Music Subscription services and their various merits
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I have well over 30,000 scrobbles on last.fm so no to the last bit.rateyourmusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/~Olimite -
The discover list is really great. Naturally enough it throws up the odd stinker (I got a U2 song once) but in general it's pretty good at digging up stuff I'll like. -
Olimite wrote:I have well over 30,000 scrobbles on last.fm so no to the last bit.
Unless I'm mistaken, none of the services use Last.fm data for suggestions, so the only relevance that has is that Last.fm isn't as good at it. -
I'm pretty sure you can scrobble from Spotify. I let Google Music try and build a playlist from a Peeping Tom song earlier, it made me laugh the confusion it goes through. It threw some good music at me, but it genre hopped more than Mike Patton (which is kinda right I suppose)
The missus uses Spotify and I'm about to commit to purchasing a service again, Does Spotify yet have a decent upload your own tracks for safety and to fill the blanks in their library service as yet? I still have loads of Spotify playlists I'd like to revisit at some point but not massively fussed
Can you download/upload your playlists as xml files or whatever the playlist standard format is for use between services?
I'll likely just get the Family sub for Google Music and tell her to like it or lump it"I spent years thinking Yorke was legit Downs-ish disabled and could only achieve lucidity through song" - Mr B -
Yeah, you can scrobble from Spotify.
It's odd you found Google Music hopped genres too much, because I want it to do so more and find it tends to stick to one for the duration of playlist.
No idea about any of your questions, I'm afraid. -
You can't upload your own tracks to a cloud with Spotify if that's what you mean. You can make it recognise tracks you have on a hard drive if you want, though.
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Whereas Apple Music forcibly puts your music in the cloud:
https://blog.vellumatlanta.com/2016/05/04/apple-stole-my-music-no-seriously/
Google has been my favourite of all the streaming services I've tried, but I can get Spotify for 5pcm with a student discount so that wins for me.iosGameCentre:T3hDaddy;
XBL: MistaTeaTime -
So I'd have to carry that hard drive round with me?? Pretty much a deal breaker I reckon
I think it only hopped so much because it's Mike Patton so it looked for stuff with him in it and stuff by people he's collaborated with"I spent years thinking Yorke was legit Downs-ish disabled and could only achieve lucidity through song" - Mr B -
Not sure if it's the interface or something else, I just couldn't get on with Google Music.rateyourmusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/~Olimite
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Oddly, that's exactly how I feel about Spotify.
Of course, none of them are as good as Rdio was and that's what really galls. -
Struggled with that too. Guess ultimately it's familiarity with what you use first.rateyourmusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/~Olimite
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For you, maybe. I had a Spotify subscription before I'd used either of the other two.
Ironically, considering what you bumped the thread for, I gave up with Spotify because it was crap at (perhaps unable to) suggest music at the time. -
AJ wrote:Oddly, that's exactly how I feel about Spotify.
Of course, none of them are as good as Rdio was and that's what really galls.
Yep.
When Pandora proper sub service goes live will be interesting to see what they've borrowed from Rdio.
I'm still great and you still love it. -
cockbeard wrote:So I'd have to carry that hard drive round with me??
Do you have so much music that isn't on Spotify? You can download however much you want onto your player and add your own tracks to that so it doesn't really matter where you keep all the stuff. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you want to do. -
AJ wrote:For you, maybe. I had a Spotify subscription before I'd used either of the other two.
Ironically, considering what you bumped the thread for, I gave up with Spotify because it was crap at (perhaps unable to) suggest music at the time.
Yep it's been a definite improvement from my old days with Spotify.
rateyourmusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/~Olimite -
Think the major plus for me with google play now is how it deals with DL stuff.
You can DL stuff and add it to google play through the website, but I've found it's simplest to just DL stuff to phone and use other stuff to listen to DL music on a laptop.
Anything you DL to your phone just appears in google play music, which is very handy.
Most of the stuff I want to listen to on my laptop I'll be streaming from somewhere else anyway (mixcloud etc)I'm still great and you still love it. -
Kow wrote:
Do you have so much music that isn't on Spotify? You can download however much you want onto your player and add your own tracks to that so it doesn't really matter where you keep all the stuff. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you want to do.cockbeard wrote:So I'd have to carry that hard drive round with me??
Yeah I think I do, about 5% of my music isn't on most of the usual places. Bands that never quite made it, demos picked up at gigs or sent to me when I was promoting, even now loads of stuff off bandcamp. So Google allows me to access that from anywhere, yes I could spend some money on a massive sdcard but I'm very likely to use my data allowance so might as well stream all my music as well"I spent years thinking Yorke was legit Downs-ish disabled and could only achieve lucidity through song" - Mr B -
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Send messageI've just taken my music collection off OneDrive (for usage with Groove) because Microsoft have dropped the max amount of data you can store on their cloud storage service from 15GB to 5GB. But they do helpfully provide a link to sign up for an Office 365 subscription, which'll fix things.
I think the technical term is "bait and switch", or more colloquially "being a cunt".For those with an open mind, wonders always await! - Kilton (monster enthusiast) -
In the last few months I've been pleasantly surprised by Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, which is auto-generated on a (you guessed it) weekly basis.
I really like at least 50% of the tracks it suggests and actively dislike very few of them. I look forward to Mondays just for this playlist.
My main bone of contention with Spotify (besides the cumbersome UI) is that their Shuffle feature doesn't seem to shuffle very well. On a playlist with hundreds of tracks, you often hear the same subset of tracks repeatedly and some never play at all. This seems to have been a problem for years, though the Spotify techies insist there isn't actually a problem and the feature works as intended.
