[Playlists] Ability to link together Tracks in Playlists

[bvacaliuc]

Hi,

Wouldn't it be great if you could "pair"/"link"/"lock" or "chain" tracks together in a playlist? Then even if you shuffle-played, certain songs would always play together.

mock-up of how linking/pairing a song might work.

This idea was actually started by @Sartoris in 2012:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Closed-Ideas/Ability-to-link-together-tracks-in-playlists-also-for-...

But in 2015 it was closed as not having enough votes. Coincidentally, about the same time, I signed up for Spotify premium.  As I listened to all the songs I've "liked" with shuffle, the one thing that kept coming into my mind was the terrible feeling you get when a song that is meant to follow another is not played.  You get the feeling of being violated; it is a terrible experience.  As I searched for this feature, I saw that idea was marked inactive and decided to open it again.

That idea had gotten 138 likes in 2015 and as of January 2020 has gotten another 116 for a total of 255.  There were another 18 ideas then that all linked to the one above (see attached). So I re-submitted this idea in 2015 and since then you wonderful people have given it over 880 votes! Thank you!

From the rules, we see that we needed to have over 500 votes to keep the topic alive in monthly discussions (check!). We also see that we need 100 votes per year to keep it alive (check again!). So we're in good shape on that front. Now we have to see what we need to do to get it moving forward from "Not Right Now" to "Under Consideration".

Again, from the rules above, Spotify says that they use these criteria:

• Helping artists.
• Data and other information we've collected.
• Information from research testing, focus groups, and surveys.
• Feedback in the Community and other support channels. (That's us!)
• Our overall short- and long-term business strategy.

Hmm. Ok. So I would say that playing tracks that are meant to be together really helps the artists because their work is rendered in the correct way that they intended. I'm wondering how many artists are dying inside when their specially arranged songs are cut up because someone shuffled their playlist?

I can't speak to Spotify's data and research, focus groups and surveys, or about their business strategy. However, it occurs to me that anything that affects the order of which song plays can affect revenue because Spotify pays someone when a song gets played and they don't pay the same amount of $ for every song... Sure its a tiny fraction of a cent, but it adds up. So my first guess is that Spotify's hesitation to implement this idea is economic. I think we should continue the discussion along these lines to see if we could come up with some kind of consensus on this notion.

Letting a song "pair" with another in a playlist would be enough to make a lot of people happy.  Would we be willing to put some $ behind having this feature? Lets say Spotify charged you $0.01 (a cent) everytime you were shuffle playing and the queue hit a linked song and played the one that came after it. Would you be ok with that? If not, what would make it ok? I think answering the economic question is one thing that is keeping this idea from moving forward. @wsmyth commented in May 2019 that he would be willing to spend $1/month for this feature. I would do that too, would you?

From the many, many great comments, @WesleyM77 posted in April 2019 a link to a US Patent. There are two patents, actually, [US8214740B2] and [US9396760B2]. Reading through the two patents, it's clear that they cover this idea in many of its possible methods. So apart from the economic impact, Spotify may be prevented by the patent holder from implementing this feature. It has been noted that only one service has this feature, and now this explains it. The patents expire in 2030.

So, here we are. We want a feature, someone has successfully patented the feature and so we can't have nice things. Everyone including the patent holders want to make money, so is there a price that Spotify could negotiate with the patent holder and then pass on to the users that would be acceptable to all parties?

Spotify, would you look into this and get back to us?

Thanks very much!

-bogdan

[lloydian0]

Let's say sort of. Yes, I'm happy with my Apple solution, but to link tracks, you must do it with your personal library. And for that library to be shared across devices, you must purchase iTunesMatch ($25/year). I do all of this, and I enjoy linked tracks, but if I was limited to only Apple Music, I would not have this ability.
I suspect they fear artist manipulation. Imagine an artist who takes a five minute song but breaks it into sub-songs of one minute each. To play the whole song, the artist would get you to play five songs which pays better than getting you to play one song. If you play songs from your personal collection, this isn't an issue since it doesn't count toward plays on the streaming service. Obvious solution: allow artists to designate medley songs where each medley is treated as a single track. Let them be identified as bonus tracks on albums or have an alternate version of the album where the medley tracks are joined with no option to split them.

[Amdir]

I support this idea!

[Bry4d]

I wanted to add my support for this really-needed feature, and also to point out another distinct way it would be useful at least to a small sub-community of users.  We already have motivations #1, "some popular songs are intended to be played together together", and #2, "classical pieces often have multiple movements that are intended to be played together".

Motivation #3: in at least one dance tradition - Argentine Tango - the convention is to play music in sets of a few similar or related songs.  These sets are called "tandas", and are typically separated by a short piece of non-tango music called a "cortina" (curtain).  The (dancing) reason for this is that people typically dance a set (tanda) together, rather than just one song, before changing partners, and the dividing cortina provides both the signal and the time to change partners.  Some people have put together nice Spotify playlists reflecting this traditional structure: for example, see https://open.spotify.com/playlist/05npMIXusZ3r1LHUz3dk01?si=hQgQz8xWRKidhbS2OEtjCA and others you can find by searching for "Argentine Tango tandas".  But as you can imagine, shuffling such a playlist completely scrambles the tanda structure and makes it useless.  It would be really nice to be able to shuffle such a playlist, but keep the tandas together, so that you're shuffling tandas rather than individual songs.  Being able to "lock" songs together in a playlist would solve this.

