mynewfavoritesong.bluesky.social
When I signed up for Val Town, I had a first project in mind. While Spotify's algorithms do a serviceable job notifying me of new music by artists I like, it's not really possible to "follow" a songwriter. Helpfully, Spotify maintains Written By... playlists for many songwriters. Here's one for Jonnali Mikaela "Noonie Bao" Parmenius, who has co-writing credits on two of my absolute favorite pop songs of the last 15 years.
But these first-party playlists aren't in chronological order, and I don't know of a good way being notified when songs get added. So it's quite hard to make sure I don't miss out on the latest credit from Sabrina Carpenter's go-to Amy Allen.
So the plan was to build a cron job val that used the Spotify API to poll a playlist on a regular basis, and check whether anything had changed since the last time, and then create some sort of alert upon detection of a change. It seemed buildable, even with my modest dev skills. I was able to use some tools that Steve from Val Town built. I was ready to request a playlist for the first time, at which point I learned that Spotify somewhat recently enshittified their web API such that first-party playlists are no longer available.
So, I'm still looking for a good way to keep up with songwriters.
But I was able to take the same basic idea and turn in into My New Favorite Song Bot (here's the val with the code). It's the same thing really: a cron val looking for new songs added to a playlist. When it catches something new, it posts to Bluesky. I think it's going to break when I add too many songs. I also haven't really thought about what happens if I try to added multiple songs at the same time.
Because another Val Town user named Jonas Merlin had already made a Bluesky bot template, the whole process was quite tractable. It's been working so far! Every time I've added a song, the Bluesky post has dutifully showed up.
I'm a little ambivalent about what having a Favorite Songs bot will impact my relationship to music. And I haven't really decided how good a song needs to be for me to add it to the playlist. Or what consitutes "new". There are seven songs so far; I seem to be on a pace of about one song a week. Also Spotify is maybe evil, and even if it isn't, it is still probably bad for the world and I shouldn't use it and you shouldn't either. But I do, and you can listen to the full playlist here.