New Music Friday is a goddamned lie

[singedsun]

Sorry folks, there's no new music this week. Only an old, frustrated fandom fanmixer. I don't want to rehash everything I just spewed into a tumblr post, so let me link that here instead.

In which singedsun is grumpy old about 8tracks porting playlists to Spotify

The tl;dr of which is that the option of porting playlists from 8tracks to Spotify isn't altogether a bad one. If you've not saved your playlists/fanmixes elsewhere over the years, having this option to move things to where a lot of people listen to music these days isn't a bad one. But when it comes to copying other people's playlists/fanmixes to your own account, I'm not a fan.

Most of you all by now know what a huge music fan I am. I come by my love for music honestly, from singing at the radio with my dad as a wee toddler and later teaching myself the piano, flute lessons, band and choir. Later when I fell out of love with traditional art, fanmixes gave me a way to contribute to fandoms I loved before I started writing things for myself. I participated in a lot of exchanges in the LJ days as a fanmixer and I still cherish some of the mixes I made for fandoms I wasn't even into at the time I made them. I liked doing the art, front and back covers with the tracklisting, the whole thing.

I stopped making fanmixes for awhile when I moved from LJ to tumblr and hopped out of fandom exchanges for awhile. But then as I got more into RPs, I got way back into it not just for myself but for people I was writing with or on the same site with and as gifts. A mix of those is on my 8tracks site (LJ & fandom). I've got a few others on playmoss, but I don't much like their set up, so I haven't done much there overall.

To be honest, I'm a little sad about losing a site like 8tracks, though I completely understand why a site like that isn't sustainable. I LOVE streaming sites like Google Play (my favorite) or Spotify. What I don't like is this specific option of completely porting someone ELSE's playlists means taking their art, their text and their playlist and putting it under your username, which you now have the ability to edit.

Fanmixes, playlists, mixtapes (whatever you call them) are in theory, a personal creative effort. Sometimes for yourself, often as a gift (to a person, or maybe to a specific fandom). It's at it's simplest, music curation. But it can be a lot more than that.

I'd hope people who like my stuff would try to do what I did just now, save .txt files of the playlists they like instead of porting them to Spotify (which might I add... isn't a perfect process, songs might not be available on that platform, or the transfer might fail, or ERRORS), or maybe clicked my profile to try and find where I am now and if there's a different place where they can follow my mixes. Which, yes, tumblr is the best place for that [here]. But who knows.

I'm happy to share my stuff wherever people are listening and I'm happy to follow other people to wherever they're sharing their mixes too. I guess I need to get over and build my own page for my own stuff and make it stand beside all the other places that might come and go.

I'm sorry this isn't a normal New Music Friday post... so let me leave you with at least one song.

Check out this AMAAZING metal cover for Roxette's "Listen to your Heart by Through Fire. I don't know anything about this band other than they made this cover, but you know I'm a sucker for a modern day metal cover of just about anything but most especially 80's music. LOVE IT.

Comments

[fiachairecht]

YEP. If I wanted my mixes on Spotify I'd've put them on Spotify! But I haven't, because I hate Spotify and I don't want even pseudo-anonymous fannish stuff linked to it. I left a 'do not import my mixes to spotify' note in my profile there but like ... who knows if it matters.

(Yoon Ha Lee on the archiving of fannish material without consent feels extremely relevant here, not to mention all the non-fandom stuff that people might've created.)

[singedsun]

Yeah, I've had similar experiences when it comes to RP stuff. I had a journalist screencap an RP board where I was the Admin. Post and pictures and everything. It was... a time.

I'm not averse to Spotify in general, it's definitely not my favorite and I don't pay for it. I do have some mixes up there just because I know that's where a lot of people have migrated and if I want to make something easily shareable, it'll have a better chance there than Google Play. But this definitely makes me nostalgic for like having to do the hard work of created a whole curated mix complete with tracklist, art and notes and upload the .zip for it for other fans. I guess I got out of the practice and I should just buck it up and get back to it.

[dolorosa_12]

Ugh, I got that message from 8tracks about needing to import things to Spotify, and it's very frustrating! Thankfully I only made five playlists there, and didn't bookmark anyone else's, so I'm hoping the process will run smoothly enough, but it's just one more thing that I don't have time to do right now, but that I will have to do due to the 31 December deadline.

[dolorosa_12]

And, having just tried this, half the songs on my playlists aren't available on Spotify, so I'm going to have to try something else as a solution.

[singedsun]

Yeah, the .txt option is the best solution. You at least get a list of the songs in the right order, and it's way faster. Porting to Spotify was breaking half the time for me on my own mixes and when it did work, I was missing sometimes half the songs.

[dolorosa_12]

Another possible solution, which will require more effort, but which I'm probably going to do, given I only have five mixes on 8tracks, is create playlists on Youtube, although that will require monitoring the playlists to ensure that tracks don't get taken down, and replacing them when that happens.

[prixmium]

Oh my gosh. I literally, literally just made a new 8tracks account on Christmas Eve for the purposes of making a fanmix for a Secret Santa thing I was doing in a discord server. Luckily, I thought to make it redundant on spotify just-because. I guess gmail has filtered out the email announcing the shutdown? This is hilarious irony. I wish they had, y'know, told people not to make new accounts, though?

[singedsun]

That sucks. Playmoss is still out there as an option, but Spotify and YouTube are really the best place for making shareable public lists. Unless you do it the old school way and create a .zip file and upload it somewhere (which is what I used to do and might go back to).