"New" songs coming soon?

I am still leaning towards this just being us affecting the search results. If I understand things correctly, Spotify aims at making relevant suggestions based on your listening preferences and what other people with similar preferences like. Their user database contains every detail on what songs are listened to and what songs/bands are searched for. Trying to find patterns in what certain groups of users look for, and then being able to suggest this music to other users with similar listening profiles, is part of the system. It is this kind of AI, in addition to other algorithms, that allows Spotify to, as an example, populate playlists with similar music.

Anyway, if some people who all listen regularly to Guns N' Roses start searching for a specific song, this will be picked up by the system, a connection is made between Guns N' Roses and this song, and the song will be suggested to other users who regularly listen to Guns N' Roses. And the other way around: if other users, regardless of whether they listen to GN'R or not, are searching for this specific song, GN'R will be suggested as an artist these users might like. If almost everybody who listens to GN'R would also start listening to, or searching for, MC Hammer, the few who aren't already listening to MC Hammer would soon have it suggested by Spotify; and other people who listen to MC Hammer will start having Guns N' Roses as a recommended artist they should check out.

Thus, if a bunch of people who regularly listen to Guns N' Roses start searching for "atlas shrugged", regardless of whether that is an actual song/artist/podcast in the Spotify system, Spotify makes a connection between "Guns N' Roses" and "atlas shrugged" and might recommend "Guns N' Roses" as an artist to other users who also search for "atlas shrugged". It is just the results of having registered a connection between these two things.

I said it "might" recommend "Guns N' Roses" and it, I suppose, depends on how strong that connection is which is based on how many people with a similar listening profile has made the same search in relation to how many other people with different listening profile make the same search. In other words, it is harder to affect the recommendations if the search term is very popular and well connected to other artists already. The rares the search term, the easier it is to affect/manipulate.

Blackstar wrote:Arguments against the "algorithm theory":

1) How many users would be required to cause something like this to occur? It's certain that the people searching for these titles are a small portion of the GN'R listeners on Spotify and a minuscule/insignificant portion of the Spotify users overall around the world. It doesn't seem plausible that a small number of users could affect the algorithm, since that would cause it to often return "obscure" results to its users.

2) The fact that it's not only users who have "GN'R listening habits" getting these results, as they appear also for people who don't use Spotify to listen to GN'R and when searching while not logged in on Spotify.

3) The timing. Supposing that this is caused from people searching for these titles and from listening to local playlists on Spotify, that surely had started since these tracks leaked or at least since the "Hard Skool Spotify Incident" was proven to be real, and it should have been intensified around last June when a new song was expected based on Slash's comments. So why now? The "algorithm theory" is not convincing enough about this.

4) The fact that the results appear gradually by country. The "algorithm theory" doesn't have a convincing explanation for this either.

5) The same phenomenon has occurred with other artists who had songs expected to be released in the near future. On the other hand, it hasn't occurred with demos and unreleased tracks that were not expected to be released.

6) People who have uploaded songs by their bands on Spotify have attested that when they search them before they are released, Spotify suggests the band in the results similarly to what is happening with these GN'R tracks now.

1. I would think it would depend on the search term. For rarer search terms I don't think many would be required before the "GN'R-search term" link becomes statistically significant. Which is why "atlas shrugged" was the first to pop up although more people had likely searched for "perhaps". The latter being a more common word in song titles/album titles/band names, meant that more searches were needed before a statistically significant connection to GN'R was made, which explain why "perhaps" only recently has started to be linked to "GN'R".

As for "red panda", considering that there is a popular, and recent, soundtrack with the name on Spority, I think it would require quite a lot of us to search for this to make a connection to GN'R. A better test would be to all of use start searching for an entirely arbitrary term, like "fsrygetyhrt".

2. But that's the point of the algorithm. Even people who never listen to Guns N' Roses will have Guns N' Roses as a suggested artist if they search for "atlas shrugged", because the AI has detected a correlation between "Guns N' Roses" and "atlas shrugged". It "thinks" that people who like Guns N' Roses also like to search for "atlas shrugged" and hence if someone searches for "atlas shrugged" they are likely to enjoy "Guns N' Roses" and thus it recommends this band to them. The whole point of this, the objective of the algorithm, is for Spotify to recommend new bands to users based on their listening/searching profile.

3. I think it started now simply because by September this year enough GN'R listeners had searched for "atlas shrugged" for it to become statistically relevant and thus it started to recommend Guns N' Roses as an artist whenever someone searched for it. It had simply just reached a threshold value. When this was discovered and talked about on mygnrforum, it caused people to start searching for other unreleased songs and quickly the thresholds of statistical significance were reached for other songs resulting in these, too, to be connected to GN'R. So in short, pure coincidence but then it snowballed.

