[Changelog] August 2, 2024

This week was my first proper week back at the desk since going on a much-needed extended family holiday. Today's changelog is mostly about work I've done since then, but truth be told, I did a bit of coding while I was supposed to be taking a break 😆 😆

Without a doubt, playlist syncing is the big news here. This is a great feature for artists (get shared cross-platform) and for curators (automatic sharing and a boost to engagement scores).

Playlist Syncing

One of the "big projects" I've been working on is syncing playlists cross-platform. It will get its own article soon, but for now I'm going to include some of the highlights in this change log:

How it works:

• Curators can copy their Spotify playlist to Deezer, Apple or YouTube
• I wrote a bunch of code to look up the songs on each platform. This was a pain in the butt, and has some limitations (see below)
• You can "sync" your playlists to keep them up-to-date with Spotify
• When approving songs, it will show your synced playlists, auto-select them as sharing options, and include them in the messaging that is sent to the submitter

Limitations:

• Apple's API allows you to add tracks to the end, but they cannot be re-ordered or removed
• YouTube playlists don't have artwork, and Apple's artwork can only be added from within the app
• Deezer can't update playlist descriptions via the API
• Sometimes searching for songs fails to find a match 🙁
• If you change your title it won't auto-update

Still to be done:

• Support for SoundCloud (and probably Amazon Music)
• Better error handling

Miscellaneous

• I revamped the Friendly Genres (now called Genre Analytics) page to show some interesting data. Tilly wrote an article about it here
• Selection for the duration a song will be included in a playlist is now remembered on playlist-specific basis (@Jerry Spoon | unique playlists)
• Added support for curators to link to Meta Threads
• Fixed some issues with What's my Genre around YouTube analysis
• Cleared up a problem with the filtering of the Activity Feed for artists
• Started integration of DeepL translations to replace Google Translate
• Artist profile photos can now be rearranged (first one becomes avatar)
• There's a new "Forward" button in the Marketplace for teams
• Influencers can be filtered by interests

Coming up

Here are a few of the things in the pipeline:

• Improve translations on the website, including support for Hebrew and Arabic
• Explore Meta ad automation
• TikTok Pixel Conversions API for SubmitHub Links
• Consider adding a "technical" feedback option when submitting