Steam review, too.
Last.fm was obviously first.
Is like to see the Wrapped for my 1273 trusted data partners.
I mean, even back in the day of listening to local .mp3s on my desktop. I’m pretty sure at least some of the software I used (Windows Media Player, Music Match Jukebox, probably others I can’t remember) kept track of the title number of listens. I definitely remember going through and looking from time to time out of curiosity.
I also just love data and analysis. I love keeping track of things. I love sparking my memory, using data like this to remember a song I loved for like 3 weeks 8 months ago and forgot about.
I hate Spotify for a variety of other reasons. Once I’ve accumulated enough CD’s or direct downloads to have a good sized library again i’m going to cancel it. But I do hope that whatever locally hosted open-source software I use for that will have tracking and analysis tools because it’s fun.
Be sure to make 2 backups of your library. Should be no problem if it’s all mp3s. Also you can add a lot of metadata to the files themselves, there are software libraries/programs for this
Humans have a soft spot for collecting data. We have had people counting “how many black spots do I see looking directly at the sun” daily since 1749.
To be fair, a Service like Spotify would make absolutely no sense if they would not be tracking my listening preferences to propose me the kind of music I like.
Just listening to random stuff on the internet would be like radio in the good ol’ days.
Exactly. When they start injecting ads for paid subscribers, fuck them…but fuck Spotify anyway for how little they pay artists.
And they support things like lunch and $100000+ donations to fascist political parties.
They support… lunch?
Wait, I support lunch! Sometimes even second lunch! Am I a fascist?? A hungry, hungry fascist.
Ha, I worded it a bit weird, sorry. Spotify organised a lunch for the maga inauguration and donated 150000 to them earlier this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify?wprov=sfla1
You know who else regularly ate lunch? Hitler.
I’m like I’ve of the few people that didn’t use Spotify I guess. After Google music went away I tried it, god it sucked. I dropped it in 2 weeks. Between Amazon music and Sirius xm I get the music I want.
Putting aside spotify being a bad company in general. What is it about the app itself that makes it so bad in your opinion? I ask this as someone who hasn’t used any other modern platform, wondering what i am missing by using spotify.
And honestly it’s been probably 3 or 4 years since I’ve used and maybe even longer than that but I just remember how annoying it was the fact that I could not find the music that I wanted to find the fact that the radio stations they had and the playlist they had were limited and overall I just got really sick and tired of fucking around with it compared to the ease of use that I can get out of Amazon music I’ll absolutely bloody simple Google music was and how spot on Sirius XM has been for me as far as finding music when I’m driving and I don’t need to worry about playlists or any of that other shit. I’m not one that often will go through and want to listen to certain music as opposed to listening to certain bands or more likely just turn genres. Overall I found Spotify pretty crap-tastic and I really couldn’t understand why everybody absolutely loved that platform. And I still don’t understand it.
Perhaps its personal use cases then. I tend to just add bands or songs as i go and then hit shuffle all when driving unless i specifically want to hear an album, in which case i just hit play on the album.
I like the collaborative playlists you can make with friends and have kept in touch with one of my old friends who moved to Australia through a collab playlist.
Otherwise i listen to podcasts and it do3s a good job of keeping track of those.
Pretty sure last.fm has been around a lot longer than spotify
For sure and tracking you was the ONLY thing they did at first, and it was and still is super fun
I understand that this is “old men yell at clouds” shit, but is it really that hard to say “is” after “Spotify”?
Pretty sure there is supposed to be a comma
Spotify, the…
I dunno, given how often I see white people typing in ebonics on twitter, I’m skeptical
I know what you edited :)
“tracking you”
It’s their service, of course they know what you listened to.
They also collect a bunch of telemetry. There are ways to disable that of course
Wait? What? Is there a guide?
That’s sort of missing the point - there are alternatives for finding and listening to music that don’t involve a “service”. Choosing those is always better than having a service not only track you, but deciding what you listen to. For some reason people seem to be okay with Spotify despite the mountains of red flags.
“always better”? Really?
Maybe you can use that brain of yours to imagine why people use and like the service rather than assuming they must have the exact same preferences as you but just be idiots
Yep, you’re right - some folks evidently just love stepping up to a trough of music slop without thinking about it.
