Need Pointers On Using Spotify App

[Phog Allen]

Gents, after my poor experiences with Pandora the last few months I have moved over to Spotify and it seems to stream easier on my mobile and does have not the wonky errors I was getting with Pandora.

What I need is a primer on how to get started. The interface for Spotify is quite a bit different to Pandora. Their you selected radio 'stations' based on interest, your own making, or other listeners making. Pretty easy. Listen, thumbs up/down on tracks, and it provided curated suggestions based on those preferences.

Spotify is a bit different. It seems you need to create playlists. You can also search genres pretty easily but I am having a bit of failure to launch on getting into the flow of how you create lists to generate suggested titles. Am I looking at this the wrong way? Overlooking obvious, easy features that would make it smoother to use?

Take this example. At Pandora I created a station called David Bowie. I liked his Thin White Duke stuff so thumbed up things like Golden Years, his krautrock tracks, and so on right up into Lets Dance. With that Blue Eyed soul focus it gave quite a bit of interesting suggestions. So, is this how Spotify works or do you pick tracks you want(if available) to make your own albums or playlists? I just need to know how to get rolling. Understanding things simply needs time spent with the interface to make it more second nature. If there is a good tutorial someone suggests I am more than willing to look. Thanks.

 

[Canadian Mountain Man]

I used Spotify for a few years and my experience was their stations are quite rigid (for lack of a better term). I could find ones that I liked but like you're experiencing the system doesn't offer up suggested new titles.

Not that this is probably what you want to hear, but have you checked out Google Play Music? I switched over a few months ago and while still figuring some things out there are a few differences from Spotify I quite like:
-thumbs up/thumbs down: if you're listening to a playlist or station and a song plays you like you can give it a thumbs up and that will influence future music, if you don't like it give it a thumbs down and you never hear it again
-better integration of your own library, always had issues with Spotify adding multiple copies of the same song (probably had 16 instances of Piano Man from my ripped CD's and Spotify wanted to add all of them to my library), Google filters out the duplicates
-Spotify (even the premium version) limits the number of songs you can download to a mobile device to 3,333 which IMO is nonsense. Google Play's limit is 50,000.

Some things I don't like about Google play:
-it doesn't support podcasts
-the existing stations & playlists aren't named as intuitively as Spotify. as an example I wanted 80's punk and the Spotify playlist had what I was expecting (Ramones, The Clash, Sex Pistols, etc.), on Google Play a similarly titled playlist gave me what I think was East German experimental prog/proto punk

 

[just1ncredible2]

After switching from Pandora to Spotify, I have never looked back.

It does work in the same vain, as far as their recommendations, where it does take a little while for the program to learn your preferences. You're on the right track, by "Liking" you are essentially using a thumbs up to songs, but the nice part is when you decide you do not like a song, you can pick just the song, or the artist as well. This seems to be able to tailor the suggestions better later.

I have had Spotify for years now, but the playlists have gotten much better in the last few months even. Every day I have 6 different "Made For You" playlists that are generated every day. They can get a bit repetitive, but generally following your different listening trends. There is also a weekly generated playlist, rightfully called "Discover Weekly." This playlist is made for you to hopefully find new music in the same vain as what you have been listening to the week before. The more you "Like" and "remove" the better it will be.

Any song or artist can be instantly turned into a "Radio" station, very similar to the Pandora experience. This playlist can generate songs differently, even between songs from the same artist/album.

While having all of these methods, you are still able to create an entire playlist on your own. This is of course the most time consuming, but reminds me of the early days of iTunes, and uploading and organizing all of my CD's into mp3's. A good start to this, is making a radio station based on a song that you are really digging recently, then picking and choosing songs from that list for your created list. Rinse and repeat.

TL/DL: Keep at it, and you will find that Spotify does a great job at doing all the work for you. Enjoy!

 

[Phog Allen]

Thanks gents. I have been looking at the interface more closely and quickly found the 'stations' button in the menus. So I wanted to create a station called; David Bowie. I went to stations and clicked create. It told me to search for stations or artists, etc. So I searched for David Bowie and knew I would get loads of hits. I did. Artist, songs, albums, and some stations created by others. First one up was of course the artist himself. I clicked it and a few things came up. Nothing said 'favourite' or similar which is how the stations menu lists your stations. You need to click the 'follow' button, then it shows up in favourites. Not completely intuitive but not super hard to figure out.

I did notice the avalanche of duplicate suggestions when I searched for Golden Years. I mean at least a couple dozen versions of the same song. This is what confused me at first. I was used to searching a song title or artist and if you made a station it would populate it with similar styles. I just haven't figured this out in Spotify yet. Likely pretty easy, I just need some more time in the driver seat.

And I will look at Google music as well. I don't really care for Google but at this point I am looking at all options. I never really entertained the idea of subscription music because I was not really a music head like so many of the guys I grew up with in the guitar/album rock era. I was content to listen to trerrestrial radio in a couple of genres. I simply cannot do it anymore. Broadcast radio for the most part is absolute crap. And I won't even get into modern music with their computer generated 'beats' and inane, childish lyrics. Do any of them actually play an instrument? So it looks like going forward I be investigating subscription services.

 

[Phog Allen]

A bit more information. I could not figure out why I wasn't seeing stations in my mobile when I distinctly remembered the option. Well I am logged into two devises and one is my 7 inch tablet. The tablet version is much more robust than the pure mobile version. I will be doing the setup on the tablet.