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I would subscribe to your ad free service in a minute if you would provide Spotify links in your emails and on your website. Promise!

Please, add a play on Spotify link to all albums and reviews in email and on your website. If possible, add an option to add the album to a play later play list. That would be totally cool and I would subscribe to a paid subscription if that would be an exclusive feature. Ad free is not that important to me. I either ignore the ads or use an ad blocker. Add some cool value to the subscription.

Thanks, André 

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Just FYI we rolled out a feature today in the tracklists of album pages that will try to search Spotify and find a link for the songs.

Thanks for the inspiration.

 

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W

Wow, that is really cool. Thanks a lot! Looks like I have to subscribe now :-) I will do that today.

One thing I found is that you do not urlencode slashes which causes problems on spotify.com.

As here between "Bacharach" and "Elvis":

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-songs-of-bacharach-costello-mw0003914813

https://open.spotify.com/search/In%20the%20Darkest%20Place%20artist%3ABurt%20Bacharach%20/%20Elvis%20Costello

Thanks again,

André

This is awesome!! And I can easily get access to the whole album. 💚💚💚

Now all we need is a Soundiiz API

W

Hi @

you are right, the second URL will not work without a local Spotify client installed. And you are right when you point out that the guys at AllMusic do a great job :-)

I like your website as well b.t.w. Just listening to your playlist "The Very Best Of 1984!!!"

Hi @Zac,

you are welcome. Thank YOU for providing this great website :-)

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You're making me blush...... 💚💚💚💚💚💚

W

Thanks for taking the time to explain the situation in such a detailed way. I am an amateur developer myself and I can feel your pain :-)

I developed a python script to add all my existing mp3 albums to my Spotify library. But that was nothing compared to what you describe.

Nevertheless, I just found a way to search Spotify like you search Amazon:

This one opens the search results in the browser:

https://open.spotify.com/search/teenage%20kicks%20artist%3Aundertones

And this URL opens the Spotify client and to display the search results:

spotify://search:teenage%20kicks%20artist%3Aundertones

I do not think that I found a solution just by using google, that you are not aware of. I am sure that you already know this search url syntax for ages.

But I am curious to hear why that does not work for you. Maybe you want to share your thoughts with us.

Thanks again,

Andre

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This is compelling.
I know when we experimented with this previously, I don't believe this syntax was in place but maybe I'm mistaken.

Thanks for the detailed response and examples.

Hi @wiesenator,

I think it would be important to point out that the spotify:// protocol would only work if you actually have Spotify installed (assuming).

Being a user of soundiiz,I've come to learn how complicated it gets when it comes to not having complete metadata. Then there's another issue with album names. If you have strict search criteria that can be a problem as well. Example, you're looking for a particular song, and the search criteria includes a specific album, and it is not found. However, the song is actually there under a different album name. Albums get re-released all the time. Record labels consume other record labels, artists/bands changing their names throughout their careers. I realize it's not that easy putting these scripts together. God bless you guys, because you have a LOT more patience then I would.

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation 💚💚 I had no idea the struggles and challenges of putting something like this together. Especially when it comes to Spotify. Their platform used to be almost like "open source," and welcomed many developers to build around their streaming service. It's disappointing given how we now consume music, there are so many barriers still.This sort of reminds me of the issues we had with the music industry 20 years ago. That being, they cared more about the money than the art. I see the same behavior in streaming. They care more about subscribers, than creating an ecosystem that allows for more integration with other services. What a shame. Sorry to read this 😢

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Hi André

We've been working toward getting more Spotify links added to AllMusic but it is tricky to link up the two catalogs since they are both so massive.

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From a streaming standpoint, Amazon was the worst service to pick. Spotify has the most users of all the streaming services, and that includes Apple. Not only that, they don't play music on demand. Users of your site have to be Amazon members to listen to songs directly. I don't think that's right. Especially when we donate to your site.

Ok. A better answer:

In 2012 when we redesigned AllMusic our plan was to include links to Spotify, Apple (iTunes), MOG and Rdio. These were four of the bigger players in the streaming space at the time (plus three of them used the same IDs we use) and our hope was to give streaming access to users, regardless of what service they used.

Over time, MOG and Rdio went out of business, iTunes stopped being iTunes which left only Spotify.

In order for us to know that when you click the link to "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones and you want to go to the Spotify (iTunes, Rdio, MOG) page to listen to that song, there needs to be an ID or a path underneath that button that says "Take them to https://open.spotify.com/track/7ATyLePQnHxFk5kzxWCcsh?si=431f7095b4f7430a so they can play the song."

For a while we were getting database dumps of raw track metadata from Spotify. We built an elaborate auto-linking process to say "We call this song Teenage Kicks by The Undertones. Spotify calls this song Teenage Kicks by Undertones, The. This has an 88% text match, 100% if you remove leading articles. Link our ID MT0000123456 to Spotify ID 7ATyLePQnHxFk5kzxWCcsh."

Conversely if our song is called 'Teenage Kicks by The Undertones' and their data says 'Tennaged Kix by Underwear' then it wouldn't get linked.

And then do that for the 35 million tracks in our database.

If we have a full database to compare metadata between our database and theirs, this is a *relatively* fast process (I believe our initial pass took about a week to link). However, we no longer have access to those data dumps from Spotify so we can't quickly/easily link our data set to theirs (as much as we'd like to).

They do have an API that we can try to look things up one at a time, but we've run into limits as to how hard we can hit their servers and how quickly the responses come back. We have a back-burner project to get the linking process improved but we just haven't had time to get to it.

In regards to Amazon, it is really simple. They have a search function where we can pass in https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=song: "Teenage%20Kicks" by "The%20Undertones" and a lot of the time it finds the right thing. We don't need to link anything ahead of time so we just send our request of song title + artist name into Amazon and they often can find it.

So it isn't a vindictive or manipulative effort to avoid Spotify and force people to Amazon. It's just that linking 35 million tracks one-by-one is a bigger job than we can do right now. Hopefully we can change that, plus add Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal, Apple Music, YouTube Music and more.

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