What do you recommend for finding new music?
Usually I go with recommendations from friends and also listening to a lot of stuff I don’t know if I’ll like or not. NPR Tiny Desk concerts are great to figure out if you vibe with an artist. Also a huge fan of the Sofar Sounds channel on YouTube - found a bunch of artists I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Also like to find interviews with artists I already like and find out what influenced them or what they’re listening to now. I don’t collect much vinyl, but love going to record shops and seeing what I can find.
You tried. Not very hard though.
What do you mean “music slop”? I’ve found tons of great music through Spotify recommendations.
And they also push a bunch of literal AI-created music and allow others to do the same. So literally AI-slop taking away the few meager fractions of a cent that would go to actual musicians.
I mean, maybe that’s just your algorithm? All the AI music I’ve seen has been goofy novelty stuff like Obscure Vinyl, which I sought out intentionally and doesn’t affect my other listening. They haven’t pushed anything I didn’t look for.
This is a well-documented and much written about story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_on_Spotify
And what reason do you have to believe that the person you’re chastising listens to that AI slop?
Never said they did. But they’re supporting a platform that has been literally caught doing it.
Deciding what you listen to is a feature, you can just choose a playlist and go about your day.
And I have discovered some amazing shit letting Spotify ‘decide what I listen to’
The majority of the cool music I’ve found has been through carefully curating a playlist, and then going to Playlist Radio.
I use YouTube music, but same here.
“That’s sort of missing the point…”
Boy now that’s the single best encapsulation of Lemmy comments I think I’ve ever seen.
It’s sort of difficult to provide good “recommendations” without user data.
I guess you could look at recent releases, and let users pick what genre they prefer. But with users play history, playlists, etc available, it becomes a lot easier to create a good recommendation engine
It would probably be harder for them to anonymize your account.
Using usage data to improve user experience and similarly worded sentences are in pretty much every apps “Terms of Service”. They record what music I have listened to and compile playlist for me, so what? In similar manner navigation apps like Waze collect data about your driving habits to offer better routes.
It becomes an issue when:
- They collect data irrelevant to the user experience or not connected in any way to the services the company provides.
- They record activity for people who don’t even have an account through third parties (looking at you Meta)
- They scan every local network I connect to and collect detailed information (again… Meta)
- They sell the data about what I listened and/or any other collected data to third parties
- They use the data to train LLMs without my knowledge and approval, or opt me in by default and bury the option to opt out of this deep in the settings.
I haven’t used Spotify for a long time, but I use YouTube. YouTube ticks most boxes of that list. I bet Waze do too, and Spotify maybe. That are for me the problematic areas we need to be discussing. Collecting data is not entirely bad. It is a good thing when that data is handled only in the user’s interest, it’s bad when it’s being abused, which unfortunately is the norm rather than exception nowadays.
I agree with you but the problem is that the incentives to collect data responsibly are FAR outweighed by financial benefits of doing it, and the barrier to entry is not much larger. So, when the vast majority of data collection is abusive, and the incentive structure is there to ensure it continues to go that way, folks are understandably upset to hear about ANY data collection these days.
Exactly. Lemmy users have got so hyper focused on privacy they seem to have forgotten why it’s important, and treat it as a goal in its own right.
Every time you interact with anyone, they learn something about you. That’s not usually cause for concern, so it needs to be a little bit more nuanced.
They don’t personalize it by user, but it’s usually fun to watch Pornhub’s annual summary.
Missed opportunity tbh
I really like how Letterboxd used their big data. By using the Watchlist (the to-watch list of movies users wants to see) of everyone, they can find movies a lot of people want to watch, but it’s impossible to stream and very challenging to buy, and license those movies for their online rental store.
Spotify isn’t the only tech company with a personalised yearly wrap-up. Not even close…
But I think they did it first (or at least they made it popular)
Maybe. I got no idea really. But the post doesn’t say “first”, it says “only”.
Yes, they figured it out successfully, meaning the rebrand was successful and people liked it. Everybody else then copied the structure and format. Hooray! /s
Transcription
Tweet by “delia” @delia_ai:
spotify the only tech company to figure out how to successfully rebrand “we’ve been tracking you” to “isn’t this FUN”
You are a really kind user
