb going directly to the Instagram app button on your phone screen. Spotify had updated its interface and suddenly I was lost. I couldn’t put on the jazz record by Yusef Lateef that I play every morning when I start writing and I couldn’t figure out where to find the songs I had saved by pressing the heart-shaped like button. The sudden lack of spatial logic was like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. Spotify’s new “Your Library” tab, which implied everything I was looking for, opened up a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense."

I like Chayka generally, though I think he's overstating the degree of bewilderment here to make his broader point about how algorithms shape our experience. The book is unfortunately kind of lazy in its argumentation, even as his contentions *feel* right if you are, like him, a longtime internet user who's become recently disenchanted with it.

I really don't understand his thing about these services turning us into passive consumers if even a small app update throws him into an existential crisis. It's like someone throwing themself on the floor at Tower Records because they have to walk past the magazine section to get to the CDs.

I do get that Spotify emphasizing playlists might make some people less likely to play full albums, but to complain so hard about app feng shui is weird.

Looks like they’re reducing royalties by classifying their regular Premium service as an audiobook bundle (after introducing a standalone audiobook tier): https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/spotify-music-audiobook-bundle-lower-royalty-for-songwriters-1235974942/

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations

Fortune headline

https://fortune.com/europe/2024/04/23/spotify-earnings-q1-ceo-daniel-eklaying-off-1500-spotify-employees-negatively-affected-streaming-giants-operations/

But he says they’re back on track now on a path to long term profitability.

Ugh

what a piece of shit that guy is. it's amazing to me he's even willing to show his face in public!