4. I would just think regions is part of the algorithm.

So in short, I find the algorithm theory somewhat plausible. Combined with me being skeptical to Guns N' Roses releasing all of these songs now and that so few of them have changed names (both Hard School and Silkworms had their names changed), I find it more likely that we are setting us up for disappointment than we getting an album's worth of music in the short term, unfortunately.

I still believe we are getting a couple more singles "soon", but likely not now when the attention is on the UYI box set. Hope I am wrong!

ƎSOɹ ˥X∀ Oפ ∩ pIp ɹƎHM MMMMMOOOOMMMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tVaq0AKCGQ QפƆʞ∀0bɐΛʇ6=ʌ¿ɥɔʇɐʍ/ɯoɔ˙ǝqnʇnoʎ˙ʍʍʍ//:sdʇʇɥ

Ha ha, very helpful indeed!

Maybe we can "force" GN'R to release "The General" or "Atlas Shrugged" if people search for them often enough?

Even if it's us who created this, it's worth documenting for posterity.

I searched in 42 countries (on the Spotify webpage on the browser, not logged in) using VPN, for the sake of comparison with the updates by people from these countries and out of curiosity about whether there are results in other countries there haven't been any updates from (note: I didn't search for covers). Of course I'm not going to do this again  .

The countries are in alphabetical order and the titles are in order of appearance since all this started (and typed with lower case letters because that's only how it works on Spotify search):

*

Argentina: state of grace, atlas sh, the general, soul mo

Australia: state of grace, atlas shrugged, soul mon

Austria: state of grace, atlas s

Belgium: state of grace, atlas sh, the general, soul mo, thyme

Brazil: state of grace, atlas shrugged, the general, soul mo

Bulgaria: -

Canada: state of gra, atlas shrugged, the general, soul mon

Chile: state of grace

Croatia: -

Czech Republic: -

Denmark: state of grace

Estonia: -

Finland: state of grace, atlas sh, the general, soul mo

France: -

Germany: state of grace, atlas shrugged

Greece: state of grace

Hungary: -

Indonesia: -

Ireland: state of grace, the general, soul mo

Israel: -

Italy: -

Japan: -

Latvia: -

Lithuania: -

Mexico: -

Netherlands: state of grace, atlas sh

New Zealand: state of grace

Norway: state of grace, atlas shrug, the general, soul mo, perhaps

Poland: state of grace, atlas shr, the general

Portugal: state of grace, atlas s

Romania: -

Serbia: -

Slovakia: -

Slovenia: -

South Africa: -

South Korea: -

Spain: state of gr

Sweden: state of grace, atlas shrugged, the general, soul mon, perhaps, thyme (Hard Skool comes up), zodiac (Hard Skool comes up), oklahoma

Switzerland: -

Turkey: -

UK: state of grace, atlas shrugged, the general, soul monster, perhaps, thyme, cuban s

USA: state of grace, atlas shrugged, soul monster, thyme, cuban sk (the general didn’t show up)

*

So in most of the countries we haven't had updates from (which probably means that there are no forum members there searching) there are no GN'R related results. However, there are also no results for countries that have people searching (France, Italy and likely a couple of others).

Something more tangible:

The band (without Axl) soundchecked an unknown tune before the show in Porto Alegre. It could be a new song, a work in progress, a jam or even a cover of a song we're not familiar with. Two snippets recorded by @jafeijo at mygnrforum:

jafeijo wrote:Hey guys! I was at the Porto Alegre gig last night, arrived early and the band was soundchecking some songs from the set. Nothing different, but suddenly they started playing this one, which really caught my attention since it has an odd chord progression and quite elaborated guitar riff. (Wasn’t a normal jam, seemed really like a work in progress, at minimum). Need to mention that Slash wouldn’t stop playing the riff as if he was trying to memorize it. At first It reminded me of the melody of Atlas Shrugged intro, which could be a reworked version of it. I recorded some of it with my phone but couldn’t get much. They played this tune about 2 times while I was on there and Slash kept playing the main riff during the whole soundcheck.

http://sndup.net/dnt6

https://sndup.net/h9cx/

jafeijo wrote:about the second clip, pretty sure it’s the same song, just a different section. I wish I’d recorded some other stuff they were playing when I was arriving from the parking lot, it was very keyboard oriented, much closer to that General intro from the CD tour. Afterwards they soundchecked only songs from the set.

