Atomic Playboy

Spotify is a good idea. Too bad that the implementation is pretty horrible.

For starters, Spotify makes it very hard to find new music to listen to. I can search just fine, and Spotify even has a modest amount of the music I listen to. But why can’t I find any new music?

If I look at the “radio” tab, I see eighteen categories, none of which describe the music I like, and a slider to pick a range of decades of music. The big problem here is that the categories are horribly generic.

I listen to a lot of electronic subgenres, yet the only thing vaguely resembling my taste is “techno” — and I don’t listen to techno. After 30 minutes of listening to music in this strange techno category, I heard one single song I could maybe classify as techno. The rest was trance, goa trance (which, of course, isn’t the same as trance), drum and bass, synthpop and futurepop. I can’t think of any way to make Boards of Canada qualify as techno.

They need to take a long hard look at last.fm. There I can participate in social tagging and tag artists and groups with whatever genres I think they fit into. Looking at the EBM tag at last.fm I see a fairly accurate representation of actual EBM – though I don’t really know what Covenant is doing that high up on the list.

Another thing they need to borrow from last.fm: Where are all the other users? Why can’t I add friends? See what they listen to? Find other users with similar taste in music that way?

Spotify is a nice idea. But it feels too much like Web 1.1 with one-way communication from the music industry to a silent crowd of passive consumers, rather than the social activity you can get at last.fm with user taxonomy, forums, discussion and music comparisons letting you find new music.

If I want to find new music on Spotify the only way is to play the incredibly vague “techno” category and hope I stumble upon something I actually like.

This is me on last.fm. At a quick glance you can see what I’ve listened to recently, what my favorite music is, and if you’re a registered user, get a comparison to see how our music tastes match.

Get to work, Spotify! We’re not in the 1990s any longer.

Last-minute edit: One minute after posting this Spotify gave me opera song and instrumental chamber music… which is apparently techno.

Update: It does seem that they actually listen, and last.fm scrobbling support was recently added. It’s a small step forward, at least.

For my feed reading needs I used Gregarius hosted on my site for nearly three years. But the downside is that I can only update feeds manually. I guess I could do a crontab that does a request for the update page, but I spent three years being too lazy to get that done.

I’ve been using Google Reader for nearly two months now to try it out, and I decided to stick with it. It’s good, it’s free, and it has great options for sharing interesting stuff with my friends that also use it (all one of them). You can find my shared items here if you’re interested. Feed also available there. The occasional shared post in Swedish, but mostly English.

Interface-wise there’s one thing that confuses me though: Google Reader treats folders (for different feeds) and tags (for individual entries) the same. But not.

I exported all my feeds from Gregarius as OPML and imported them to Google Reader with my old categories preserved. Nothing fancy — I had categories like People, Tech, Design and so on.

After importing the OPML, Google Reader picked it up just fine. The problem is when I want to tag individual entries, something I typically do with stuff I want to keep around for later.

The problem: The names of what I think of as “folders” show up as tags when I tag individual entries. And it’s making my brain melt. Google, you got tags in my folders and folders in my tags!

Another problem is that the name of the folder a feed is in is always added as a default tag for all entries from that feed. Very annoying. I have a folder named “People”, and that’s a very poor tag for the items in it.