I noticed that the track “Canon (Primo)” by Justice only has 5,815 plays on Spotify, even though every other track on the album has millions of plays. How is this possible? I know it’s just an interlude track that you wouldn’t listen to unless you’re listening to the full album, but still, this play count seems extremely low. What’s going on here? (I’m hoping my attached screenshot shows up here)

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    78·
    9 months ago

    It’s 27 seconds long - Spotify on shuffle won’t (AFAICT) play songs below a certain length on shuffle unless you specifically like them.

    So it’s probably people listening to “Justice Radio” and never being given that song.

  • EK13@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    9 months ago

    It seems that Spotify doesn’t accurately count plays for tracks under 30 seconds. I had a look through some of the albums I know of with short tracks and here’s what I found:

    In fact I found the MGMT album 11​•​11​•​11 has a 26 second long track with no reported plays.

    So while it’s probably true that people are listening to fewer full albums than they used to in the days of vinyl or CD, it seems more likely to do with Spotify only paying royalties on tracks over 30 seconds and the discussion surrounding that.

  • WastedJobe@feddit.de
    38·
    9 months ago

    AFAIK to count as one play, a song needs to be played for more than 30 seconds (source: friend used to work at a record label), so to me it’s surprising it has any plays at all.

      • Cinner@lemmy.worldB
        9·
        9 months ago

        Or # of people that listened to it/entire album twice (27x2 > 30) which given the listener counts of the other songs seems likely.

        Maybe it counts if someone downloads it?

        It would be interesting to hear from an actual Spotify dev.

        • Atemu@lemmy.ml
          41·
          9 months ago

          I’m sure they’re absolutely not allowed to tell anything related to this to the public ;)

          • Cinner@lemmy.worldB
            5·
            9 months ago

            No I’m sure they’re under NDA, but this specific example doesn’t seem like it would provide anyone trying to game the system any insight the numbers don’t already provide, unless it was something like “the real counts are zero, the numbers are inflated.”

            IOW doesn’t seem like a big deal. But I can understand most Spotify devs not wanting to risk it.

  • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
    24·
    9 months ago

    So I’m not a programmer but I work with a few and they told me that due to the way that certain processor architectures store integers as floating-point numbers, this can happen when a track is listened to exactly 5,815 times.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      72·
      9 months ago

      Did we ever? Except maybe on the first play through?

      Once tapes started being more popular than ever, it became easy to record your own mixtape. So that predates me by a generation or so

      • Regalia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        3·
        9 months ago

        I mean, I’m young and I have a full on digital collection of albums on my drive.

        I don’t like mixtapes for regular listens because I might like the songs in the album if I like one song already.

        I do like mixes if I just want to listen to a specific kind of music.

        • Venator@lemmy.nz
          3·
          9 months ago

          Even on a streaming service if I hear a band i like that I’ve not heard before from a “radio” playlist I’ll go to that band and listen to whatever thier most popular album is.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        I did for a bit with tapes and CDs, then didn’t for a good long while, but about a decade ago I got into vinyl, which I think is super cool because it’s somewhat difficult to drop the needle right where you want to… and at the same time, listening to one side of a record just feels like a much more atomic experience, and some artists actually build the album so that it adds another layer to the art.

    • BurningnnTree@lemmy.oneOPEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      Hello fellow Justice listener ✝ My speakers are getting tired of playing Generator (new track) over and over

      • brokenlcd@feddit.it
        3·
        9 months ago

        Mine are getting a bit of an upgrade… I found two 26" speakers ripped from an old stage set and a bag of identical tweeters in my dad’s old stuff, I’m currently soldering together a crossover circuit and an amplifier that won’t die while trying to run this whole mess; you can bet a bomb threat is gonna be called when genesis and waters of nazareth hit

  • Corroded@leminal.spaceEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Maybe people who are listening to the album have removed it from their liked/downloaded songs?

    If I shuffle through a playlist and find a song that doesn’t add much or just acts as an intro to an album I usually remove it eventually.