I would love to see something like this for jazz, which has musicians constantly moving through groups and albums as musicians and composers and writers.
Like take "Take Five", one of my favorites. It was written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with solos by Desmond on alto sax and Joe Morello on drums. Those are all fun pieces of information that I wish I could click through to see more of.
Just like classical music, it's not impossible to represent this with a generic interface, but it would benefit by something more geared to how jazz fans like to browse.
Maybe it's just rose colored glasses but I want to say Rdio had support for things like this back in the early 2010s. I know it was the best music streaming service I've ever used for music discovery. I definitely recall it supporting things like music labels (i.e. Deutsche Grammophon) and want to say it got so granular that it provided the information (performers, conductors, etc) you are looking for. Alas, Rdio is no more :(
Yes, I’ll join you in pouring one out for Rdio. I listened to, and paid for, Rdio every day for years until Spotify killed it. Rdio allowed users to fulfill simple goals — find music you know and listen to it; find new music and listen to it. The paths to those goals were simple and clear.
Turns out it’s hard to make money that way. Thus why, I suppose, Spotify is a cornucopia of manipulative dark patterns.
I use spotify daily to listen to my playlists and find new music regularly. I have not noticed any dark patterns, apart from search on desktop being weird sometimes. What are they?
For one, all of the recommendations you receive are driven partly by sponsorship by major labels - release radar, the for you mix, and the radios you run from your playlists. This is not clearly documented online, but there is some coverage from when it was introduced in 2020. I'd be curious if anyone here has more up to date information.[0]
So one dark pattern would be the fact that the entire discovery system is partly driven by advertising incentives with no indication to the user about what recommendations are most genuine and what are being selected as the most-relevant sponsored option.
As an individual user, I think I've noticed this before. There was a span of time where every single playlist I made with hip hop on it would always bring up the same 2-3 JPEGMafia tracks in the radio mix, regardless of the playlists' individual content or the fact that I don't listen to that artist.
honestly, I don't know who to believe about anything anymore, but luckily this particular controversy is pretty low-stakes relative to a number of other current topics.
I only know of the upgrade splash screens where Dismiss is small and/or floating off of the brightly colored splash so it doesn't contrast and is harder to see. Exactly like Amazon Music.
Check out roon + quboz and/or tidal -- that's the audiophile route.
Roon is just meta-data and presentation. Quboz/Tidal hold the content. Roon's content and interface is fantastic compared to spotify and apple music. It uses third party content (wikipedia, reviews from tivo, maybe others) seemlessly. And it elevates the use of the album art. Also, it allows for album-centric approach to viewing/organizing/listening which I vastly prefer. Roon also allows deep linking. Like every album/track has a list of the people on it and you can see everything each of them has done. Same for composers/etc. Also, from each track, you can get to all the other recordings across all artists. Using this for the last month has really pointed out to me how crap apple and spotify are for discovery/learning/investigation.
Technically, this route is also superior because, as I understand it, roon tells the streamer + DAC, which may be way higher quality than the DAC in any apple device, to stream directly from TIDAL or QUBOZ. This yields higher quality because you skip the apple DAC and airplay, both of which lessen quality compared to what's possible with the other route. I'm sure the apple DACs are fine for what they are, but I'm also sure they're full of compromises. You can spend like 5K on a DAC alone.
I know audiophiles can really overdo it, but I have been using this combination for a month or so now and I think it's sooo much better. Music is way more like I remember it. It was confusing to me because spotify/apple music have everything and yet I found them very frustrating to use. My instinct was right -- they're crap products compared to what's possible. Your mileage may vary.
A DAC and an amp are two different things. It's not "worse" than dedicated amps either (it's better quality than many of those too), but it is lower powered because it's running off a phone battery, so that makes it less compatible with high-impedance headphones.
I use this and love it too. I've been using both the Dragonfly DAC/headphone amp (works with iPhones and iPads) as well as RooPiee on several raspberry pis with HifiBerry Digi digital output devices. Installation was very simple, and these add 24bit/192khz roon endpoint capability to my home theater systems.
I want that for pop music, too! I don't understand why Apple (and other companies) don't get that there are users who want to slice and dice music in this way for every genre. When I go looking for "No-one is to blame" by Howard Jones, I want the version from "Dream Into Action" not the crappy radio remake he did with Phil Collins on the drums. When I listen to "Leave it" by Yes, I may want to make the connection that it was produced by Trevor Horn who was also 1/2 of The Art of Noise. In fact, my friends and I used to play a game we called "6 Degrees of Bruford/Wakeman". You could find connections between just about any band and either Yes or Genesis in 6 or fewer steps.
One impediment is the pop industry doesn't organize it that way. Classical does, so PrimePhonic/Apple didn't have to invent a new taxonomy to make a classical service.
Apple and Spotify could use their market power to make labels backfill a more complex data format for pop.
> Although I guess that in today's world, I could just say "use AI to figure it out."
Amazon do this and it doesn't work at all well for classical music. The album reviews are full of reviews for the same piece of music but different performances, it's not always easy to tell either. I stopped buying CDs from Amazon years ago, although primarily because they'd always arrive with cracked jewel cases.
The crap data that labels provide is a big issue and it should be part of Apple’s curation process to provide us with better information.
They already did by putting singles and EPs into their own category instead of listing everything under albums. Speaking of which, those also got de-duplicated.
