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Spotify revises TOS to allow transfers of user-created playlists
- judge2020 6y agoI wonder how much they're automating the protection of their auto-generated playlists (if at all) - for example, does it know if I look at an auto-generated playlist, create a new one, then fill it with all the same songs in the same order?
- nxc18 6y agoNot as far as I can tell, and I believe they let you do point-in-time copies. I’ve got a copy of mint, formerly electroNow (it was better when it was electroNow) from June 2017 in my collection.
- techdevangelist 6y agoOn the desktop client you can select all songs on a playlist, right click and add to a new playlist. This new lis shows up as able to be transferred with SongShift. I did it last night as a PoC, I’ve done it it previously to customize some Spotify playlists here and there and will be my method going forward to keep lists in sync between services now. Just in case they try to pull access again.
- tpmx 6y agoFantastic! Maybe the outrage here resulted in something good? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001 Also: I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music as a matter of principle after that drama. I hate the Youtube Music web UI so much, already.
- phist_mcgee 6y agoSomething really tickles me about a single individual standing up to a corporation and strongly and clearly stating that the company is violating the law of their country and they won't hesitate to prosecute in a civil court for their rights. I believe that is what true justice against corporate overreach should be like. Ordinary people standing up for themselves.
- spacemanmatt 6y agoI much prefer the idea that we might vote for and fully fund a full time civil servant to protect us mere peons from corporate abuse. Often the abusive behavior is conducted out of sight or against a naive group of victims. Building up the capability in societies so individuals aren't victimized by their naivette is a net benefit.
- nxc18 6y agoI switched to Tidal for similar reasons and it has been really painful. Unfortunately the competition is so bad that Spotify can do really, really bad things before it outweighs their overall competence at service delivery. I don’t understand how it got to this point; Tidal seems like the most viable option but I swear even back in 2008 the field had far more solid options (e.g. Zune, as much as it was a commercial failure, was really great to use IME). I just don’t understand how other streaming services haven’t delivered something like Spotify Connect yet. It has been available and basically the standard for streaming since 2014 at least.
- viraptor 6y ago> Unfortunately the competition is so bad Somehow Google had a really nice solution, but decided to kill it and replace with the broken YouTube music app. Given how few real competitors there were, I'm really confused by that one.
- teruakohatu 6y ago> I'm really confused by that one. Google is a specialist in killing good products. They owned the news reader space and could probably have datamined it but killed Reader. Edit: Removed a joke I made to avoid causing offense.
- viraptor 6y agoThey do kill projects, but these are not really comparable. People paid directly for Google music. They also did not really kill it, but rather replace with an inferior version aiming at the same business. This is not even comparable to the chat/hangouts/meet migration. I can find a reason, even if I don't agree with it, for most of their killed projects. This one is just... different.
- teruakohatu 6y agoI am sorry, I was trying to make a lighthearted joke but it must not have come across this way. I have removed the joke. > People paid directly for Google music In the case of many people they were paying for Youtube Premium and got Google Music for free.
- chewz 6y ago> I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music I have also suspended Premium and went for Youtube Music. But Youtube Music is even more closed system. There is no API and Google isn't planing any. With Spotify API I am able to export and transfer my playlists and other stuff if Spotify liked it or not.
- gravitas 6y agoI found during my journey (Google Music -> Youtube Music autoconvert -> Spotify import) several online tools which could read a public Youtube Music Playlist (mine are 500+ songs, so not small, not gigantic) and one which allowed me to copy my "likes" over (read YTM like, find same Spotify song and Like it) so there are tools out there even though we don't have official or supported APIs. I could not find one single service to do it all, it took.. I think 3 different services to work through the process. The largest problem I think happened is many of the origin tracks from Google Music were incorrectly named or identified; I had to repair the process in both YTM and Spotify to try and find the actual track which I had in GPM but with bad metadata around it. The mistakes were high enough that I thought to myself "wow, Google Music really had a lot of bad metadata" during the work.
- Vinnl 6y ago> I hate the Youtube Music web UI so much, already. It's such a shame Grooveshark went under - they really nailed the UI. The only reason Spotify isn't too bad is because everyone knows it now, but back when it was relatively new, far too often people obliterated my entire queue just because they wanted to add a single song.
- Spivak 6y agoAnd the three tabs that are different but actually the same is intuitive at this point but I couldn’t explain how it works to anyone who doesn’t already know. Double tab to reset a tab to its home screen is something I don’t think you discover except by accident.
- salmon 6y agoMan, I haven't thought about Grooveshark in years. It was so good, but doomed from the beginning. They didn't have any sort of copyright agreements in place and they let users browse any songs uploaded by other users.
