Aleatoric

April 17, 2013 10:37 AM

Do you like music? Do you like entropy? Do you have Spotify? If so, then go here to listen to a song chosen completely at random. It might even be good!
posted by theodolite (20 comments total)

Look, pal. If I want to listen to completely random music on Spotify, I can click the "Radio" button any time I want.
posted by schmod at 10:46 AM on April 17, 2013 [4 favorites]

In retrospect I should have written "Do you like Bob Seger tribute bands, eurodance remixes, and yoga studio background music?" as the first question there.
posted by theodolite at 11:01 AM on April 17, 2013

Hah yes! I got a eurodance remix ... and I only just realized that there's still a shuffle function on the desktop version of Spotify. I was SO ANGRY for a long time about it!
posted by brilliantine at 11:03 AM on April 17, 2013

Look, pal. If I want to listen to completely random music on Spotify, I can click the "Radio" button…

…and get a filtered queue of playlist-based selections, chummer.
posted by Nomyte at 11:09 AM on April 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

By digitizing thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music.
posted by wemayfreeze at 11:09 AM on April 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

I was Googling one of the horrible results I got, and uhh ... is anyone else able to get the Spotify app to open just by mousing over a search result? Like for instance this result?
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:19 AM on April 17, 2013

"Jingle Bells All The Way" by DJ Scumback from Hardcore X-Mas Party - Hallelujahhh It's Christmas. Well, that is random all right.
posted by zachlipton at 11:44 AM on April 17, 2013

Spotify is the most addictive thing in the universe. When people tell me they don't use it and/or buy albums from Itunes my face gets all jelloish and I'm what are you why do you exist.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:45 AM on April 17, 2013 [3 favorites]

Guessing it tilts towards the more popular, out of 4 clicks so far 3 are bands I've already listened to...

The specifics seem to be:

I have set up a web service (written in C#) that queries the Spotify Metadata API with random searchphrazes and then I pick a random song from the result

and the spotify results do seem to be returned in some sort of popularity order (not sure about the API, last time I was tempted there was some barrier, possibly monetary).

I prefer ant-walking* spotify and chucking all the good stuff on a stack.

One of my favourite weighted random suggestion would be searches for:

/reads h(er|is) (poem|work)s/ (and variations and where they take you)


My current random suggestion is W.H. Auden (for grandiose is his vision, and grandiose is his love, and hip is hiz rhymez).



* Even though it does sometimes end up in closed loops with certain genres.
posted by titus-g at 11:54 AM on April 17, 2013

Doesn't Spotify already do this ... ?
posted by mrgrimm at 12:17 PM on April 17, 2013

Spotify only allows 10 requests per second per IP-number. Usually this is not a problem, but if this site should get some heavy traffic, this limitation could kick in.

Uh, yeah.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:18 PM on April 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Spotify is the most addictive thing in the universe. When people tell me they don't use it and/or buy albums from Itunes my face gets all jelloish and I'm what are you why do you exist.

It helps that the current version UI of iTunes is really terrible.
posted by Brocktoon at 12:19 PM on April 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

Spotify is great for non-random music listening as well; I am listening my way through Western Classical music, chronologically. Neither every composer nor every piece nor every performance but a lot and I would have access to almost none of it otherwise. With Spotify I can just search on Kassia or Nicholas Gombert and I'm ready to go.
posted by mountmccabe at 12:54 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't use Spotify, I buy music on iTunes (and Amazon, and Bandcamp, and Bleep, and untold record label sites, with the intention of getting the artists as much money from the sale as possible), and I think the current iTunes UI is pretty great.
posted by zsazsa at 1:25 PM on April 17, 2013

No, no, it's pretty horrible. It was probably a significant effort (a month late) to take a half-horrible interface and make it truly, truly horrible.
posted by mrgrimm at 1:54 PM on April 17, 2013 [1 favorite]

I hate to further the derail, but yes, hiding the sidebar was an awfully boneheaded move. But its new music browsing interface, the expanded album view, and Up Next are fantastic (in my opinion). I never really used iTunes until 11 came out because it was missing the features I considered absolutely necessary for music listening, especially the on-the-fly listening queue building that Up Next added.
posted by zsazsa at 2:35 PM on April 17, 2013

Little known fact: our world is roughly 75% made up of Eurodance remixes. If you stacked all of the world's music from end to end across the globe, you'd have the most epic Eurodance megamix of all time.
posted by naju at 2:43 PM on April 17, 2013 [2 favorites]

My music library is large enough that clicking 'shuffle' on my Spotify will work just as well. It's a marvelous invention.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:00 PM on April 17, 2013

Do you like entropy?

I don't have a strong opinion there, but I can assure you, most fervently, that entropy does not like me.
posted by Malor at 1:13 AM on April 18, 2013

I've never liked the sound of entropy, but if you play it backwards it's amazing.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:49 AM on April 18, 2013