No better way to alienate your audience than to tell them the problem they're experiencing doesn't actually exist. Customer Service 101. -
That's pretty much the shuffle problem all round. Used to happen all the times on a variety of mp3 players.rateyourmusic: https://rateyourmusic.com/~Olimite
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Apple adjusted their shuffle to be less random because people kept hearing the same stuff, but what they were doing was just noticing the tracks that came up and kept on instead of skipping.
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Also it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. In any shuffle algorithm (I assume) it would want to keep giving you stuff you like along with stuff that is new to you. So it bases what you like on what you play, so when it plays something on shuffle it gets an extra point, which bumps it up the list of things you like so makes it more likely to come round again
I've never built a shuffle function but it seems intuitive, especially with things like lastfm scrobbles etc. I do wish google music had an option in the instant mix to only mix from your own collection, as many mixes when I was a subscriber had a similar issue where the same few albums would pop up regularly or it would send me crap I didn't like because it thought it similar to what I was playing. Admittedly the service was much younger then so hadn't seen as many coorelations as it would have by now"I spent years thinking Yorke was legit Downs-ish disabled and could only achieve lucidity through song" - Mr B -
I wonder if there's a mismatch between what people want from shuffle vs what certain implementations of it actually do.
If shuffle is implemented as truly random for each track, then it's not unlikely you'll hear the same track twice before all tracks in the playlist have played once.
Generally, people don't want random. What they want is for shuffle to play all tracks in the playlist once before any tracks are repeated.
Surely not that hard to keep track of which tracks have already been played? -
I think Spotify does the list thing. I guess what it could do is weight popular songs to the top. Like if you have an 4 hour play list, you done want your favouritrs at the end for technical purity reasons.
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Me too - Spotify (or I guess any streaming service) really comes into its own once you've been listening a while and followed a few of your favourite artists, added your favourite tunes etc and the algorithm gets a feel for your tastes and can serve you up some more stuff.SwiftBoyAdams wrote:In the last few months I've been pleasantly surprised by Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, which is auto-generated on a (you guessed it) weekly basis. I really like at least 50% of the tracks it suggests and actively dislike very few of them. I look forward to Mondays just for this playlist. ...
I've discovered a few fantastic tunes and artists via the discover playlist and following the artist links and dumping their albums in my "Currently Listening" playlist (which currently stands at 1,203 songs, 77 hours worth) and delete the songs as I listen, adding/following any new tunes/artists I like.
Case in point, current jam is a french instrumental hip-hop guy called "Guts", who's perfect for a chilled work vibe in the vein of Bonobo, Nightmares on Wax, RJD2, Deckwrecka etc. - and from that guy I've added Wax Tailor and Chinese Man to my playlist of artists to check out.
It's never been easier to find awesome tunes and I love it. I used to spend whole weekends trawling record shops and listening posts, and a ridiculous amount of my money as well, and now it's on tap and, so far, free - as I put up with the Spotify adverts for now.
Really loving living in the future!
[edit] oh, and also being able to browse other peoples' playlists means it's the ultimate for genre catch-up and you don't have to rely on compilations with a handful of tracks, as someone out there will have a playlist of hundreds of tunes. -
Technically it doesn't really live here, but I got an email from bandcamp this morning and I'm really pleased that they're doing well and thought I'd share their thoughts here. For a long time they must've felt like they were swimming against the tide, but I for one really love the direction they take with ownership versus access
Bandcamp wrote:Bandcamp, Downloads, Streaming, and the Inescapably Bright Future
In light of a recent report that Apple will soon abandon music downloads (later denied, but undoubtedly containing a certain amount of inevitability), we thought we’d take a moment to update you on the state of Bandcamp’s business and our plans for the future.
Bandcamp grew by 35% last year. Fans pay artists $4.3 million dollars every month using the site, and they buy about 25,000 records a day, which works out to about one every 4 seconds (you can see a real-time feed of those purchases on our desktop home page). Nearly 6 million fans have bought music through Bandcamp (half of whom are younger than 30), and hundreds of thousands of artists have sold music on Bandcamp. Digital album sales on Bandcamp grew 14% in 2015 while dropping 3% industry-wide, track sales grew 11% while dropping 13% industry-wide, vinyl was up 40%, cassettes 49%… even CD sales grew 10% (down 11% industry-wide). Most importantly of all, Bandcamp has been profitable (in the now-quaint revenues-exceed-expenses sense) since 2012.
Subscription-based music streaming,* on the other hand, has yet to prove itself to be a viable model, even after hundreds of millions of investment dollars raised and spent. For our part, we are committed to offering an alternative that we know works. As long as there are fans who care about the welfare of their favorite artists and want to help them keep making music, we will continue to provide that direct connection. And as long as there are fans who want to own, not rent, their music, that is a service we will continue to provide, and that is a model whose benefits we will continue to champion. We have been here since 2008 and we mean to be here in 2028. Thank you!
*Bandcamp is not a download store, and we very much embrace the convenience of streaming. When you buy music on Bandcamp, whether that’s in digital or physical form (30% of sales on Bandcamp are for vinyl and other merchandise), you not only get the pleasure of knowing you’re supporting the artist in a direct and transparent way, you also get instant, unlimited streaming of that music via our free apps for Android and iOS, as well as an optional, high-quality download. Your purchase is about direct support, ownership and access, whether that access takes the form of a stream, download, or both. So please consider joining us in never using “streaming” as shorthand for “subscription-based music.” The former is an inevitable technological shift, the latter is an unproven business model."I spent years thinking Yorke was legit Downs-ish disabled and could only achieve lucidity through song" - Mr B -
Anyone fancy forming a https://www.spotify.com/uk/family/? -
£15 for up to five people (living at the same address...)
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