- Kerrick 6y agoAnother blast from the past: Lala. Before Apple bought them, you could buy the rights to stream any song from their website for 10 cents. This was during the era of dollar downloads, so you essentially got a steep discount in exchange for needing to use a non-mobile device. I loved that service.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoAnd Lala let you match all your own music library and stream for free, just like the marquee feature of Google Play Music, but years ahead of time. Also they let you stream every song (that you didn’t already have) once for free, and then you only needed to pay for it after that. Lala was amazing, and I was bitter with Apple for years when they killed it.
- donatzsky 6y agoYeah, YouTube Music is a dumpster fire. Don't use it myself, but Deezer is supposedly pretty good.
- simonklitj 6y agoHave you considered Apple Music? If not, how come?
- olah_1 6y agoIt only works on Apple devices. I use an iPhone but also a Windows PC. It’s extremely simple to not consider Apple Music if you don’t have all Apple devices. I hate that ultimatum of “use ONLY our products or have a subpar experience.”
- simonklitj 6y agoIt works on Android with an app and Windows in the browser. That being said, the subpar experience part is definitely something I agree with, and come to think of it, if I used Windows I probably wouldn't use Apple Music either. EDIT: I'm pretty sure iTunes for Windows has Apple Music support actually: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210384 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210384
- adamors 6y agoI've been using AM on Windows for years and years now. I want to say it's been there since inception but I'm not sure.
- simonklitj 6y agoMight’ve been, but I think I recall it took them a couple of months. Anyway, another factor in the decision could be that aside from Tidal, Apple Music pays the most to the actual artists per stream. Almost twice what Spotify pays, I believe.
- salmon 6y agoYou can access Apple Music through iTunes on Windows.
- freetonik 6y agoApple music works great for me on Android, and their web player is pretty good (especially compared to the "native" Music.app on macOS).
- sschueller 6y agoHow do I remove likes videos from my liked music. This annoys me the most after being force to switch from google music.
- sorenjan 6y ago> I switched from Spotify to Youtube Music as a matter of principle after that drama. That's funny, since I did the opposite when Google forced me to switch from Google Music to Youtube Music. I have decided to avoid Google services when possible, since they invariably end up unsupported and later killed off and maybe replaced with a worse option. I also want to stay away from services from companies that doesn't have that service as their main focus. Google clearly doesn't really care about music, but it's pretty much all Spotify cares about. Apple isn't really a music company, but unlike Google they care about a coherent user experience within their ecosystem. I won't buy from Apple for different reasons, but compare Apple Watch and WatchOS, Apple TV and Youtube TV, Apple Music and Youtube Music, and so on. Picking a Google consumer service is almost always a guarantee for worse quality and an uncertain future. For the same reasons I wouldn't touch Google Stadia, there's other companies with clearer gaming focus and better track record of keeping services available.
- parliament32 6y agoYT music is so bad. I switched from Play Music to Spotify a few months ago when they killed it cause I couldn't deal with YT.
- cdubzzz 6y agoI like to believe this person’s email thread is at least partly to thank — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
- ksec 6y agoThank You for pointing this out. I was about to write a comment believing they reacted in Good Faith. Acting in line with their Time to Play Fair ( Against Apple App Store ) Campaign. So it looks like actually has nothing to do with Good Faith. And people often tell me I am cynical, turns out I am still too naive.
- HenryBemis 6y agoCompany that does things for profit does not operate in Good Faith. Especially if it facilitates the exit of clients. If it wasn't for GDPR in Europe, they would fight this tooth and nail. I would not be surprised if they enable this ONLY for Europe, because they absolutely-have-to and ignore in other locations. I am in EU, so I cannot test, I would like to ask someone from Africa, America(s), Asia, Oceania to let us know if this is also enabled/available in their country/regions.
- andrewshadura 6y agoAll companies do things for profit, that's their primary raison d'être.
- Rygian 6y agoIn this case, "profit" being an accurate euphemism for "avoid GDPR fines".
- Fnoord 6y agoKeeping customers satisfied leads to a good name. A good name leads to more customers, and both that and satisfied customers leads to long term profit. It appears some companies focus too much on short term profit.
- fomine3 6y agoThat's good. This change needed to Spotify become "justice" in platform war context.
- mosselman 6y agoI switches to Apple Music more than a year ago. It isn’t as good as Spotify (yet?), but I had some bad experiences setting up a legit family account with Spotify, so that got me angry enough to switch. What I do like about Apple Music is being able to use Siri and my car’s radio can see all my music when I plug in my phone.
- andyroid 6y agoThose are features of Apple Monopoly rather than Apple Music.
- tchalla 6y agoSiri can access Spotify and also be used in CarPlay https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/siri/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/can-i-use-spotify-in-my-car/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/can-i-use-spotify-in-...
- noja 6y agoWith Apple Music, I believe you can say: "Hey Siri, play X". Can you do this with Spotify? Or do you have to always say "on Spotify" for every request ever?
