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The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

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Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#121

Post by jose_zap »

mgoetzke wrote: post #108
wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

Yes, it has happened to me on Spotify multiple times. More often, they change a song with a different version (e.g. same song from a different album or recorded live performance)

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#122

Post by nonrandomstring »

code51 wrote: post #26

The crux of Spotify was the acquisition of Echo Nest back in 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/06/spotify-e... I tend to think whatever good bits we see (Discovery being good) is sitting on the shoulders of that base work. Yet, the product values of Spotify do not align with these people or musicians anymore.

People may not know what Echo-Nest is. Since I once worked quite deeply with it, here's my thought on how Spotify might be dislodged.

Echo Nest is a set of music analysis routines that provide high level information about songs, like tempo, time signature, key, chordal modes, and other features best thought of as compositional/musical. Beneath it is a deep stack of low level signal processing parts, libaubio for example, for onset detection, spectral flux, timbre analysis, pitch estimation. These build into intermediates like chord analysis, rhythm classifiers and whatnot. Above that you can build "genre" and "mood" then cluster into a similarity space because there's few enough parameters.

It seems to me, more as a "mathematical intuition" at this stage, that advances in NN for generative work could be targeted at blind classification, bypassing the whole expensive parametric layers and do machine listening on the raw audio.

Are there any recommendation and music search systems that work this way. I expect the training prospect is terrifying, but whoever works it out first will have an alternative and possibly better route into music recommendation.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#123

Post by inferiorhuman »

wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…

CDNow was amazing before Amazon bought and killed them. Their recommendations were great and turned me on to artists I wouldn't have ever thought about otherwise.

For discoverability these days? Radio, mostly college radio. Much of it is streamed over teh intertubes. KXSF (ex-USF), KEXP (UW), KALX (Cal). Of course there's internet only stuff like SOMAFM or Midlands Metalheads. And there are aggregators like Sound Garden. But I've never once felt that Spotify was something missing from my life.

KEXP deserves a special shoutout because they put a lot of their sessions on Youtube and have an excellent production crew.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#124

Post by da39a3ee »

wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…

In the UK my public library had CDs including metal and that was how I discovered music as a teenager.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#125

Post by toyg »

SeanLuke wrote: post #105

I'd like to call attention to the incredible situation regarding Benn Jordan (The Lightbulb), Spotify, and TuneCore, which just beggars belief. Jordan uses TuneCore to distribute his music to major streaming services. He has posted a series of videos critical of Spotify among other streaming services, including the most recent, entitled "How Money Laundering W/ Spotify Works", attacking fraud on Spotify. Very soon th…

It's shit, but musicians really critical of "the system" have always had trouble with mainstream channels; nobody likes to work with someone who bites the hand that feeds them. Hence the whole punk thing - self-production, indie labels, etc etc.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#127

Post by bakugo »

>I listen to what it suggests and just accept that it will go away when it decides to rotate it out. Spotify trained me not to look too hard, to let the flow be, and if that awesome song is gone or removed, don’t worry, we still have a million more.

I just can't understand this mindset. The amount of people out there nowadays who simply listen to/watch/etc. whatever some algorithm tells them to consume, and fully accept being told "you know that one song you really like? well it's not available anymore so you can no longer listen to it, too bad", actually boggles my mind. I can't imagine an existence like that.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#128

Post by tuyiown »

lawgimenez wrote: post #114
mgoetzke wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that is great. Apple Music and others for comparison remove songs from your playlists btw, does Spotify do that too ?

I have several Spotify playlists back in 2014, I don't see any songs removed. I am not sure why Apple Music will remove them?

Quick scan on my spotify liked songs, on 331 ~5% is greyed out.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#129

Post by bj-rn »

throwaway220033 wrote: post #3

I can't stand Spotify's redesign anymore. Looking for an improved Winamp-like app with very simple interface and playlists. What should I try? Apple Music is a joke as well. I can't even play some of my custom audio files (they're not music, custom sounds) because Apple thinks they are not allowed to play in my country. I can't play my own audio files because of some buggy software Apple doesn't care about maintainin…

Maybe check out www.foobar2000.org.

Re: The day I canceled my Spotify subscription

#130

Post by vintermann »

wolframhempel wrote: post #85

I believe, Spotify is pretty much the best thing ever. I understand the criticism - but to me, this is just a sign of how far we've come. I was born in 1984 and, from a very early age, was really into Metal. That was a problem - since there were literally zero ways to discover new songs. The radio and MTV didn't play Metal. None of my friends shared my taste in Music. The listening stations at HMV & Co (remember thos…

> My entire strategy was based on going to a record store and buying whatever had appealing cover art in the metal section. And I did this A LOT.

By doing this, you supported the bands you liked, and supported experimentation by accidentally subsidizing a lot of bands which didn't turn out so great (at the very least, experimentation in cool album covers...)

But you don't actually do that on Spotify. As the article correctly points out, your subscription fee doesn't go to the artists you listen to, it goes to the artists played on Spotify as a whole - that kid playing some pop song on repeat 24/7, that restaurant playing Bangla music in the background whenever it's open, or the spammer uploading 10000 machine-generated tracks and setting an army of bots with stolen credentials to listen to them on random shuffle - they all direct Spotify's artist pool money much, much better than you.

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