Tag: spotify

A simple trick to keep up with pop music culture as you get older

A simple trick to keep up with pop music culture as you get older is to use Spotify Stats. Simply go to Spotify’s Top 100 artists and look for this: their monthly listener stats equals their peak listener stats. If you see that and you don’t recognize who they are, chances are they are an upcoming band/performer. Go learn about them: you are now cool again! 🙂

There is a chance that you will see a well known artist will also have their monthly listener stats equal to their peak listener stats. For example I recently saw Michael Jackson and Lana del Rey do this. I googled them both and found out that Lana del Rey has lots going on (new record, maybe doing James Bond), so it’s not surprising that her numbers are spiking. As for Michael Jackson? Think Halloween.

P.S. This is not serious advice, but it is not totally wrong either. 🙂

Spotify helps makes the holidays more festive. Take advantage of it.

When I was younger, I loved listening to Christmas music all through the holiday season. This was hard in the days of radio only music, since they often stopping playing Christmas tunes once Christmas day was done. To keep it going, I could play my own records/tapes/CDs, but they get old after a time. (Except for the music for Charlie Brown’s Christmas: that never gets old.)

All that is to say that Spotify solves the problems I used to have. They have LOTS of Christmas music, and you can listen to it all you want. You can even listen to it in July. (That’s too long for me, but you do you.) Not only do they have lots of songs, but they have plenty of playlists. You can even make your own playlist. That way you can list to the type of Christmas you want, when you want it.

Happy holidays to you. Keep it festive with Christmas music, be it from the radio, your own collection, or Spotify. Joyeux Noel.

It’s getting warmer. Here’s the perfect speaker / lamp to help you enjoy music outside

It’s nice to sit outside in the summer and have some music playing while you grill food or enjoy a fire or simply relax. Now thanks to this collaboration, you can: IKEA teams up with Spotify to debut the Vappeby, a $65 wireless lamp/speaker with built-in ‘Spotify Tap’

The nice thing about it is that it is not only portable, but that it looks just as nice inside too:

If having sound outside this summer is on your todo list, check out the piece in Yanko design, then head out to IKEA (or their website) and try and get one soon.

Thinking of moving from Spotify to another service?

If you are thinking of moving from Spotify but you don’t want to because you have all these great playlists, then you might want to consider the site TuneMyMusic.com . It’s a service to help you do just that. I haven’t tried it yet but it could be just the thing if you are thinking of going from Spotify to Apple Music or Tidal or one of the other music streaming services.

Thanks to Navneet Alang for point it out.

Why Play a Music CD? Lots of reasons….


I really liked a recent article about Ben Sisario, the New York Times reporter who covers the music industry. He is talking about what he uses to listen to music, and this quote jumped out at me, especially the part I put in bold.

(I) try to keep an eye on all the major platforms out there, which means regularly poking around on about a dozen apps. My go-to sources are Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Mixcloud, which has excellent D.J.-style mixes and to me feels more human than most.

At home I have a Sonos Play:5 speaker, which plays streaming music and podcasts, and is a piece of cake to use. I also have Google Chromecast Audio, a little plug-in device (now discontinued) that allows me to send high-fidelity streams to my stereo. It sounds better that way, but it’s not nearly as easy to use as the Sonos.

To be honest, my preferred way to listen to music is on CD, as unfashionable as that might be. You push a button, the music plays, and then it’s over — no ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms!

Like Ben, I started to listen to music on CDs again too. For a number of reasons:

    1. I have some great old CDs from labels like Deutsche Grammphon that I am never going to download again and which I don’t even want to listen to on Spotify.
    2. I find it satisfying to put on a CD, listen to it, and then it be over. I don’t want to listen to an infinite playlist all the time.
    3. I always worry that some day services like Spotify will simply trim their catalog and I will never be able to listen to that music easily again. For music I love, I want to own it outright.
    4. I worry about how what I listen to on Spotify is constantly fed into their analytic software – what people like to call their algorithm – to determine what I want to listen to. Some times I just want to listen to music in a different direction. I don’t want Spotify to start suggesting new music based on a whim.
    5. I don’t want Spotify or others to know everything about my listening choices. I think we all need a stealth mode for any services we use online.

I still love Spotify, but I don’t want to depend on Spotify to enjoy music.

That’s my two cents. For more on Ben, see: Why Play a Music CD? ‘No Ads, No Privacy Terrors, No Algorithms’ – The New York Times