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Shutting down Line-In

Hello Spotify Line-In users.

We’re here to announce that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Line-In.

We want to personally thank you for all of your help and hard work on this project, as we’ve gained some very valuable insights.

Community input is something we truly value at Spotify so we will keep you updated on future initiatives here in the Community.

Thank you,
The Line-In Team

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ParentalControl

Sad. I've been useing this a lot to flag innopropriate content in spotify and to correct metadata. You guys have a lot of errors for artists. Lot of bootleg albums out there taking credit for stuff that doesn't belong to them.

jshatan

Yeah that's a darn shame. Nearly every week I get incorrect artists in my Release Radar due to the lousy metadata and I was excited about being able to do something about it directly.

MidnightRuby

So how are we supposed to correct it when you put albums on the wrong artist? I have seen three cases of this recently and only one has been fixed.

cutout

The process for reporting incorrect info on Spotify is just maddening.

Line-in is now gone.

There is no UI in the app alongside the incorrect project (ex: "Report incorrect info" link)

When you click the "Want to help report metadata errors" post, it gives you "You do not have sufficient privileges for this resource"

When you search for the solution via Google, you get routed through a labrinyth of outdated solutions to the problem.

This is a total mess! C'mon Spotify.

j2niker

This is honestly great news. Now do as literally all your big competitors allow their users to do (Apple Music, Google Music Play), which is to

ALLOW THE USERS THEMSELVES TO CHANGE THEIR METADATA (which only affects their own accounts)!!!!!

_M-I-K-I_

Very sad news. I was very proud to help You, manage ivalid metadata. 😕

RapFiend

I was glad to help. But Line-In was a failing system.

chidi9901

What a shame. First the beta community was dying slowly over the years (it got more and more in-transparent for beta testers), then voice search being introduced and removed again (for me at least), then the new music player layout never appeared for premium users for whatever reason (only for free users?), then changing the navigation buttons layout (from initially 5 to 3, and now back to 5 again, on Android devices), and now Line-In has been shut down. What's going on? It looks like there are huge problems with project management in Spotify HQ. I read that the next big thing is the Friends Weekly feature. No release date yet, but should I fear that this is also going to fail?

alansteward

It would be nice if artists were given the opportunity to fix the metadata such a genre in their artist accounts. I personally suffer from a Last.fm hangover where all data was taken over from 8 years ago when I was doing a different music style.

Cheers, Alan

frenchiveruti

This is shameful at the bare minimum..

Caltor

So how do we flag explicit songs now???

alansteward

Your distributor should do that. When you realease an album or song on Spofity , the distri will ask if it is explicit or not.

That is not necessarily the biggest problem for us artists. So many are stuck in the wrong genre and Spotify will show wrong "people also like..." artists because most of the genres and "also like" are taken over from Last.fm and no longer valid.

It would be so easy for an artist to be able to specify his genre on Spotify for Artists instead of relying on outdated info from another website like Last.fm where artists also no longer have the option to specify your genre.

Caltor

@alansteward wrote:
Your distributor should do that. When you realease an album or song on Spofity , the distri will ask if it is explicit or not.

I'm not an artist.

alansteward

I understand. Usually it is the artist who reports if his song is explicit or not and the record company just goes with that labeling (and so does Spotify).

Caltor

Unfortunately that isn't 100% reliable and I think users reporting explicit
songs that aren't flagged and vice versa was a useful part of Line-in.
There doesn't appear to be an alternative way of doing this on a desktop
computer. At a time when their competitors are steadily adding features,
Spotify seem to be doing the opposite.

Aurora14

What are your plans then on creating an alternative to report incorrect titles etc?

In the last few days I found about four-five errors that need to be addressed. Different artists that have the same name have albums mixed together under one entry; typos in song names, and so on and so forth.

It's really frustrating paying for a subscription and having amateurish, if understandable given the amount of content managed, errors like this.

alansteward

What would be my solution? I think that was why this thread had started here in the first place: Don't shut down Line-In. If it has issues, Spotify could address and fix the issues. That would make sense to me.

MooseBlaster

Well, this is an absolute disappointment but to be honest it felt a little bit like shouting into the wind. So many things were just straight out ignored rather than simply checked and agreed - even when it was obvious.

For example Justice vs Simian's 'We Are Your Friends' ( spotify:track:49ErwcBYfYRPNBdRuPvpYA ) - which has over 24 million plays - is still being listed as by a British jungle producer rather than, pretty obviously, the massively popular dance duo who actually did it.

