Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I just read about this. Apparently some kind of streaming iTunes looking service with rights to all the majors cleared. Could be interesting? If nothing else just to see it fail miserably...

trying this now. blatant rip of itunes design-wise but looks better in many ways. all i really want to do with it is listen to whole albums easily and it seems to let you do that very well (i haven't heard the ads yet tho).

20 second xbox ad came in after 5 songs. not bad really.

needs last.fm support asap

the ads don't bother me that much either, haven't noticed if 5 songs is always the limit? in any case it's 5 songs of any length, and you can listen to "In C" for example straight through which is cool.

I love it!

I think there is progress towards spotify scrobbling happening here:

http://www.last.fm/group/Scrobble+for+Spotify

carsmile sent this link: http://code.google.com/p/scrobblify/

scrobbles perfectly

for Windows maybe!

Yeah this looks terrific, I like how easy it makes it to dip into artists with huge discographies.

Although I haven't actually listened yet, just been browsing so far.

i am so in love with this thing <3

some artist tag crapness tho

the radio is fun for discovering things totally insane and cheesy

Oh wow the quality is actually pretty good.

The radio thing is indeed cool. I'm trying to get it to find me some techno from the 50s.

the quality is good, the range not so much, but this could well prove useful.

Presumably the range will increase as they agree deals with more record companies? It seems fine for major label stuff and a quick search for eg Kompakt pulls up a lot.

does it pass the melt banana test?

the range seems identical to what's on 7digital (and therefore itunes i think). eg they have trina's first and third albums but inexplicably not her second or fourth. i dunno how much use i'll have for spotify but kudos for how well it works, the quality of the tracks etc - the tags need ironing out but i'm sure they'll do this in time.

actually it'll be most useful for stuff like the goldfrapp album this year - i didn't really expect to love it but i wanted to hear it, so obv i wouldn't buy it but couldn't be arsed blagging it. that's a ton of consumer laziness in there.

oh god i should've said i was american! fuck. could've got access to all the hip-hop and r&b which never makes it over to this godforsaken, miserable island.

Do they have a license for the US now? I don't think they did a couple of weeks ago...

Four MB albums, Deano: Teeny Shiny, Bambi's Dilemma, Charlie and Scratch or Stitch.

does not work in australia yet

Just searched for The Recession and that shows up in its entirety, and it hasn't been released here at all right?

It's really good for the one-album playback when you've no idea if you'll like it or not and can't be arsed downloading.

yeah i'm basically going through albums i've been wondering about checking out but didn't have the hd space for.

no the recession was released here, but the label didn't bother telling the pr - she only realised when she looked on amazon and found it had been there for a fortnight

"80s funk house disco" radio suggests Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers!

> Four MB albums, Deano

thanks. we don't have any, amazon.co.uk mp3 store has scratch n stitch and a couple of tracks from compilations, emusic had a lot... all these people seem to be getting their info from the same places though, they all make the same mistakes (search for broadcast on amazon - details are about duophonic / warp broadcast but the listed albums aren't)

One detail I like: when it gets to the end of what I've queued up, it just continues with the current album without me needing to ask it to. (I suppose I can see how someone might not like this, though.)

Finally got round to sorting scrobbling for this (there's a windows messenger box ticked by default in the last.fm client that somehow stops Scrobblify from working). So far I'm really liking Spotify - handy for hearng stuff you randomly think on that you haven't got in your library or for legal trying before you buy. The adverts don't annoy me in the slightest.

fails Boredoms test :(

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

anyone got a spotfiy INVITE?

If not, try the "oooh ask me please!" option on the website ("Get started" -> email in "Not invited?" field). Took about five days for me, was surprised to get it at all actually.

jordan, webmail me an email address to send an invite to.

didn't get asked for an invite here, just got straight in

This is amazing! You type in what you want to listen to, and then you are listening to it. all this needs is to work on an iphone, and then i'll buy an iphone, and then i will have achieved bliss.

Mine appears to have made it through an album without giving me any adverts. Maybe they've bumped me up to a pro account without realising it.

you can now scrobble to last.fm from within spotify (it's in 'preferences')

That's handy, saves me running that scrobblify thing at the same time.

Spotify lists 'The Prodigy' as 'Prodigy' and makes last.fm think this guy sings Smack My Bitch Up and Out of Space
http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/252/17704623.jpg

can someone please send me an invite?

thanks!!

Er....

https://www.spotify.com/en/get-started/

Think there's still a waiting list though.

<3 this service btw.

Got in straight away with the link I posted.

Aha they've obviously opened it up!

