Featured: Spotify
This article focuses on Spotify. Now you are probably wondering. What the heck does Spotify have to do with data? Realistically not that much, but I wanted to take the time to highlight in depth some of the great things Spotify is doing in the world of data, and even some things that are completely out of the way of data.
discover weekly
(4.5/5)
Discover Weekly is a new Spotify feature fully launched over the summer. Every Monday the playlist is updated bringing you 30 songs you may never have heard of. It takes the data they have stored about you and creates songs that they think you might like. Sounds great right? Yes. It’s great, but after using this feature for a couple of months now there are some glitches in your system.
negatives
1. Discover Weekly seems to be based on your all-time plays. So if you decide you want to listen to a genre you don’t usually listen to for an entire week, that won’t be reflected in your Discover Weekly. This is not necessarily a plus or minus. For me, I prefer to receive music suggestions based on the music I listened to most recently.
2. There is a supreme lack of visibility in your process. It’s understandable that they don’t want someone else to copy how this works. I’d be very curious about reverse-engineering your algorithm, but that would mean keeping track of everything I listen to for a week (impossible), and suddenly I’d have to become a software engineer (which I’m not), plus Spotify. will never disclose how promotional activity affects this playlist.
3. The playlist update time seems to be really arbitrary and I’m not sure what causes it. My playlist updated at 2am on Monday and I updated it at 10pm on Monday. The inconsistency is quite annoying for those of us who are super habitual beings. UPDATE: I’ve now noticed that it seems to update every time you restart the client. It would be nice if they had a push setting to alert the user that they need to restart the client to get it back.
4. Sometimes things you just don’t like show up, and it’s almost infuriating when they do. There’s no way to really fix this on their end, but it would be nice if they somehow gave me the ability to opt out of certain bands. For example, Upon a Burning Body came up on my playlist, which I’ve listened to them in the past. Well I had a big fight with that band after some stunts they did on their new album. I lost all respect for the band and I don’t want anything to do with listening to them.
5. Sometimes songs appear that are already in one of your playlists. In the 10 weeks I’ve been using this playlist, this has only happened once. But it’s still disappointing.
Those are the negatives, but let’s talk more about the positives and why it provides a great listening experience for someone like me, the user.
positives
1. Rediscover music you forgot existed. Yes, I listen to a lot of music. I’ve been known to listen to a song non-stop for a couple of days and then never listen to it again because I forgot to attach it to a playlist or have trouble finding the right playlist to put it on. Almost every week I rediscover one of those songs, and it’s exciting to hear something you love again.
2. Listening to other songs by an artist that you originally thought you only liked a couple of songs about. This is one of my favorite things on the playlist by far. Sometimes I hear a song from a band, only to hear 5 other songs and I absolutely hate them, so I quit the band. Then that band shows up on my DW, I complain, and the song ends up being amazing.
3. Discovering a band you don’t listen to much or follow well released a new album, AND it’s amazing. It’s kind of embarrassing to find out that a band you really like put out a new album 3 months ago and you didn’t know it. But Spotify is to the rescue!
Spotify Radio (1/5)
Spotify’s radio offer is not good. Plain and simple. Pandora is an outdated service in my opinion, but they master the art of radio much better than Spotify. If there’s one thing Spotify could afford to fix more than anything else, it’s its radio. It’s pretty annoying to make a playlist of about 50 songs, want to improve it, start a playlist radio, and hear a bunch of songs that not only don’t belong on that playlist, but when you spam the next button song get a repeat of the songs.
Spotify radio has been awful for a long time. I want to believe it’s because radio attracts more hyped bands than bands that actually play along with the other musicians it relates to relationally. If that’s the case, then it’s disappointing, but I understand that Spotify needs to increase its revenue.
Spotify Premium (5/5)
Obviously, Spotify Premium isn’t free, but the extras you get for spending $10 a month (5 if you’re a student) outweigh hearing ads and not being able to take your music with you wherever you go. Spotify premium has essentially turned my phone into my full-time on-the-go listening device, I replaced my iPod and haven’t looked back. If we did a cost analysis, we’d see that $120 a year, compared to the $200 one-time cost of owning an iPod, works out pretty well. Not only do I have one less device to remember when traveling (oh how disappointing to forget your iPod on a trip), but I also don’t have to worry about downloading and buying music and managing an archive. structure on my computer’s hard drive.
If you don’t pay for Spotify Premium, do you really use Spotify?