- lights0123 6y ago"on Spotify". Amazon at least lets you set a default music platform for Alexa devices that isn't their own.
- CobsterLock 6y agoI recently bought a iPhone SE and forced myself to use it as my primary phone. This "on Spotify" is really annoying and really summarizes the whole iOS experience. If you dont fully by into their walled garden you will have to deal with a lot of minor annoyances. I was thinking about switching over to Apple Music for a bit to see if I like the whole user experience a bit more even if apple music on its own is inferior.
- newbie578 6y agoNice to read, they were in the wrong, got berated for it and now they changed it. This is how things are supposed to go. Now can we please do the same for Apple?
- byteface 6y agoI noticed spotify delete tracks without telling you a few years back. So setup IFTT to write any files I add to a playlist to a gsheet
- smarx007 6y agoI think they don't do this anymore. I have some old playlists with some tracks greyed out so I think that's their new way of dealing with songs they no longer have rights to let us play.
- IneffablePigeon 6y agoI believe there's a setting somewhere in your account to turn this on, I think by default it just hides tracks that have been removed from the service. They stay there on the playlist (I guess in theory if the track comes back onto the service it'll reappear, but in practice I've found it's often a slightly different version that doesn't get matched up).
- smarx007 6y agoYou are right, I have enabled it myself.
- kingosticks 6y agoThere's also a bit of explanation about this at https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/track-relinking-guide/ https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/general/guides/t...
- byteface 6y agoye I noticed they swap them sometimes as well. which i hate. i'm really picky about that. Even slightest difference to the version I like can make me hate any other version. so getting one slightly faster from another album is no good for me.
- vvillena 6y agoThey don't do that anymore: unplayable songs are greyed out, but they still show on playlists. It would be great to get notifications when this happens, though.
- eznzt 6y agoBack in the day, when they had a native application, I remember you could just use Ctrl+A and Ctrl+C to copy a list of all songs in a playlist that you could past anywhere else (including Notepad, or another Spotify playlist)—does that work anymore? Also, they have a web app now. Shouldn't it be very easy to write a bookmarklet to dump a list of all songs in the current playlist?
- rypskar 6y agoCtrl+A, Ctrl+C works to get a list of urls to the songs in a playlist on the format https://open.spotify.com/track/<trackId> https://open.spotify.com/track/<trackId>
- aqfamnzc 6y agoYep, that still works. Copying "songs" puts the song URLs into your clipboard, which you can indeed paste into other playlist, other accounts, or anywhere else.
- 4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 6y agoFor those that are interested in self-hosting I’ve had good success with airsonic and some of the clients for it on both iOS and Android. On one hand it makes search a little more high-friction since My personal library will never be as huge as that of a streaming service. My workaround is treat Spotify like a radio and star songs I like to then download later. In that way it’s a lot like interacting with music before streaming. It also forces me to curate a bit more. Probably not for everyone, but I actually like it better, and I know that my library will always be there.
- benologist 6y agoI host mine too because I'm not interested in paying ~$100/year for the rest of my life to access music, this is like welfare for tech giants and record companies and very little even trickles down to musicians. I got a Synology NAS and these days I just run the Synology operating system in a virtual machine and it's accessible via web UI or mobile apps and backs up to the cloud, this has served me very well for years now.
- mayneack 6y agoThe google -> youtube music transition finally got me to self host too. I've been pretty happy with plex. Getting my playlists out has actually been the only sticking point, so this has inspired me to see if there's a reasonable export option there too.
- leokennis 6y agoMy self hosting solution at the moment is: - Upload music to a webserver (can be anything, like Google Drive or in my case a OwnCloud server) - Connect Astiga (https://asti.ga/ https://asti.ga/) to it, which turns your storage (can be multiple storages, like some music on DropBox and some on an FTP or whatever) into a music library. For €24/year it will auto sync any changes automatically 24 times per day. - Use the Astiga app (Android) or any SubSonic app (on iOS play:Sub is passable) to browse this library from your phone To be honest, stuff like Apple Music is way more convenient. But I have my baseline of albums I “need to have” in lossless (and where possible hi-res) format in Astiga, perfectly tagged. Especially in case my rented access via Apple Music to this music is suddenly fucked with.
- circa 6y agowow this is great! I didn't think much would come of that original post last week
- plankers 6y agoThis is good. Now if only they'd stop trying to wall off the podcast market. glares angrily at Joe Rogan
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoI can’t really fault Joe for taking the money, as I think I probably would have done the same if given the chance. But man it sucks that this is the direction podcasting is headed. It is going to be so annoying in the future when you need 4 podcasting clients to play all your podcasts.
- ascii234 6y agoFinally! I've been hesitant to switch from spotify because of my playlists, but now I might finally make the switch.
- jopsen 6y agoNice, now I can keep using Spotify without feeling bad. This was the sort of thing that made me consider migrating to a different service.