Conversely, Apple lets L'Arc〜en〜Ciel keep their elegantly swoopy tildes, and Maxïmo Park keep their pointless diaeresis.

Flattening Dååth, Mœnia and BIG|BRAVE into Daath, Moenia and Big Brave seems hypocritically petty for a company that rigorously defends the non-standard orthography of their most important product.

Apple does not special-case the composers on classical tracks the way Spotify does, so I would have a hard time following new jams by Herbert Howells on Apple Music alone.

Spotify keeps Japanese and Chinese artist names in the original character-set more often than Apple, at least in my samples, but there are exceptions in both directions.

It sucks that there is no standard universal ID for artists, and it sucks that ISRC uniqueness is not strictly enforced, but resolving artists across platforms by ISRC voting works quite well. Looking at exceptions is interesting. Why is Déhà listed as Dèhá on Apple Music?

Oh, it's actually worse than that. Spotify has 59 artists named Fiona that you can find with a search for "Fiona". But the one to which her great 1992 album Squeeze is assigned isn't even one of those, because it's not in the top 1000 results for the substring "fiona".

And not always "accidentally"...

Distributors CAN provide service-specific IDs, but often don't, so mostly each service has to do the disambiguation from scratch themselves. This doesn't directly affect royalties (ISRCs handle those), but if you can't find a song you can't play it...

Anong Gagawin Mo Ngayon?

But also

FR59R2612989
open.spotify.com/track/1xU3Nt...

Life On The Moon

Spotify has 59 artists named Fiona. The catalogs of the top 6 map via ISRCs to 6, 3, 5, 0, 1 and 3 different Apple Music artists.

AM has 22 Fionas. One of them maps via ISRCs to 30 different Spotify artists, another to 9, and 6 more to multiple.

USUM72010080
open.spotify.com/track/1iCvpI...

Hmm, what about a query that traverses music services?

If you were using NRbG with a free Spotify account, you probably just got cut off. See the bottom of the NRbG page for a link to join the group for more info.

Reply to the message you get back...

Join the group, check the message history...

Data navigation.

(dactal.org/curiam.html – you'll need Apple Music for this one, and tolerance for a deliberately unadorned state.)

Note that you will be asked to explain your interest, in the hopes of minimizing the robots among us.

If you use NRbG with a Development Mode API key, things are supposedly about to get bad for that. If you're interested in alternatives, see the bottom of the page for a group you could join to discuss such things.

Streaming, Spotify, Song Discovery: The Mind Behind the Algorithm

If you're in Zurich on March 20th, you could come see me talk about algorithms and music discovery and human creativity and machines and power. How many of the Swiss metal bands I personally like will I find excuses to mention?

www.m4music.ch/events/en/20...

Their "Development Mode" is now specifically useless for development, since it uses different endpoints and even different response formats from the non-development mode.

Spotify removed all the multiple-item metadata calls, so you now have to get every track/album/artist individually. This is clearly ludicrous (for both them and us), and probably prohibits most uses beyond trivial ones on the scale of Now Playing lookups or the like.

Presumably NRbG and Curio are now broken for newly created Spotify API keys. Due to the same petty new restrictions to the API I can't create a new API key myself, and thus can't even try them that way. But other people report hitting 429s and getting locked out almost immediately.

You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song : Glenn McDonald A former Spotify insider reveals how streaming has changed the global musical landscape and what it means for fans, musicians and the music industry.

If you've read my book, thanks, that was awesome of you!

If you haven't, but not as a matter of principle, you could read the beginning and see if that makes you feel like reading more.

www.book2look.com/book/RVopHiZ...

Or to use the grouped display to see the top 10 such artists per year:

?play history
|track info=(....spotify_track_uri,urid.other tracks)
/artist=(.track info.artists:@1),playyear/artist :count=1 .of
|artistname=(.artist.name),-artist
#count /playyear |of=10

You can click the "x" next to 1000 - 1000 to switch to a flat display.

Yep, you can do that. Hint: group by artist,year then group by artist and filter count=1.

Note, too, that all the queries in Curio are exposed and editable, so if I were, say, on vacation and unavailable, anybody could have fixed these for themselves. Technically, anyway...

So everything that did

.id.other tracks

should now do

....spotify_track_uri,urid.other tracks

using the urid function to pull the ID portion out of the URI.

For the curious: last year I lazily used track IDs as stream IDs, and then hacked around the resulting problems. Since then I gave streams their own unique IDs, which is much better, but I forgot to update some track-lookup queries, which were thus trying to use new stream IDs as track IDs.

If you have hit issues with the Listening History views in Curio showing zero counts for things, do this:

Yeah, sorry, I had to fix the same issue in a couple other places, which I didn't notice because I had the queries cached. Delete any "20XX tracks all" and "20XX tracks full" queries from the query page (the little "x" when you hover), and then go back to Listening History and try again.