Downside is loads more ads (I've heard two during the same album), but you can hear them coming after a while and tune out. Still great.

thanks Chewshabadoo but I need an invitation code.

Please!

If i hear gareth jones from cardiff reciting pi again i'll scream

(advert)

And I'm not buying that White Lies record either.

At least it doesn't scrobble the adverts

jonathan from spotify sounds remarkably like Michael Vaughan

I don’t necessarily see the background music thing as a Spotify only phenomenon. I listened to a bunch of Japanese ambient albums on Youtube and for years all my recommendations have been for things like “6 hours of soothing piano music” and stuff like that.

Spotify updates shuffle to prioritize variety over strict randomness
https://www.androidauthority.com/spotify-updates-shuffle-3615645/

It's a common-sense change, but Premium users can choose to opt out.

This is interesting as I have been very skeptical it is purely random, I have seen patterns on particular lists where certain releases and tracks appeared to be prioritized over others. For example, playing the "hit" from an album more often than other tracks, or not adding recent releases to shuffle for several weeks. Maybe this is the result of randomness, but I've seen it happen too often.

I long suspected, when I worked there, that the most insidious problem with the existing shuffle was not its degree of randomness, but that the playback sequencer would lose track of where it was in a very-adequately-random order and thus end up repeating parts of it. The new option sounds like a fix designed for exactly this failure mode, so I'm going to take it as evidence that I was right.

i know nothing about the specs of this, but what glenn just described is the single most frustrating thing about my spotify user experience. especially when switching between devices, it happens every time. so if this new update addresses that, huh... interesting.

playing the "hit" from an album more often than other tracks

I've experienced this, too. In fact, often times the hit is the first song on a "random" playlist. On the other hand, I've considered that the hit probably shows up on more collections and playlists than other songs, so maybe that factors into its frequency?

Am I the only person who hardly ever uses shuffle?

I never use shuffle, not on purpose. Often (always?) it'll keep going after the album I picked ended, and usually that's OK.

There's no way the old shuffle was random. I had a playlist that was like 4 days long and anytime I hit shuffle I would get the same 100 songs or so (which I assumed it picked because it thought what i wanted to here most, using my play history). Hated the spotify shuffle.

Tidal shuffle is just as bad. I wish there was a user setting where I could switch from Bullshit Algorithm to Random Number Generator. But even more, I wish there was a setting called Exclude Songs for (user-determined amt of time) after Playing in Shuffled List.

Spotify Wrapped 2025 adds its first multiplayer feature with ‘Wrapped Party’
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/spotifys-2025-wrapped-becomes-a-multiplayer-experience/

Spotify Wrapped 2025 launches – here’s how to see your top songs, artists, albums and more
https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-wrapped-2025-launches-heres-how-to-see-your-top-songs-artists-albums-and-more-3915338

Anyone else have albums in your top 5 that you don't recognize?

lame

My most played song came out 20 years ago. Guess I was feeling nostalgic.

friendly reminder: last.fm has existed for over a decade.

i'm not anti-streaming, but if you like this kind of coalesced data, last.fm is neat, and free. no, it doesn't make a little powerpoint presentation.

that being said, my wrapped has a ton of indie r+b that i highly recommend. i'm still not sharing it. sorry, spotify.

friendly reminder: last.fm has existed for over a decade.

over two decades iirc!

Last.fm is a music website founded in the United Kingdom in 2002.

i happily stand corrected!

last post, i swear.

last.fm also better at social networking integration.

I was using Spotify for musicleague, but now that's over, I'm going to delete it.

Spotify updates shuffle to prioritize variety over strict randomness

after living with this update for a while, it doesn't work. i'm still getting the same 15-20 songs day after day on a playlist of 600+ tracks and 40+ hrs of content.

Same as that. If I try and skip those, they then come back.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

this is wild! incredible

https://annas-archive.li/blog/spotify/sel_06_albums_timeline.png

a lot of releases these days...

both those annas archive links fail to resolve, like "address not found" errors. blocked by isp?

must be, it is quite illegal tbh

apparently they were able to scrape all metedata and music from spotify and will release it publically via massive torrents as an archive

We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity.

This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.

It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

they do a bit of data analysis based on the metadata, the image linked shows albums released per year, here in an imgur copy that should load:

https://i.imgur.com/C2f1cqI.png

Only with a VPN in the UK, lol (Imgur no longer serves this country). I can load Anna's Archive, meanwhile 😆

it is quite illegal tbh

Ironically so, as Spotify filled its catalog at its formation by torrenting music from the usual suspects.

have to admit this made me laugh for a good 20 minutes when i saw it yesterday. good on anna's archive for this one!

