The future of online music: not just about access, but about continuous entertainment
I feel that something like this does not need to be said, but Spotify a relatively new service here in the Netherlands and selected countries, while cool, is missing one key ingredient: suggesting new music to users that feels somehow related to what they want.
Spotify knows what users want. There are few songs that I haven’t been able to find on Spotify, which in itself is awesome. But it ends there. When I look for the “Baby got Back” song, which I tend to do, it plays EVERY song that has those terms in the title (luckily fewer than you might expect). Instead of saying, hey, it’s “Baby got Back,” it’s a 90s song, it’s a hip-hop song, it’s funny (to some), it just plays the list of whoever decided to use those terms in the title (no seriously, there’s only 72 tracks).
Why it doesn’t need to be said that such a feature needs to exist, is because it already has for some time. Starting with Amazon, which suggests products to you based on what other people with similar tastes like, to Pandora Radio, which unfortunately (grrrr!) doesn’t work outside the US anymore, to Last.fm, which also plays some funny regional games since CBS took it over, iTunes Genius, which rocks (though iTunes as a music-player is way too bloated), Netflix, another US-only service (I’m sensing a pattern here…), etc. etc.
It’s called collaborative filtering, it’s not a new thing and I don’t at all get why not all (music-)services have it. It leads to more user-engagement, it allows listeners to navigate a musical world that has become increasingly diverse and fast-moving, and it has drastically improved my music-listening experience.
So my question is: why doesn’t Spotify have collaborative filtering? Is it expensive to implement, does it require more data than Spotify has, is it an up-and-coming feature, or is it a hidden feature that I haven’t discovered yet? In any case, it is the No. One Reason why I don’t open Spotify as often as either of us would like.
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I think that's a really good question why the search couldn't work like you suggested. I have too listened to the same song over and over just because I didn't bother to use the "queue". Also, the radio thing is a joke that plays music that just happens to have been same in the year region in the broad genre label you chose.
Fortunately some bright minds on the internet have made tools that can build Spotify playlists out of one's last.fm data, like Spotibot. Yeah, it's clunky and manual and last.fm's recommendations don't update that often, but it's at least something.
Because there's no real technological barrier to do it, I'm wondering if there is some hidden business reason Spotify doesn't offer that functionality. I think some people, especially heave Free users, might be willing to pay for suggestion engine more than for removal of ads.
I'm quite sure there has to be some perverse incentive for Spotify or the music labels in not offering collaborative filtering. The common point in Netflix, Amazon and iTunes is that they all use it to sell more of their stuff. However, for a music label, is it a good thing if a listener discover a competing label's music? Real conspiracy stuff here, but I seriously can't come up with any other reason why not to have that feature and music labels are pretty notorious for dragging their feet e-commerce-wise.
yeah, I'd definitely be in the group will to pay for this (though the ads also bother me to no ends). But I find it hard to believe that business reasons are the cause of not having collaborative filtering built in. Spotify, as a technology company, should have the spine for being allowed to produce the best product possible, also because not doing so will lose them market share. This is of course ignoring the relative monopolies that these services appear to be building geographically, which I hope will be a topic for a future lawsuit or 200.
I don't really get how the queue feature works, can you explain that to me?
Well, this is how I see how the play queue works: The "play queue" in Spotify is bit like iTunes DJ / Party shuffle or whatever it is called today, but in Spotify it works how I'd like it to work in iTunes. Unlike in iTunes where Party shuffle is its own list that you need to manage, in Spotify the queue is the list that tells you what's going to be played next – but, like in party shuffle, you can add songs to and reorder that list.
As an example, when you click a song in Spotify's search results, your play queue is the whole list of search results (down from the selected song). If you click a song in a playlist or an artist page, the same thing. However, all these actions overwrite the play queue. (And the songs are only "implicitly" on the queue)
If you right-click and choose "Queue" or drag things to the "Play queue" (ie. "explicitly" add things to the queue), they'll be added to the queue (after the last "explicitly" queued song).
It's a bit complex, and I rarely use it, because the UI of Spotify really forces people to build playlists or play full albums instead of picking and choosing songs as they go.
[...] Swedes know how to connect with music – or how to stream Spotify to the living room By Kari Silvennoinen, August 3, 2010 ABBA, The Cardigans, Ace of Base and Roxette to name just a few – there’s no doubt Swedes have always known how to pump out pop music. So, it should not be a wonder that, once again, it took the Swedes to show how to bring music to the masses in the form of Spotify. [...]
you're right music should be entertaining