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Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

neil.computer

421–430 of 504 posts

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

> I can access basically every song ever recorded Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time. Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side,…

Worse is that the missing stuff is constantly shifting. I'll add a whole album (worth of songs) to a playlist, and a few months later one of them is grayed out but the rest still work.

The Spotify forums seem to suggest this is because someone licensed that one song differently and conditions have changed, so I'm no longer entitled to play it.

That seems bonkers to me, but regardless of the reason, the effect is infuriating.

I ditched Spotify a while back and I'm slowly clawing my way back into physical CDs, ripping and encoding (or not even bothering to encode; storing as plain WAV still doesn't take that much space given modern hard drives), and trying to ensure that songs don't vanish out from under me ever again.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see is that the "attention economy"'s end goal is still to be a marketing platform for real, paid products . It won't work in a world where there are no products and everything is an advertising platform - people won't be paying for the "privilege" of seeing ads. The market has been distorted by VCs and investors who are willing to throw shit tons of money towards anything that "grows" and generates eng…

read the book "subprime attention crisis"

I will give Spotify UX one thing: the mobile version has a great feature where if I just double click the tab menu button that opens up search, it shoots me straight into my keyboard. That needs to be standard.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dystopian you say? For $15 a month I can access basically every song ever recorded at the click of a button, wirelessly on an ultrapowerful mobile computing device that fits comfortably in my pocket. Place yourself in about 1997 and savor that statement for a moment. But what have we gained?

Dystopia is when I have to use electron and a slightly inconvenient UI. HN users must have pretty comfy lives.

isn't that.. exactly what a dystopia is? The archetypical dystopia is superficially utopian, often driven by tech progress and excess of comfort. They're not torturing people in cages in Brave New World, they're giving them too much Soma

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#425
post #153
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered about this. I had sooooo many songs saved yet I have been only listening to probably 20% of them. Why is that?

Revenues from licensing. Full stop.

Can you elaborate please? I thought their revenue was from users periodic subscriptions. Do you mean there are certain songs with lower licensing costs that the algorithm will prefer?

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#426
I mostly quit listening to Joe Rogan's podcast after it left YouTube. I'd watch when he had an interesting guest that showed up in my recommendations. A while back a co-worker told me about a recent episode I should check out. Reluctantly, I went to Spotify to check it out. It took me a good 20 minute, and a lot of just scrolling through page after page of podcasts, until I actually found it. You'd think after spending $50M on the guy they wouldn't make it so hard to find. The search and navigation was horrendous. I listened to maybe 20 minutes of the podcast, quit to go do something else, and never went back.

I don't particularly like what Apple Music has become, when compared to the iTunes from the music-only era, but it's still dramatically better than Spotify.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can access basically every song ever recorded Not really, there is a lot missing from Spotify, and not just obscure music. And you have to accept the fact that music may (and does) go missing at any time. Plus, even for songs that are on the platform, you are forced to listen to what version they have, which is almost always a "remastered" version. Example: early Beatles songs have vocals hard-panned to one side,…

How does this work for you then: Spotify allows the vast majority of music listeners far more access to far more music than ever in history.

That's very true but so is Sturgeon's law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#428

I use Winamp for my MP3 collection that I downloaded of my T1 line at the office. When I turn that mother up on and my CRT monitor starts smoking because of the Winamp addons that spikes all kinds of shit whenever the tune is changing, then I know I have found the right track. Then I get cracking on the floor. Break dancing and caps flying around. The neighbors come jumping in the door and starts clapping and the mus…

We should hang out some time.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical storage space. ;) My laptop is smaller than any collection of CDs and can store an entire building of them in the space of 12 jewel cases. If you include my phone and a cellular connection for streaming, the entire world of music can be accessed in a device smaller than any portable CD player. And the speakers in my iPhone are better than most stereos from the same era. We truly live in the world where scien…

The speakers... A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1] After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our abili…

100% agree. I got a new MBP in 2020 and its sound is shockingly good. I had never experienced decent sound from laptop speakers before.

Re: Dear Spotify, can we just get a table of songs?

#430
Hear hear! Spotify's UI/ux choices have frustrated me more and more over the years. Do any of their employees use their clients? Why is artist not a column that I can sort. Why such terrible uses of space? What happened to the social features? I'm not on any social platforms but it'd be fun to easily see, share, comment on friends' playlists.
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