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

neil.computer

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

#241

Post by anticristi »

mongol wrote: post #231
frogstomp19 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we've lost essentially nothing. In the streaming era, it's easier than ever before to discover new artists and listen to an unprecedented variety of music with minimal investment. If it's slightly cumbersome to listen to albums on Spotify, it's still much less cumbersome that going to a store to buy a CD or purchasing online and waiting for it to arrive + keeping your collection physically organized and i…

Many people bring up the "discover new music" argument. It is probably subjective, but for me this has never been an issue. There are so many way to discover new music today, there are tons on youtube and people recommend in the comments, you see a mention of something and head over to Wikipedia, follow some links, and so on. I don't need an algorithm for it, an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenu…

> an algorithm that most likely is more optimized for revenue than anything else.

Yup, that is the core issue. We have all this great tech, but then deploy it against ourselves. The peak is when FB optimized for polarized (ahem fake) content, because that is what drives "engagement".

I'm not sure what is the solution here. Regulations around more algorithmic transparency? "Low tech" alternatives? User education?

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

#242

Post by DarylZero »

motoxpro wrote: post #64
orestis wrote: post #46

The truncated text is a huge peeve of mine with designers. I get that it’s hard to design a nice grid if you have to account for text that wrapped etc, but not everyone is called Tom Smith, and not all titles are 20 characters long. A designer I know advocated that users should be coaxed into using shorter titles and descriptions so that the UI looks good. It just makes me seethe.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-little-do-users-read/ This is why they were advocating for "Concise Titles" instead of "Titles that are Short Enough to Read, but Long Enough to Convey Info!"

When you have 20 consecutive listings that all have the same first 80 characters, you don't even read those 80 characters.

But the listing only shows the part you don't read!

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

#244

Post by flycaliguy »

lapser wrote: post #43

Spotify is horrendous. Their UI is subpar. Their mix of podcasts with songs is odd at best (seriously, I never listen to podcasts, why can't I switch it off completely?). Their shuffle is just not. Imagine listening to the same 20ish songs from a playlist of nearly 2k songs. How can you mess up shuffle that bad? It's also not easy to move away from it. It requires time and effort. Time that many don't have.

Spotify was promoting a podcast to me for a while called “c*m town” (add a u). It was so gross, the album cover was written in white liquid. I could not make it go away! One of the worst UI experiences ever, actually made my stomach turn.

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

#245

Post by DarylZero »

Nextgrid wrote: post #99
raydiatian wrote: post #20

A concise explanation: functionalism is secondary to the attention economy for modern media platforms. Hard to advertise in a functional list grid, but yeah like fuck, I’m right there with you. It’s to the point where I’d rather just steal the album off of YouTube. At least there’s an ad-blocker.

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…

> a world where there are no products and everything is an advertising platform

Maybe the advertised products will all be opportunities to make money. Occasionally job listings, mostly crypto coins.

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

#247

Post by jdr23bc »

srrr wrote: post #196
mcjiggerlog wrote: post #16

This is a big frustration of mine, too. The other is that Spotify is extremely biased towards playlist listening and makes browsing and listening to a library of albums really painful. The good news is that Spotify's SDK and API are actually powerful enough that you can build up an entire alternative interface, which is actually what I recently started doing: https://i.imgur.com/ar7VrYy.png . It's still work in progr…

15 years ago when I worked in the music streaming space we also had to push users to playlists instead of albums. The reason, in Germany at least, was that a playlist only payed 1/10 the royalties to the GEMA [1] than an album playthrough. Playlists were classified as ¨radio¨ and thus a performance of the radio station but an album was the performance of the original artist. Our interface was optimized for low royalt…

AFAIK royalties are paid out for every stream over 30 seconds long. The 'context' (album, playlist, single play) doesn't matter. "royalties [are] based on an artist’s share of overall streams across the platform" [1]

My guess is that playlists lead to more engagement than albums. Users listen longer, and discover new music, which leads to more listening in the future.

[1] https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/?question=per-stream-rate

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

#248

Post by joshspankit »

No.

Because even though you pay for the subscription, they are still getting paid to promote artists, albums, and tracks while also trying to keep you on the platform for more time by offering playlists made by themselves (more opportunity to promote) or other users.

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

#249

Post by WeZzyNL »

What I hate most about Spotify is: after meticulously adding songs to a queue, accidentally tapping a song near the end of the queue just to see the entire queue being cleared up to that song.

It’s just mind-boggling and creates some sort of anxiety during using the app.

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

#250

Post by joshspankit »

hanoz wrote: post #149
pnut wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I suspect this comment is GPT3 generated. Regardless, it was hilariously absurd.

Oh no, can it already be that the memory of 90s internet culture is indistinguishable from the mad ravings of an intelligent machine?

The neon Turing test.
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