I really appreciate full albums but sometimes I like to listen at random. Cue Spotify Popular.
I know Spotify is the devil but it’s also an angel, so I turn a blind eye. Oh well. Happy to hear why I shouldn’t though, so fire away.
ANYWAYS, OMG KGLW makes it tough to listen to anything but an album straight through because the tracks are always cut in weird spots! So nothing pieces together well. I actually deeply appreciate this. They really want you to have the full album experience, and the way the songs flow together on a lot of the albums is fantastic. Listening at random is a butchered experience. Witchcraft.
since it sounds like you are looking for reasons to ditch Spotify lets see (a) they pay artists amoung the lowest, while overpaying certain podcasters, (b) they still haven’t delivered lossless while promising for years and that others have added at no extra cost and (c) no Joni Mitchell, perhaps the greatest songwriter of the 20th century, and no Neil either.
Amazon music has lossless for no extra charge, so I think its like $9 a month with Amazon Prime and maybe $13 if you don’t have Prime. I’m sure their are downsides, like I don’t think their player allows you to upload your own files like Spotify does. So far I’ve found the catalog to be comparable as I don’t see why an artist would keep music off Amazon Music when it pays a bit more to artists than Spotify. I know Apple lossless is very popular as well, but I don’t really use Apple products.
regarding your original question, while I do love the album format as the intention of the artist, I’m also a fan of playlists, maybe ever since a good friend had Killing in the Name by Rage Against The Machine > Closer to Fine by Indigo Girls, back on a mixed tape on a post high school road trip to Florida back in 1994. Sometimes the jarring element of random playlists are fun, like getting a section of Altered Beast suite squeezed between Carpet Crawlers by Genesis and Fat Old Sun by Pink Floyd on a prog rock/psychedelic rock mixed playlist.
Thanks for this breakdown! I will look into these things. I don’t upload my own tracks anyway so I don’t need that. feature. I just love how much music I have “discovered” because of Spotify, and the ease of use. Regarding the above mentioned Gizz track issue, that would be the same no matter the platform. I don’t mind a weirdly cut Gizz track when mixed in with other artists, that’s just how it goes, and most other artists end their songs at the end with a fade or a break, not part way into the next song or whatever. But when mixing up pure Gizz, it can become tedious! I then go back to listening to full albums, which is great on my laptop because it will play one and then the next one. But on the app the albums aren’t cued that way so I can only play one and then it jumps to Gizz radio. Fine, but not always what I want. Gah, golden age problems.
I am an engineer at Spotify. I don’t work on the shuffle (or the app at all) but I’ve looked into this. Here’s an article that explains how shuffle works:
Seems like also you can make the shuffle more random by turning off this option in your app
You know Bandcamp was the best streaming model because it hasn’t triumphed financially.
I was kind of over Spotify (and never been into algorithmic playlist) and so have just switched to YouTube Music. Couple of hitches and basic things missing, but I also think it’s bad to have the interface of Spotify define the way I consume music, so it’s all part of shaking that off.
I know that internally there are quite prominent voices within the company that are expressing that they are upset about this. I will say that Stereogum article is quite loaded with biased language and a bit of misinformation.
For example, this was suggested by UMG/Deezer and although we capitulated the article makes it seem like this is a Spotify idea. Spotify also doesn’t pay artists, Spotify pays Labels (or otherwise rights holders). And it’s not just Spotify that is going along with these changes, these talks were started with UMG/SoundCloud or UMG/Tidal earlier this year (and probably before that).
My personal hope is this mainly is around rooting out fraud/noise tracks (which is a huge problem). But I suspect since this is a UMG thing that if UMG wishes, it will be the standard payment model for streaming going forward… they are just that powerful. At least Spotify provides other tools and avenues for artists who want to generate revenue. In most parts of the company we do care deeply about supporting artists, I have to imagine this is not universal at apple/google where their music streaming is just an appendage of a jumbo tech corporation.
Lastly, specifics of the implementation are still not available and it’s possible this won’t even be implemented (this is really up to the labels, as most of the royalty things are… nearly all the labels have to agree to this model I think).
My tl;dr - I wish we (Spotify) would fight it, but we are kinda at the whims of the record labels who have conveniently sidestepped the crosshairs of public outrage somehow.
I listen to soooooo much music i would of never paid for when the only way to hear music was buying cds, tapes and vinyl. And paying $15 in 1990s based on a hope you were going to like an album based on hearing one song you like was absolutey horrible for the customer. My and most others CD collections had tons of stuff played once or twice and then never again. That is why when napster came along no one felt any guilt about it, we had been getting screwed for decades on overpriced albums, fueling a lot of record executives cocaine habits. Yes, buying an album is going to help out a band more than streaming, but streaming helps tens of thousands of smaller artists that never would of been able to make and distribute an album 30 years ago. Spoify has 11 million artists, Amazon likey has more since their library is larger. How many artists were getting paid for their records in the 1990s?