Yes, this is a very niche use-case, probably affecting a far smaller body of users than all the classical and pop music fans already wanting to be able to lock songs together.  But I thought I'd mention it just to add to the diversity of uses and user communities that this feature would benefit.

[Bry4d]

Now for a separate, quick thought on the many ways to implement this idea.  While it would be nice in principle to be able to create virtual "composite songs" or playlists-within-playlists or something like that, my guess is that this approach would be invasive to a lot of different code in a lot of places throughout the system, and also might run into licensing-related issues as brought up before in this thread.

On the other hand, simply being able to lock songs together in a playlist seems to avoid that - it could be a pure "playlist UI" feature, and could even be a premium-only feature if that avoids licensing issues related to Spotify's promises to publishers about how songs are played to non-premium users.

As a minor further simplification/refinement to the idea as already suggested, I don't think the "Link To..." menu option would even need to have a sub-menu to specify what song to link to.  Instead, just have the user put all the relevant songs together in the playlist, appropriately ordered, and then provide a single checkbox option called "Lock to next song" or something equivalent.  This option might toggle a little visible lock icon or some such appearing just on the border between one song and the next in the playlist, so that the user can always see which adjacent pairs of songs are locked together.  The need for a right-click menu option could even be eliminated entirely at least in the desktop UI if the "hover-over" display mode for a playlist item makes clickable lock/unlock icons appear on the upper and/or lower border of the current playlist item the mouse is hovering over.

In shuffled, play, the shuffler then simply shuffles the beginnings of *unlocked* pairs of songs in the playlist, keeping locked sub-sequences of songs playing contiguously.  Nothing should be affected other than the playlist management UI and playlist shuffle-play mechanisms.

Thanks again for considering.

[wsmyth]

It’s not about licensing. Apple has a patent. Spotify does not want to pay Apple to use the  intellectual property.

If you do not believe me, look for a previous post by me in this thread. It has the link to the patent.

You might want to reconsider not writing about why you want it or how it could be implemented. It will not help.

Just give it an up vote, and ask them to pay Apple to use the patent.

One of my previous posts also says I would pay $1 per month for this feature. I guess Apple wants too much to make this feasible.

[bvacaliuc]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks @WesleyM77 and @wsmyth for bringing up the patent and the notion of adding a fee for this service.  I think something like this will be necessary in order for Spotify to consider implementing this feature.

I have updated the top post to reflect what you all have found.  Let's see if this clarifies things for Spotify.  In the meantime, why don't we discuss how much $ we would be willing to spend to have this feature.  Right now, we have $1/month extra and I've suggested $0.01/song.  Would you all be ok with that?  Spotify needs to know.

Happy New Year!

[jofoco4]

I would be willing to spend a little more for this feature, and the rates suggested are nominal.

[AMEntwistle]

Love this idea. You'd need to be able to add a link order so when shuffle tries to play either song it will know that it should play a specific song either after or before it. Too many times to I get hyped up by intro songs, only for it to shuffle to a completely different song.

[Sobaixu]

C'mon spotify, get your **bleep** together! I mean really!! Lots of bands have albums with many songs that should be played together, Pink Floyd's shine on you crazy diamond parts 1 to 9, for example. We need to have a "grouped songs playlist" option in the song menu. Call it what you want (Attach songs, sub-playlist, etc)... So that i can essentially tap on a song, select the "grouped songs playlist" option (or whatever you call it) from the menu, and then add any songs i want to be played along with the selected song, and in what order they will play, when this song is played (or any of the songs in the grouped playlist are going to be played) in shuffle mode. So i can tap on the song Shine on you crazy diamond part 1, select the grouped songs option from the song menu, then add shine on you crazy diamond parts 2 to 9 to the playlist. And then when i hit shuffle on my liked songs playlist, and it goes to play shine on you part 6, it will instead start at part 1 and play parts 1 through 9 before skipping to the next song. This way people can listen to certain songs the way they were meant to be played while using shuffle mode. Artists wont be rolling in their graves. And i won't have to manually edit albums so that certain songs are all i. One track and mess with the meta tag data and import it into spotify myself. Cause that's a **bleep** hassle and a half! And i'm tired of it. Almost ready to go looking for that other app that already has this feature, if spotify can't get up to par.

[user-removed]

I would love to have this feature and would happily pay $1/mo for it. I primarily listen to a playlist of about 8,000 songs that I treat as a personal radio station of sorts, but hearing, say, "Brain Damage" separate from "Eclipse" or several songs from The Wall not linked up, or numerous other examples (a few tracks from The Appleseed Cast's "Low Level Owl" come to mind) really hampers the experience.