The 🔥🔥🔥 New Social App: NPR Podcasts Comments Section on Spotify

{Ira Glass voice} On this week’s episode of This American Life, the story of middle schoolers too young for social media chatting in the comments section of NPR’s podcasts on Spotify. From the transcript:

And it was just, like, gibberish. There was a bunch of new comments, but I couldn’t make heads or tail of any of them. They’re just these clipped, weird, incoherent postings that I was just like— it screamed bots, just because anytime that I see just gibberish in a comment on the internet, I assume it’s a bot. But the fact that they were all from different accounts seemed very weird. And the fact that they also maybe seemed to be interacting in some way also seemed weird and not like typical bot behavior.

They tracked down one of the participants and interviewed her:

Ira Glass: And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?

Ella: I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.

Ira Glass: I see. So you picked NPR because it didn’t seem very popular.

Ella: Yeah, so that we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s comments.

Ira Glass: I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.

You can listen to the whole episode here (or wherever you get your podcasts) — it’s the very first segment — or watch a shorter version of it on Instagram or YouTube. (thx, alana)

• Ira Glass
• NPR
• podcasts
• spotify
• This American Life

Spotify’s Time Capsule personalized playlists

Spotify has made a Time Capsule playlist for each of its users, “a personalized playlist with songs to take you back in time to your teenage years”. It’s a little tough to find…you can search for it, find it under “Decades” on the Browse page, or use the website. Here’s my Time Capsule:

I’d heard from friends how eerily accurate their playlists were, but mine’s not that great. I grew up in a small town with limited access to music. Everyone I knew listened to country, metal, or top 40. I didn’t really care that much for metal or country, so top 40 it was. My musical taste took a right turn in college and it was only much later that I circled back to the sort of music that I would have listened to in the 80s had I been aware of it. Also, it looks as though Spotify thinks I’m 8-10 years younger than I actually am. The playlist should be crammed with Prince, Michael Jackson, Madonna, George Michael, and other 80s MTV staples, not stuff that came out in the mid 90s.

However, I have no idea how the hell it knew about Cum on Feel the Noize, Wishing Well, and Eye of the Tiger. I’ve never listened to any of them on Spotify but young Jason was obsessed with each of these for a brief period. I can still hear Casey Kasem saying Terence Trent D’Arby’s name with his distinctive America’s Top 40 cadence. Freaky!

• music
• Spotify

The Most Timeless Songs of All Time

Matt Daniels of Polygraph used playcount data from Spotify to identify the most played songs from the past, which he labeled The Most Timeless Songs of All Time. The most timeless song of the 90s, by a wide margin? Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit.¹

Out of the entire catalog of music from the 90s, these are the tracks on the trajectory to survive. Some of my friends were deeply disturbed by what’s been lost in time (e.g., Pearl Jam). And No Diggity isn’t just anecdotally timeless, it’s the fifth most-played song from the 90s.

Note the tracks that hardly charted on Billboard, in their day. Smells Like Teen Spirit, a track that never reached the Billboard Top 5 when it was released in 1992, is now the most-played song from the 90s.

Daniels makes the point that it is not the generation that made the music that will determine its long-term prospects for being remembered, but subsequent generations, which sounds obvious when it’s put that way, but I’d never really thought about it.¹

Biggie has three of the Top 10 hip-hop songs between 1986 and 1999. This is a strong signal that future generations will remember Biggie as the referent artist of 80s and 90s hip-hop. And there’s No Diggity as the top - perhaps it’s that glorious Dr. Dre verse.

Hip hop heads will lament the omission of Rakim, Public Enemy, or Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt. It’s a depressing reality that exists for every genre and generation: not every artist will be remembered. The incoming generation will control what’s relevant from the 90s and carried into the future, independent of quality and commercial success. For rock, that might be Blink-182. For electronica, that might be Sandstorm.

I made a playlist on Spotify of the top 30 most timeless songs from the article. Enjoy!

Update: Mike Harris made a Spotify playlist with all 1001 songs from the article. 66+ hours of timelessness is a lot of timelessness.

1. Keeping in mind that not all recorded music is on Spotify.↩

2. And now I can’t stop thinking about it, particularly in the context of the Internet/Web. Who and what from the 1990s and early 2000s will be remembered in the context of the Web 10 or 20 years from now? Marc Andreessen might because he’s relevant to a whole new generation of startup bros right now whereas David Filo or Pierre Omidyar might not be. Flickr might because of Slack but not Delicious. Jorn Barger and Dave Winer may be lost to the sands of time in favor of John Gruber or Dooce.↩

• Matt Daniels
• music
• Nirvana
• Spotify

re/spin

The re/spin service helps you import any Spotify or Last.fm playlist into Rdio. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that before too long, we’ll need a service to convert Rdio collections and playlists to Spotify. (via @capndesign)

• music
• Rdio
• Spotify