However, these existing efforts have some major issues:
1. Over-focus on the most popular artists.

We primarily used Spotify’s “popularity” metric to prioritize tracks.

?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgke0n73r22o?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

An indie band has claimed their music was stolen and recreated by artificial intelligence (AI) after they shared a short teaser online.

Milton Keynes group Torus decided to release a grunge-style cover of Billie Eilish's Ocean Eyes after a clip of them performing the song began to "blow up a little bit" on TikTok.

Before they could release their version, a similar track appeared on Spotify, uploaded by an artist called Independent Lemon, which predominantly uploads covers and has no social media presence, record label or live show dates.

Torus believed someone used generative AI on their snippet to "predict what the rest of the song was going to be".

The Independent Lemon version began with what sounded like a clip of Torus performing the song, but it continues for a few more minutes longer, the band claimed.

Singer and guitarist Alfie Glass said he initially thought a "real person" had done a "cover of our cover" and had done a "pretty good job".

Drummer Jack Orr added: "It took me a minute to realise that came from our initial clip, someone had just taken that clip and looped it a few times, but then I think AI had done something to it to - it added a riff or something."

The account has nearly 700,000 monthly listeners and has uploaded about 100 singles over the last year.

Many of these are covers, and some have earned millions of streams.

There were versions of Michael Jackson, Lorde and the Macarena - sometimes done in a different genre, sped up or slowed down.

https://www.billboard.com/business/streaming/spotify-music-library-leak-1236143970/

statement: “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping. We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior. Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”

ok please fuck off

Not sure I get the point of why this scraping is so great. Does anyone want to download torrents of tens of millions of albums?

No, but it does make it available to anyone who is looking to train AI on the data.

oh wonderful then

ogg vorbis files at 160kbps? no thanks, I'll stick to rutracker

Spotify adds real-time listening activity to Messages, with group chats coming soon
There's also a new Request to Jam feature, making it easier to start shared listening sessions with friends.
https://www.androidauthority.com/spotify-messages-listening-activity-request-to-jam-3630507/

Spotify Messages now offers an opt-in Listening activity feature, allowing connected friends and family to see what you are playing in real-time.
A new Request to Jam button has been added to chats, making it easier to coordinate and start remote shared listening sessions.
The features are rolling out to iOS and Android users in markets where Messages is enabled. Group chat support is planned for the near future.

trash

Didn’t they do this like 15 years ago and then completely abandon that feature? i still have “friends” on Spotify that I can no longer chat to or share songs with but whose activity I can see

The fact that early on they removed the notifications when playlists were updated feature leading to Companion for Playlists being created THEN shutting that down to bring it back last year but WORSE...

Not Spotify specific probably, but another AI artist is making the charts:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/spotify/the-hottest-neo-soul-artist-on-spotify-doesnt-exist

Prior to today, I had never heard of up-and-coming neo-soul act Sienna Rose before, but based on social media today, it seems a lot of people had—she’s got three songs in the Spotify top 50 and boasts a rapidly rising listener count that’s already well into the millions. She is also, importantly, not real. That’s right, the so-called “anonymous” R&B phenom with no social media presence, digital footprint, or discernible personal traits is AI generated. Who would’ve thunk?

Well, not Selena Gomez, it seems. Two days ago, the “Come & Get It” singer posted a photo dump on Instagram after the Golden Globes and soundtracked it to “Where Your Warmth Begins,” a Sienna Rose “original,” computer-created vocals crooning soulfully through the screen (rather ironic, considering Sienna Rose is inherently soulless, being a series of numbers and all). The post has 1.3 million likes.

i suppose i should've counted on there being traitors and collaborators within the musician community but it's still sad to see

a scummy company from the jump

Has anyone else got the Beta "Prompted Playlists" feature? Unlike the crappy "AI Playlists" one they launched last year this one actually allows you to draw on your own data, so you can say something like "Songs by 70s female singer-songwriters that I haven't listened to since 2020" or whatever and have it auto-update daily or weekly if you want. It also attempts to make the playlist flow well.

Also, this popped up on Google Discover:

The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete

Sensationalist headline but wondered what those with more understanding of the business model of streamers than me had to say about its thesis.

Has anyone else got the Beta "Prompted Playlists" feature?

Yes, comes under the sub-heading: Prompted by us, made for you

examples:

My First Plays on Spotify

My Rediscover Weekly

What's My Musical Enneagram?

i'm a bit skeptical of an article that has a graph with "SaaS = exponential profit" on it