is now responding again, from a new server. It is now a static snapshot of the world as it was, with many interactive pieces disabled for the moment. Where we go from here remains to be seen. But at least we start here, not nowhere.
The original server at Spotify is not currently responding, so my assumption is that Spotify has turned it off. I have redirected the domain to an archived copy, but the DNS update will take a while to propagate.
The official-Spotify-forum plea/lamentation for 's future has passed 500 endorsements and is onto the 7th page of comments, but has so far elicited no official response there, nor to me.
Hey
@SpotifyPlatform
, if albums in the API had genres (each album's artist's extended genres), so the "genre:" and "tag:new" filters could be used at once in /search for albums, I could try to rebuild New Releases by Genre using the API.
This may be more of a guest book at the funeral than a feedback channel to anybody with decision power, but is a place one step closer to
@Spotify
than Twitter if you have thoughts about the fate of , new releases, fear, joy, love.
How much do you want New Releases by Genre back? If it's enough to sign up for your own Spotify API credentials, I have an experimental thing you can try.
non-news update: There's no news. Future fates of dormant features remain unresolved.
The Spotify Community thread about this has over 1000 votes and 11 pages of comments, but still no official response.
Well, at least some of the things I left behind at Spotify are running again. No new data is getting out to , but playlist updates happen through internal connections, and some automated daily playlists have updated. We'll see about weekly ones tomorrow.
In a fit of love I have ported the artist profile page from server-side python to client-side javascript so we can have it again without my server instantly imploding.
There probably won't be any more site updates for a bit. I'm clearing my calendar to really focus on reading the updated privacy policies of every restaurant I ever had to install an app to order from once.
Well, some weekly playlists did update, but so far none of the genre ones have. It's not that unusual for the genre sets to update later in the day, so it's too early to draw firm conclusions.
But I can't do anything about it, regardless.
There will be some increased chaos on this week, particularly in the balance between specificity and expansiveness. Calibration is enthusiastically ongoing.
I love Music about as much as I love Data. Since I keep meeting folks who haven't seen this incredible project, I wanted to write a thread gushing about 🧵
None of that helps with new releases. I have some ideas about that. They aren't good ideas, but sadly the bar set by all other available approaches is low, so bad ideas might be better than nothing.
2000 genres looked suspicious, so I found another one. But somehow 2001 genres looked even more suspicious to me, so I added 7 more. But then "2008 genres" looked like a year, so I added a comma. Please sign up for Spotify Premium to continue funding this important work.
If you think you would enjoy reading a book that isn't exactly about , but is words about the same things that is code about, then maybe you'll look forward to this.
Oh, I wrote a book! It's called "You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music". It doesn't come out until June 2024, but it was announced to the UK trade press today, so it's finally no longer secret. There's more info here:
The Sound of Genre playlists have updated, so I assume Pulse and Edge and the rest will also update eventually. The ghosts can do that much. For how long? I don't know.
I keep saying that music exploration is a form of travel, but I think this Condé Nast Traveller España piece is the first time we've been covered by a travel magazine:
(But for the record, the genre work, which always involved more people than just me, is only part of the input into Daylist. And Discover Weekly works a completely different non-genre way.)
For those of you already ready to be done with the year, has been updated with provisional data through 2023-11-30. This will be updated once more when the year is done with itself, too.
For the curious: we have opted to stop modeling genre communities based on individual anime/game franchises and other trademarks and brands and brand-like things. Most of the ones we had have now been consolidated into broader cultural groupings.
(🎸 to
@dj_tolstoy
for noticing)
In case this tempts you: if you use Curio to get the artists you follow, NRbG in the same browser can use that list to look for new releases by those artists.
Friday evening DNS update: it's kind of impressive that there is still anything electronic that takes 48+ hours. I've heard reports of resolving in some regions, so progress is happening, but still nothing from here. Tomorrow?
Saying a fond goodbye to some code I wrote in 2015 that has been earnestly trying to find songs that are rising out of obscurity on the wings of listeners' love. The Needle () is now operating on new algorithms and better data! But with the same goal.
Saturday morning update in the gripping DNS saga: another setting had to be changed to a different value, so start another 24hr timer and think positive connecty thoughts.
@DataMosherLLC
But "Spotify" is not a single beast, it's 83% of the people who worked there when I did, some of whom also believed in, and participated in, what I did. How will they use the power they have not yet lost?
2021. It's not over yet, but here's an attempt at an exploratory summary of how it's been in new music so far.
(This will be updated once more when the year is actually complete.)
5: All of these projects build on the work of 100s of co-workers, as well as the collective listening of 200m+ other humans. But raise a chord to the understatedly-named
@GenreADay
, who is responsible for more like 4 genres/day, and has mostly taken us from 1500 to 3000. So far.
Do you ever just want to wrap the world's music around you? And draw it over your head and stick your hands in its pockets? Work is underway to make this possible!
4: I've promoted The Sound of Immortality, my data-generated playlist of pre-2000 songs that are still in the Spotify top 2000 today, from monthly to weekly.
You can watch the propagation via …, if you're curious. The old address starts with 34, the new one with 216. Currently there are still some stragglers.
It seems very college for students to have found out about our Sounds of Schools playlists through TikTok. In MY day in we were lucky not to run out of college-supplied steam for our turntables...
What's the soundtrack of your college? "The Sounds of Spotify Schools" has made over 3,000 playlists for colleges across the globe.
Listen to the Sound of Emory University:
What Boston University students think about BU's playlist:
Once the DNS update finishes, there will be SSL certificate issues, but I think I can't fix those until the DNS update finishes. This is solidly in the category of things I would have been completely fine not learning about.
@DataMosherLLC
In addition, everything that uses Spotify genres (including everynoise and the API) gets them from the system I invented and maintained for finding and modeling those, and if layoffs were rational, laying me off would suggest that Spotify doesn't intend to keep doing that.
Every playlist needs a refresh now and then. No matter how much of a selector you are, this miracle website has your back.
@glenn_mcdonald
//
@EveryNoise
You might think, given that were 2,342 genres on everynoise as of this morning, that I would no longer be SURPRISED by new ones. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.
In the case of new releases by genre, this actually improves coverage significantly, but/and it also greatly reduces duplication, so if you're tracking individual genres, you may find that you want to adjust your picks, or add some.
Bot waves were repeatedly taking down my tiny web-server by pointlessly spamming the sortable genre list, but one advantage of no longer getting data-updates is that it no longer really matters how slow it is to pregenerate all the parameter results.
There will probably also be more ongoing tweaks and changes for a while as we explore what else our improved data makes possible or superfluous. Feel free to report anything that looks weird, even if it turns out to be intentional. Intentions are another form of chaos.