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Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they
by Triphibian 3y ago
Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with. That notion, that the algorithm is more concerned with cash savings than serving you the songs you want to hear, really changed the way I think about these services -- and the idea of music recommendation writ large.
I currently subscribe to Apple Music, which I am sure is up to similar shenanigans. But to me their user front end is less egregious. It seems like Spotify barely wants to acknowledge that the 'album' is a thing. While Apple still offers me full records by artists I like or most like. This, currently, is the be scenario for my habits.
But yes, I would love a streaming service with a fully customizable front page a recommendation engine that allows the user to tweak the kind of suggestions they get, beyond the extremely vague "more of this or less of this" options.
- antifa 3y ago> It seems like Spotify barely wants to acknowledge that the 'album' is a thing. I can't get Spotify to give me a simple list of all an artist's songs, it only gives me a list of albums, so I have to manually click into each one, and most have one song or duplicate songs anyways. If anything, Spotify grossly over emphasizes albums.
- burnerthrow008 3y ago> Reading "Choke Point Captialism" by Cory Doctorow I learned that Spotify uses playlists to prioritize songs that cost less for them or pays out to artists they deal with. Gosh, that sounds horrible. With such a large market share and such monopolistic business practices, how did they escaped being named a gatekeeper for the purposes of the DMA?
- nicgrev103 3y agoI suspected this practice and ran a very rudimentary test which concluded they were not doing such things. I made a playlist with Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Justin Bieber and then an equal amount of songs from obscure artists with fewer than 1000 followers (this was back when followers was the main popularity metric, now it's monthly streams). I then played the playlist on shuffle, expecting for the 'popular'/ expensive artists to be played less. I tallied each song for a day of listening (that's as much as I could take!) and the popular songs were played equally as frequently and the non- popular. Like I said, very rudimentary but didn't yield the result I was expecting.
- alwaysbeconsing 3y agoI believe statement is about the playlist Spotify makes, not those made by user. Those called "Daily Mix", generated on user listening choices.
- Triphibian 3y agoYes, these are the suggested playlists. As well as the popular pre-fab playlists. A notable one mentioned was their "Ambient" playlist -- which favors in house ambient artists with much less generous royalty deals than someone like Brian Eno -- who is be the best known artist in the field apart from maybe Aphex Twin -- but easily replaceable with a no-name for some people apparenty.
- Triphibian 3y agoI admire the testing you did on the random plays, I would have gone in on the same hypothesis -- that the "shuffle" would prefer lower cost plays.
- Cub3 3y agoI swapped to Apple Music recently too (as I got 6 months free) and the UI is horrible compared to spotify + painfully slow to load on my phone.
- Vorh 3y agoSomewhat similar experience for me- I canceled apple music today because the Linux experience is... not great. The web client has an issue where the emoji font (Noto Emoji) makes all spaces full width. There's an unofficial client called Cider, but it has issues with favoriting items. And neither web nor Cider support playing to a networked speaker.