Combo the “Fans Also Like” move with your Following journey to swiftly move through groups of related artists without having to manually search each one up.
He says, having recently spent an entire afternoon liking 809 artists on Spotify :-D
Yeah I’m first gonna go through my big playlists and follow EVERYONE, then do what you suggested.
I don’t really like the “radio” feature on Spotify but Discover Weekly has generally been very good for me. You do have to train it up a bit first though.
I’ve been using Spotify for years now and I really like it - we even have a family membership as my kids both have accounts and use it to listen to music as well, it works fantastic and we can share playlists and the like.
Make sure you set Quality to Very High and not Automatic, if you have an iffy connection.
What’s wrong with Spotify Connect? I find it very handy when I want to play stuff on speakers or my soundbar, and never even really noticed it until I had those things.
Two separate, but related issues:
Even after disabling the Connect-related settings I’m allowed to modify in both my Windows program version of Spotify and the Android app on my phone, sometimes, playing songs on Spotify on my PC will generate an ongoing “now playing” notification on my phone (that returns if I swipe it off), slowly but surely draining battery in the process. This is a known bug that has a several-hundred-post thread about in the Spotify Community forums going back about five years that, IIRC, I started, that has never been fixed.
Additionally, Connect forces a use case I don’t like, which is that starting an album/song/station on my PC or phone “erases” whatever I was listening to previously on the other. e.g., if I am listening to a Blind Guardian album at home on my speakers, go out to the car to drop off the rent check and put on Iced Earth, when i get back home, I can’t just pick back up where I was on the BG album; Spotify’s automatically set the desktop program to the same spot on the IE album my phone left off at. Since I frequently go for different moods/genres when driving vs. at home, this is particularly annoying, and will be way worse when the virus is contained and I’m back to driving back and forth to work + gaming commitments for multiple trips/day.
I can totally understand how someone would find that functionality neat/preferable, for what it’s worth! But there’s no need to force it as the only possible behavior once you go Premium and enable Connect.
(there isn’t presently a way to avoid Connect on your phone short of using a years-old APK file that can only listen to albums and crashes if you load a radio or playlist)
So is there no way to “thumbs down” a song?
Ah, yeah, I can see where that would be annoying. I don’t use my phone for music usually, let alone for separate music, so it’s never come up for me. (although I do have Spotify loaded, just because it can be a handy remote for if I’m using the portable speaker that supports it). And I agree that being able to disable it would be preferable.
There’s a little “cancel” icon on the right side for “hide this song” and it’ll ask if you don’t like the song or don’t like the artist. It only shows up when you mouseover, on PC.
It should be a little stop sign type thing right next to the heart in the same column. But like I say, only when you mouse over.
Edit: weird, on the web app it’s identified as “remove”, on the desktop it’s “hide”. Dunno if that means a difference in function.
Weird, I’m totally not getting that when I hover over it. Maybe it’s a Firefox problem? Should I just get the desktop app?
FWIW, I don’t see it (the cross-out/no icon) in an artist radio, either, and in discover weekly, I can’t remove, only do the hide option, which only shows up on a right click.
What modes does it show up in? I have to admit, this tangle of different ways to use Spotify is confusing the guy who’s used to just starting a Pandora station and whacking thumbs up or thumbs down as needed.
I have only seen a remove the song at times in Spotify. ITA that it’s inconsistent. I also really liked the variety of Pandora and the ability to really refine stations. However, I got a deal years ago to get premium Spotify with digital NYT, so I gave up Pandora. (Don’t get me wrong: I think Spotify’s selection is better than P’s, but I wish it had a bit more control.)
I’ve had that issue for a while, especially now that more and more audiobooks show up on spotify. Basically I’m listening to a book on the phone and music at home. If I have the app on the phone active when I start the pc app I loose my place in the book, which is a REAL pain!
My workaround is a third party app:
Basically this app remote controls spotify and will bookmark your place. I’ve only used it for books, but in principle I don’t see any issues if you want to listen to music. Not sure if it can access playlists / radio / Discovery feeds though, but at least you can keep your listening devices separate.
In defense of Pandora, I fired it up this morning (after getting frustrated with Spotify) and started playing around with its alternate channel modes. Functions like Discovery, Deep Cuts, and Newly Released do succeed in getting you out of the usual rut and introducing you to some new music, I’m finding. I’m not sure why the default mode is so repetitive these days, but the capacity to shake things up still exists.
I believe it’s the opposite. Spotify (and most music recommendation services) use collaborative filtering, i.e. “people who liked X also tended to like Y, you like X so try Y”.
Pandora came out of the “Music Genome Project”, which was trying to categorize music based on musical components. So, they have tags on every song, and based on what you like / dislike, they weight songs for you. You can see some of the tags, in the “Why this song” view. For instance, here’s what it shows for me an Elvis Costello song:
Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features punk influences, prominent organ, mild rhythmic syncopation, major key tonality and great lyrics.
I think this, combined with the size of their music catalog, has always lent it towards getting you down into holes of recommendations, where you only ever get things that match 95% of your tag preferences. Since there aren’t any other tags even showing up, even if you like a new song, teh weight applied to the new tag doesn’t change your preferences much, so you can’t get up out of the hole. The only way around this was to create a new station and seed it with different song choices, and hope that you don’t end up sinking into the same music-hole. I haven’t used them in a while, but they used to have a “try something new” button that I think would try to give you rec that’s farther away from your preferences, but that never really worked well. It sounds like the “new release / discovery / deep cuts” might be a generalization of that approach.
OK, I don’t know why I’m so Spotify incompetent, but how do I even get music recommendations from Spotify? All I see are various canned and preset radio stations and then artist lists.