Blackstar wrote:Something more tangible:

The band (without Axl) soundchecked an unknown tune before the show in Porto Alegre. It could be a new song, a work in progress, a jam or even a cover of a song we're not familiar with. Two snippets recorded by @jafeijo at mygnrforum:

jafeijo wrote:Hey guys! I was at the Porto Alegre gig last night, arrived early and the band was soundchecking some songs from the set. Nothing different, but suddenly they started playing this one, which really caught my attention since it has an odd chord progression and quite elaborated guitar riff. (Wasn’t a normal jam, seemed really like a work in progress, at minimum). Need to mention that Slash wouldn’t stop playing the riff as if he was trying to memorize it. At first It reminded me of the melody of Atlas Shrugged intro, which could be a reworked version of it. I recorded some of it with my phone but couldn’t get much. They played this tune about 2 times while I was on there and Slash kept playing the main riff during the whole soundcheck.

http://sndup.net/dnt6

https://sndup.net/h9cx/

jafeijo wrote:about the second clip, pretty sure it’s the same song, just a different section.  I wish I’d recorded some other stuff they were playing when I was arriving from the parking lot, it was very keyboard oriented, much closer to that General intro from the CD tour. Afterwards they soundchecked only songs from the set.  

There are some similarities to Circus Maximus, but not enough to say it is the same songs. Could have been reworked. If so, Slash's contributions elevate the song, I like his little riff.

Another snippet of the unknown song from soundcheck before the show in Buenos Aires:

In Brazil they swear this is State of Grace"

Anyone recognizes it?

I can't tell because I was never able to listen to the Axl songs more than a few times

What I can tell its that it sounds very similar to all those axl chinese era songs

ludurigan wrote:In Brazil they swear this is State of Grace"

Anyone recognizes it?

I can't tell because I was never able to listen to the Axl songs more than a few times

What I can tell its that it sounds very similar to all those axl chinese era songs

Yes, it does sound like Axl's CD era songs, but not like anyone in particular, definitely not State of Grace. The third clip sounds a bit like another track called Oklahoma, which leaked only as an instrumental and it's probably the earliest written track of the bunch. But all these songs must have changed a lot now.

Definitely fit well with the Chinese Democracy era material but also not identical to any on the songs on the Village leaks. Similarities to the coda of Oklahoma, but different. It wouldn't be surprised at all if any of these instrumentals have been changed quite a bit by now, though. It's like comparing "Sorry" to "I'm Sorry" (from the Village leaks).

I am slightly optimistic they will debut a new song then before the end of the year.

Soulmonster wrote:Definitely fit well with the Chinese Democracy era material but also not identical to any on the songs on the Village leaks. Similarities to the coda of Oklahoma, but different. It wouldn't be surprised at all if any of these instrumentals have been changed quite a bit by now, though. It's like comparing "Sorry" to "I'm Sorry" (from the Village leaks).

I am slightly optimistic they will debut a new song then before the end of the year.

Looks like that indeed!

Regarding Spotify, this was posted by "HollywoodRose84" at mygnrforum:

HollywoodRose84 wrote: Hello all.

So I wanted to provided some sort of update/information to this whole Spotify situation. I reached out to a contact of mine who is a higher up at Spotify (mods you can check with me via PM to confirm. I don’t want to post personal info of someone else for everyone to see). I was told that Spotify receives song(s) information directly from labels before releases are announced. The reason being if someone tries to leak a song or an album the computer system will recognize the songs and block them from being uploaded by third parties. This kinda gives weight to all of these song titles showing up in searches being done by forum members. I also found out that yes, they know what albums/songs are going to be released and when way ahead of time. I’m working on trying to get more specific information relating to Guns but we will see if that materializes.

In a nutshell, this info somehow does point to something possibly happening regarding either a new album or new songs being released, at least that’s the consensus I received after getting this information.

After reading the information by HollywoodRose84, I realized that the explanation might be simpler than we thought.

According to this information, song data are submitted to Spotify by record labels long before release as a preventive measure for potential leaks. A few days ago another poster at mygnrforum (I think it was "Legendador") mentioned that people have tried to upload the leaked tracks on Spotify from their musician/band accounts and got blocked - so that is not a case of people using Spotify to listen to files they have stored locally, but of trying to actually upload the tracks to the system.

So I think the connection between these tracks and Guns N' Roses has not been created by AI ("the algorithm"), but because the data about these titles (although maybe not the tracks themselves) are in Spotify's system. However, this is not necessarily because the songs are going to be released, but because the band/label has provided these (working) titles to the streaming platforms to prevent uploads of the leaked tracks by third parties.

And then, as the song information is in the system, Spotify's algorithm has this function which, unlike other streaming platforms, allows the data to appear in search results in some way under certain circumstances (e.g. many search sessions, how popular GN'R is in relation to other artists that have songs with similar titles, etc.)

That would explain why titles that are unlikely to be the final/official song titles show up in search results.

Now, there are two possibilities:

1) The data were submitted to Spotify after these tracks leaked only for the reason mentioned above and without any plans for release.

2) The data have been submitted recently because the songs are going to be released, and the provided information included earlier/working titles - again as a preventive measure.

Or, maybe, a combination of both: the data were submitted after the tracks leaked, but now some of them are going to be released.

pretty crazy stuff, AI, algorithms, ha! you gotta love everyone's genuine excitement over the possibility of new tracks being released