Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy).

It might be because I live in Brooklyn.

And there's no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora.

edit: Don't think anyone compromised my account.

When I first started listening to Spotify (about a year and a half ago), I found the dicovery really high-quality, but it just seems to have gotten worse and worse. Discover Weekly is particularly bad. I find that the first 5 or so songs are okay, but from there is rapidly decends into madness.

I have the weird habit (though I'm weening off) of keeping all the music I listen to out of curiosity on a big playlist together, whether I liked it or not, as a way of keeping track. I thought that might be throwing Spotify's algorithm off (and it probably still is), but it seems it's definitely not the only reason.

I've decided to just trust that Last.fm is doing it's juob and not add any more to that playlist.

I love the daily mixes, though thats mostly just sorting the music I normally listen to into genres. I still find it kinda cool. Especially that I always get a mix with my kids' tastes, since I often play music for them.

I disagree about the native app, though. PWDs are where it's at now. Native apps are doomed.* I didn't even download it on my new MBP, it was slow and buggy. The web version is good enough for me, combined with web-scrobbler for Chrome so I can still scrobble to Last.fm.

[*] https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-doomed-a...

There may be some odd connection made internally, between fans of some specific genres and Dutch rap, and you were unlucky enough to be hit by it.

I get why Spotify doesn't want to expose the connections their algorithms make (because that's their biggest competitive advantage), but it would be nice to dig through once in a while, to see the connections they've made.

It appears to me that they include Discover weekly consumption in determining preferences. Any personalised Spotify playlist should be excluded to avoid this kind of reinforcement.

Hah, imagine that, AI Cognitive Biases!

No idea why they hid it there, and there only.

I do love it though, generally speaking although being a heavy daily user I'm not sure the discovery part is actually as good as it initially appears.

I listen almost exlusively to hard rock and metal, and all of my auto-generated playlists are absolutely stellar in their selection.

It seems that once Spotify lumps you in with a specific segment, it's hard to get out of it again.

On the other hand what I do like is the playlist radio that comes on after you finish listening to a playlist. I find that a great way to find new music and new artists.

    $ ls -lh /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/Frameworks/
    total 0
    drwxr-xr-x  5 jjgod  staff   160B Nov  7  2016 Chromium Embedded Framework.framework
    drwxr-xr-x  3 jjgod  staff    96B Nov  7  2016 Spotify Helper EH.app
    drwxr-xr-x  3 jjgod  staff    96B Nov  7  2016 Spotify Helper.app

Is IKEA effect at play? Without Spotify, I would only start another artist when I finished the current one. So, with Spotify it becomes an information management problem due to the large amount of albums available at a click. Or it could just be that my life has changed and I don't have a time slot dedicated to music anymore.

I was able to recognise any song in my collection in less than 5 seconds, give you the artist, how I discovered it and potentially an anecdote about them.

Now I have playlists full of stuff I know nothing about. It definitively solved the music distribution issue, but I have trouble to be emotionally attached to the music I discover on Spotify.

I think your theory about the IKEA effect is probably spot(ify) on

I love Spotify, but I use Pandora sometimes _exclusively_ for music discovery, and then add to my Spotify.

[1] https://www.jqbx.fm

Are you worried about any Spotify terms of service issues?

There's no way to know if I listened to that track in full because I liked it or because I had it on in the background while doing other work and it wasn't distracting enough (usually the latter is the case for me). Furthermore if I skip a track they don't know if I skipped it because I didn't like it or I wasn't in the mood for that style of music, or I was just sick of that song cause I've heard it enough in the past X listens.

There's no way to easily signal to spotify why I'm taking an action, and yet their algorithms are trying to make assumptions over every little action.

For posterity, I have a little under 1000 tracks saved from 200 or so artists (of which I am following around half), around 50 favorite album playlists and about as many "I should give this album a listen" playlists.

So not really a huge collection in absolute terms. It is very much focused on hard rock and metal, though.

I miss the forums, IRC rooms, and insane collection of obscure music though. Not sure that will ever be totally recreated.

> My only wish is they'd get off Electron (EDIT Chromium - thanks jjgod) and go native. A music player is a frequently enough used piece of software to optimize for performance.

