Spotify - anyone heard of it?

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!

more amazing that anyone still admits to and / or rationalizes subscribing to this service

It's a go-kart powered by my own sense of self satisfaction.

Anyone explored the 'Daylist' feature? It analyses what you tend to listen to at any given time of the day and serves up a playlist accordingly. This changes 3 or 4 times during the day. It does give the playlist a dumb name. Eg, my current one is called 'healing abstract tuesday (sic) morning'.

The key difference so far is that mine have actually been pretty good?

happy saxophone trumpet tuesday morning from here......

I pulled up Daylist and it offered a bunch of Drake songs wtf

in the days of pandora I remember flipping around trying to find some new age music I liked until the “algorithm” just gave up and started playing Jaheim, which totally hit the he spot somehow

he spot? the spot

Seems relevant to post here:
Spotify's Former Data Guru Tells All: A Conversation with Glenn McDonald

nice! look forward to the book

Long-time readers of this thread, where I've been before, during and after my long time at Spotify, will probably recognize many of the themes and sentiments in the book, but hopefully I did a better job of organizing them into a coherent whole than came across in individual comments here...

i'm very excited to purchase the book

I haven't popped in here to say "fuck these capitalist pigs" for a while, this is also relevant:

https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-back-as-spotify-ceo-claims-the-cost-of-creating-content-is-close-to-zero-3761004

this guy is such a piece of shit

I use YouTube Music now. Tried a couple of scrobblers on my phone but they don't work :/

so they're still messing around with the interface while not improving it.

It’s basically become worse in every way in the last year

My book, mentioned above, is now out. It contains a lot of stuff about streaming, and a fair amount of stuff about Spotify as an example of streaming, but nothing at all about Daniel Ek.

Congrats on getting the book out Glenn!

link?

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/you-have-not-yet-heard-your-favourite-song-how-streaming-changes-music-glenn-mcdonald/7590219

My copy just arrived! Exciting

awesome Glenn, just bought my copy

I'm in the middle of reading You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. Quite interesting.

I just read the part of how the Recommended feature to add songs to your playlist causes problems and specifically caused Martina McBride anguish because it took 136 recommendations before her empty playlist named "Country Music" came up with a song not by a man. The book does a good job discussing the implications of that.

I never create empty playlists so never noticed this feature before but I'm not sure if it still works or not.

When I create a playlist "American Classical Music" on Windows anyway, the recommendations are mostly tracks I play from other genres - Led Zeppelin, Bardo Pond, obscure recorder music etc. It does include Terry Jennings, who was arguably an American Classical composer. And it has a song by Stereolab, John Cage Bubblegum, which is at least a reference to my somewhat obscure genre.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6H4wMlqU40uDKQTmjDAhFV?si=60643bd5b20f40d0

I’ve just started the book. Glenn you write beautifully. I love this!

Thanks!

And yes, I can't totally tell whether they've disabled the title-matching feature on empty playlists entirely (it still says "Based on the title of this playlist" at the top, but that doesn't guarantee they haven't), or cranked up the personalization so far that the keyword results are crowded out. I just tried a blank playlist called "Reggae", which my own listening contains very little of, and no amount of Refreshing gets me anything other than lots of random selections from my existing favorites.

Coincidentally, I just wrote about over-personalization in another nearby context: https://www.furia.com/log/488

the search function seems broken

or maybe it's broken as a feature, the same way youtube search is broken these days

few real results and then down the algorithm hole

"When I create a playlist "American Classical Music" on Windows anyway, the recommendations are mostly tracks I play from other genres - Led Zeppelin, Bardo Pond, obscure recorder music etc. It does include Terry Jennings, who was arguably an American Classical composer. And it has a song by Stereolab, John Cage Bubblegum, which is at least a reference to my somewhat obscure genre."

Spotify and YouTube Music seem puzzled by classical music and as if it would really rather you dont go there. "Can we just get back to some Zeppelin please?"

I'm enjoying the book as well, very fun to read as a dev who loves music. You describe the challenges very well. Recently I requested Spotify send my full listening history so I could figure out every full album I had ever listened to, which required some data manipulation and wasn't as easy as I thought. It felt like a very simple version of what you describe in the book

Spotify and YouTube Music seem puzzled by classical music and as if it would really rather you dont go there. "Can we just get back to some Zeppelin please?"

they've now added a dynamic margin for the queue which triggers when you go to add items to the queue. are they doing this intentionally badly.

Stupid dumbarse spotify bot going through and carefully deleting any uploaded album covers for local files that feature a hint of nipple.

i asked my friend the other day (she is a well-known local musician in L.A. w/a decent fanbase in Europe) if Spotify had any noticeable effect on her career, and she said it had completely wrecked a lot of her supporting income. she said a lot of what made touring tenable was the ability to sell records and CDs at various stops, just to give her something extra every show, and that has absolutely cratered for her. fans will come see her, her albums had still received the same acclaim and attention, but the sales of physical media just aren't there anymore. she receives hardly anything from streaming.

is queue now intentionally unmanageable. you can't easily move items up queue any more. keep triggering menu which stops item from being movable or the track will start playing erasing everything above it in the queue. I'm not sure if this is just being exacerbated by the queue now giving far less space to pick up an item . does seem wilful.

i asked my friend the other day (she is a well-known local musician in L.A. w/a decent fanbase in Europe) if Spotify had any noticeable effect on her career, and she said it had completely wrecked a lot of her supporting income. she said a lot of what made touring tenable was the ability to sell records and CDs at various stops, just to give her something extra every show, and that has absolutely cratered for her. fans will come see her, her albums had still received the same acclaim and attention, but the sales of physical media just aren't there anymore. she receives hardly anything from streaming.

― omar little, Monday, July 22, 2024 9:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I will never understand why people are still shocked when they hear stories like this

she said that streaming services gaslight the hell out of musicians with respect to it, they came in as disrupters and made their billions and the musicians are left to eat shit. she did say it was something that started as far back as napster, the beginning of music being seen as without value.

They just undid the queue set up where it's a side column. Has everybody been complaining about that? Are they just beta-ing things for a few months to find out how many people are annoyed by them or sumfin?

That's par for tons of software nowadays

Just noticed that on the desktop app. How do you see your queue now?

you can't easily move items up queue any more.

It's still fairly easy to do this on your phone - just drag the song using the three bars to its right

queue opens in the main column so you hit queue and that's the main display.

i can’t really relate to this because i usually know what i want to listen to and type into the search bar but maybe others itt will relate

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/why-i-finally-quit-spotify

It's not very hard! I don't understand this article at all.

"Oh good - a small amount of friction - I can get an article out of this"

It is hard for some. Though I find it a bit of a put-on for a staff writer "covering technology and culture on the Internet."

yeah his complaints here and on twitter makes him seem like the kind of guy who would enter “albums” in the search bar

and i’m now realizing this is the guy who wrote rhat hacky algorithm book filterworld
https://maxread.substack.com/p/are-algorithms-making-us-boring