In the end, it was a pointless, undersupported disaster - but unlike the last time they tried (and failed) I hope they actually sit down and think 'how do we make this work better?' - like having it that if a number of people say 'Hey, this is wrong!' they go 'huh, you're right. Thanks' and fix it.

Expecting record labels to fix trivial things is pointless - because big record labels can't really be bothered to fix things if they don't affect plays, and these churn-out merchants that produce badly-labelled albums attributed to the wrong artist and messing up the recommendations don't really care - (like this album with every track credited to 'Mambo Jambo' - which is the name of the album, and not the artist: spotify:album:4DBo1i0GOdXhiM0VBi7VYv ).

Honestly, it's not rocket science. Just figure out a way of algorithmically handling the bulk of changes - and if you can't handle it, maybe you shouldn't put it as a visible option in the app but leave it on the website.

DonSolare

I am not sure if I understood. Does it mean that the hours that hundreds of users spent sharing their knowledge unpaid are gone for ever? We have to deal with a credibility issue here. And with a simple question: guess what will happen next time that Spotify asks for support?

In my case I was mainly adding composers to the tracks that doesn't have this information. By the way, I never saw that they were added to the credits, nor that the distributors/labels were asked "is this true?". Since I am with an indie label, I would have known immediately. This kind of information is not only anecdotical, it also has to do with the royalties. If no composer is acknowledged, were do their royalties go?

https://open.spotify.com/artist/0sr00YxbHKRAruzYrJ6PEg

Kerry_Maxwell

Virtually every service I pay for online pulls this **bleep** - "we've removed funtionality that you value from the service you pay for and there's nothing you can do about it, but 'community input is something we truly value' ". Sure it is. The only input these services value is the input from my bank account.

Aurora14

Well there can be some arguments made that if the implementation of Line In made it difficult to process edits, - at the end of the day it's also a piece of software, and depending on its workings it may be impractical to provide fixes, when what is needed is a complete rewrite.

Obviously this is speculation, there may be entirely other reasons for it.

The point still remains that we need a way to report incorrect metadata, and to have these reports actioned.

unknown

Hey all,

Although Line-In is going away, you can still help to report incorrect content metadata! Just check out this Spotify support article for a how-to on correcting content issues: https://support.spotify.com/article/how-do-i-report-a-content-error-on-spotify/ 🙂

Aurora14

@ItsPurgle that's great, thanks for posting it. This path should have a lot more visibility since Line In has been retired, - otherwise we'll keep having 10-page threads like this one 🙂

When there's a dedicated community, some of the most important things for them are a) that they are being listened to, and b) that their time and effort contributing to this community are not wasted. I hope whatever Spotify does is genuinely guided by these principles.

jshatan

Good point - but until they actually make the fix I suggested through that form a couple of weeks ago, I will not be spending any of my valuable time using it. Cheers!

Kerry_Maxwell

There's another function I used Line-In for: you can not select type in the app, so I would go to Line-In so I could select the artist name or piece and copy the text for search purposes. I listen to primarily classical, that often has very long names and "song" titles, and if I decided I'd like to purchase something, I'd select the type from Line-In to help me find the music for purchase. It was also handy to see what label the recording is from, which is not always apparent from the copyright credit. Many classical recordings appear on multiple labels, and if I read about a specific recording, it's sometimes hard to figure out which one I've found on Spotify. Sure, thisn't what it was designed for, but it was functionality I found useful, so the service I pay for is now less useful to me. Minor for sure, but these things have a habit of multiplying.

The-Equalizer

Disappointing. I enjoyed changing the metadata details and adding moods. It clearly got some usage, based on 26 pages in this forum.

But if it was still a manual process and not automatically changing the actual music metadata, then it was probably a hopeful tool at most anyway.

An earlier post suggested changing the metadata locally only, but that doesn't fix the underlying issue of wrong details on the service to begin with.

felipegaucin97

So the changes I made in Spotify Line-In did not help? At least you should accept the changes you make

Zambiblasian1

Pardon my french, but what the fk were you guys smoking when you made this charlie-foxtrot of a decision?!

"Difficult decision" my backside.

Justapilgrim20

Well there are some instrumental songs that are marked Explicit. Some are even religious in nature. I wish they would not be classified as such.

https://open.spotify.com/track/4vp8EqgDsuJJDz2fGIr50H?si=GtIByL__R1yivf1Yeg_FJQ

xoberecords

Es muy triste lo que hicieron, espero que vuelvan a ponerlo disponible.

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