I agree, but I also think it's probably the main reason we have a semi-official Spotify client on linux.

My discover weekly playlist ALWAYS contains at least one song in Portoguese and at least two in German. I speak neither of those languages, and I've never willingly searched and played songs in those languages (except for "99 Luftballons" once).

I also get some terrible variation of "Here comes the sun" at least once a month despite not listening to The Beatles at all. [0] is the one that I hate the most.

Spotify, please sthap. I can't take any more Portoguese, German, and "Here comes the sun" cover songs.

[0] https://open.spotify.com/track/5PWh3rG5zWv7hVvWHRMbsf

As much as I love the notion, I have to conclude that Discover Weekly's mediocrity is just another piece of evidence that the world actually did end in 2012, and ever since, we've been living in a simulation. A simulation where the level of petty annoyance is carefully adjusted to a maximum, remaining ever so slightly within the bounds of believability. (In November 2016, someone spilled coffee on the controls.)

totally?

The discover weekly algorithm seems to latch on to outliers, I guess.

I think it's a newer feature so maybe it just hasn't made its way to mobile yet.

I have no big issues with the desktop Spotify app. I find it better than iTunes.

It's the Android app that Spotify need to fix.

There are plenty of songs which I've added to playlists, only to find a year or two later are no longer available due to expired licenses. Some of my favorite artists and labels - Drag City is a big one - aren't available on Spotify at all (usually due to objections to the royalty structure). Many live albums, and more obscure and vintage releases are often nigh-impossible to find, or only have one or two songs from the album: likely those that have been licensed previously for use on TV etc.

Spotify is great, but it will forever be fighting the friction of music licensing and fair monetization.

I also like the artist and song radio options which work well for office background music.

IIRC they moved to Chromium to ensure decoupled releases and faster iteration (starting at ~9:35: https://vimeo.com/85490944).

I think the last time I tried to price a single one of my playlists, it'd cost me thousands to buy the songs and that's without trying to track down FLACs.

It wouldn't surprise me if they end up killing their golden goose out of sheer incompetence, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_eXchange_Protocol

I've reached out to Spotify's support over Twitter and they were like keep listening to more music and it will correct itself, but so far it hasn't. :(

I think it would be a good suggestion on their Community Ideas board, I would certainly vote for it.

1) Electron needs to be good about sharing memory between multiple electron processes. If I have Slack, VSCode and spotify open, then memory shouldn't be tripled.

2) Better app development. It is quite possible to make performant electron apps. Apart from the memory hit of spinning up blink, if you manage your views and JS well, both memory and CPU usage can be quite reasonable.

3) I really do like Electron apps because it's a very consistent experience, no matter the platform. Developing for Mac or Linux is not an after-thought. It's always in Parity. I can see how that is both a great user experience and makes great business sense. There is a reason why React Native is gaining so much popularity: Consistent experience, write once, deploy everywhere, much smaller and maintainable codebase.

Spotify allowed me to listen what I want, where I want. I don't like their chromium based application, but if it's the only way that they continue developing their Linux client, I'll not whine about it.

However, nothing beats owning the albums. So if the album passes a certain value in my mind, I buy it either on CD or from iTunes for archival and listening on my proper audio system, because all the snake oil and hype aside, nothing beats warmth of a good old amplifier, a decent DAC, and some big, good speakers.

Here is a blog post that describes one of their machine learning models using neural networks. http://benanne.github.io/2014/08/05/spotify-cnns.html

I would love to hear some recommendations for streaming services that can accommodate my tastes. I'm a fairly fluent in Japanese so Japanese-native services are fine too, but I'm not aware if any exists.

Not to mention the SSD-destroying & CPU-hogging habits of the application. That being said, I still use Spotify because I really value the music discovery and algorithms... and nobody else offers a streaming service with a dark theme :)

If it were any other application, I wouldn't care. But because this is the second most frequently piece of software I use (browser being first), I'd love for it to be as performant as possible.

My only issue with discover weekly is how heavily it weights the music you've listened to most recently. I guess thats part of the whole weekly aspect, but I wish they would give you recommendations based on your whole listening history.