I don’t see how that could work without cooperation from the labels since they, the artists and producers have the authoritative data about each track and album. Even then, going back more than a number of years accurately would be challenging.
From popular genres I would think hip-hop would be the one to target; pop and rock have had pretty much for its entire existence encouraged listeners to link a recording with a band, and not to think about a producer or composer/writer, and to be generally negative about the idea of different performances (derided as covers, unless, like Joan Jett your covers become identified as the standard).
Hip-hop fans are generally much more interested in the producer, songwriters, and also sample use. They'd be a great audience for richer metadata and better presentation of same.
I second this! Couldn't agree more. In all honesty, some of the best parts of jazz lie in its history. For example listening to Clifford Brown might make you think "huh this is neat". But understanding his relationship to gillespie, early death, etc, puts his career in a unique and fascinating frame.
What aways amazes me about Brown is how much he accomplished in so little. I play trumpet, in high school was in California All State Jazz and Classical. I'm by no means a prodigy, I merely brought that up to say I know a lot of musicians.
When you ask any trumpet player to name their top 5 go-to artists if they want to sit down and listen, I'd say that 95% plus would have Brown somewhere in that list. This would be true of people ranging from myself to pro studio musicians. Heck I don't know anyone who's dedicated to the instrument that cant hum along perfectly to Jordu or Joy Spring including his solos.
In only 26 years of life, he has become one of the most iconic names in hard bop, a genre containing the likes of Freddie Hubbard and Horace Silver.
To think he did that in 26 years, one can only imagine what he'd have done if he made it to 60+!
Roon uses a database-style approach to keep track of the differences between compositions vs performances + artists vs composers. It’s peerless for Jazz.
It also has many of the “Apple Music Classical” features already like breaking out movements from tracks.
I've heard Roon mentioned a lot, and I have BluOs and my NAD amp support it natively. I've never really bothered to look into this. But this sounds like it's time for me to explore. Weird that it took an Apple product marketing sheet for me to "get" what Roon is like then....
I think the problem with separating jazz is that its boundaries are far more porous than classical.
There's virtually never a question as to whether a piece is classical or not. (Except maybe soundtrack scores which are a weird category of their own.)
But jazz tends to fuse with every other genre out there. You can find an artist at every point on the spectrum between jazz and hip-hop.
Another way of looking at it is, I never want classical tracks in a non-classical playlist. But I want jazz tracks mixed with non-jazz in my shuffle all the time.
And just one more point -- composers matter in classical just as much as artists, hence the need for special UX. But composers mostly aren't prominent that way in jazz. There are lots of standards but most people aren't aware of who actually wrote most of them.
When I tried out Tidal a while ago I noticed that it handled the liner notes type stuff much better than Spotify or anyone else.
Very much was able to do the sort of things you're alluding to, noticing you like a drummer on a track then clicking on them and finding out what else they've done. That sort of thing can't be done on Spotify.
There's a lot more potential with that sort of stuff that no one is yet doing.
That's an interesting idea, and a stone killer idea for jazz (imagine following the links from "Kind of Blue," where I think every player has their own discography to explore), but the utility wouldn't be limited to jazz.
Having prominent album personnel as links in really ANY popular music service would be great -- very often, players or producers on album A are also on album B, and that could lead to interesting discoveries for people.
I mean, this thing happens already, but only if you're motivated to read liner notes. 30+ years ago I figured out the cool atmospheric sounds I loved on THE JOSHUA TREE were probably because of U2's collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. When I realized both had albums of their own (and other artists with whom they collaborated) I had multiple new paths to explore.
Lanois resonated more with me than Eno, so I followed his work, which led me to artists I wouldn't have listened to otherwise for genre reasons or whatever.
It's also fun to pull on the producer thread sometimes. Lanois's track "The Maker", from his 1989 record ACADIE, shows up as a cover on several OTHER records he produced or otherwise influenced. Emmylou Harris included it (plus another of Lanois' songs) on her 1998 live album SPYBOY, which was the direct followup to the Lanois-helmed WRECKING BALL from the year before.
Willie Nelson included it on his 1998 collaboration with Lanois, TEATRO, which is an underrated and somewhat forgotten gem in his discography. It's NOT what you'd think of when someone says "country album."
(Eventually, the song became part of the Dave Matthews Band's live rep, even.)
Anyway, back then, you did it by reading liner notes, but digital music makes it less likely that you'll mull over the CD booklet while listening today. The good news is that the tech exists to make those paths more obvious now.
This is the "Take Five" variant by Val Bennett, "The Russians Are Coming", used in the show Secret Life of Machines (awesome series, now freely/legally posted on YT):
Learning Take Five on alto sax when I was 15 or so was part of what solidified my love for the instrument. Such a recognizable and timeless song; it's often my go-to suggestion for people unfamiliar with jazz.
Gets even more interesting when you look at things like b sides, alternate takes, and covers. Take 10 was a variant of Take five, released under Desmond's name.
Like take "Take Five", one of my favorites. It was written by Paul Desmond for the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with solos by Desmond on alto sax and Joe Morello on drums. Those are all fun pieces of information that I wish I could click through to see more of.
Just like classical music, it's not impossible to represent this with a generic interface, but it would benefit by something more geared to how jazz fans like to browse.