Spotify provided an extremely convenient and inexpensive alternative, with the added bonus of curated playlists and automatic recommendations.

I've been wondering whether paying for a Bandcamp album every so often to match the cost of Spotify, and pirating music otherwise would actually benefit artists more.

I've read that Spotify pays fractions of a cent per play, where as Bandcamp pays out quite well, better than iTunes and Google Play.

If you want a streaming service more like Spotify you might also check out Resonate Cooperative https://resonate.is/ which has a stream-to-own model.

Discovering new music is low cost, repeated listens double until the ninth, upon which you own the track outright. You can then download or stream that track for free.

Still ramping up but I'm excited about their prospects.

Personally I like a distinction between looking for music and having it DRM-free offline on my hard drive.

https://resonate.is/in-the-details/status/

Already signed up.

No. Your monthly $10, after Spotify and the labels get their majority cut, goes by percentage to the most popular artists on the service, with absolutely no regard to which artists you have personally listened to, so if you have even remotely obscure taste you are effectively not supporting the artists at all.

Bandcamp, on the other hand, takes a 15% cut of digital downloads and 10% for physical releases/merch. If you buy an album for $10 on Bandcamp, the artist gets $8.50. If you play an album by an indie artist on Spotify 100 times, they might get $0.0002 or thereabouts¤.

¤ Not actual numbers, but the point is it is effectively zero.

I know a couple of relatively obscure bands personally, and they do get something from Spotify. It's not much, but they do get a little bit. They consider streaming more as advertising that gets their name out there and their music easily accessible, but they make most of the actual money from shows and merch.

E: Artists can see their playcount stats and payouts here: https://artists.spotify.com and as far as I know, even niche artists are paid the $0.006 per song, not just the biggest players.

E2: I am a huge fan of the Bandcamp model, though. Most of the time I find music there that isn't on Spotify, and I've also bought albums on there even though they're on Spotify as well, because I want to support the artists directly. I have completely stopped buying physical albums.

There used to be a FAQ entry on spotifyartists.com about royalties and the complex formulae by which they are divided amongst the various parties entitled to slices of those precious fractions of a cent, but I can't find it now.

(That's right: on a promotional site directed towards artists, aimed to encourage people to make their work available on Spotify, there is nothing anywhere about how they intend to pay you. Because honestly, they don't.)

You also need to sell a hell of a lot of albums every month, to make minimum wage.

I do agree that they should pay artists more, but I consider it an issue with the record labels, rather than with Spotify.

Made up example: $100000000 * 0.0000001 of all listening activity = $10

Or $10 * 1 of all my listening activity = $10

Or are you saying that Spotify cuts off at a certain point and doesn't pay anything out, or that they take a fixed cut after allocation?

Getting 100% of your subscription is the same thing as getting 1% from everyone out of 100 customers, where only one person (you) listen to that artist (and exclusively).

That 99% of "your" money went to an artist you dislike doesn't matter if 1% of everyone else's money went to the artist you do like. The money doesn't know where it came from, and the artist doesn't care. Only the aggregate distribution matters.

Now I don't know how they do their reward distribution, I'm merely pointing out the flaw in your reasoning.

Which is exactly the current situation, by the way. Anyway, what I was doing was just demonstrating that the system is not the same.

Although I am admittedly bad at maths and statistics, it seems to me that the system I am proposing would be more likely to pay out at least coffee change to small-time artists. I might be wrong, though.

Basically I think it's unfair and unintuitive how everything I pay goes to artists I don't listen to. There has to be a better system.

(They've even implemented a solid weekly "new music mix" discovery service... and the apps are native.)

Upon saying that, even with my Sennheiser HD 202s and Macbook built-in audio I can tell the difference between Spotify and lossless FLAC. My Australian internet is so bad that I probably couldn't even stream FLAC anyway.

For the mobile app, it's 96, 160 and 320 for normal, high and extreme, respectively.

Chromecast and the browser-based player both use AAC, at a maximum of 256kbps.

There may also be mastering differences between different versions of an album.

So the best thing is actually to do your own Ogg Vorbis encodes of a lossless album you have, and do the a/b testing on those files instead, so you're certain of the provenance.

Short-sighted publishers be damned.