[HN Gopher] Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations
___________________________________________________________________
Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations
Author : aww_dang
Score : 816 points
Date : 2021-10-16 18:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.cornell.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.cornell.edu)
| techas wrote:
| There is a "don't play this artist" option. With a coarser
| granularity they have the "unlike" information.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| Has pandora licensed their music DNA engine to anybody?
|
| Pandora recommendations have always been 1000x better than
| anybody else. It's not even a comparison.
| zz865 wrote:
| Yeah I was wondering if Pandora had a patent on channels based
| on likes/dislikes.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I find pandora recommendations to be absolute garbage and
| HEAVILY weighted to certain local maxima, typically favoring
| mainstream songs. A few that invariably came up for me that I
| remember and didn't block:
|
| This must be it by Royksopp Headstrong by Trapt Outside by
| Staind
| [deleted]
| mimanning wrote:
| Does anyone know if the spotify recommendation algorithm analyzes
| the actual music in order to group songs? Or does it only do
| clustering based on users' listening habits? It seems like
| incorporating the former could help with discovering new and
| potentially less well known music, which is an area I'd like to
| see spotify improve on.
| MutableLambda wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's done via collaborative filtering (other
| user preferences), and not the actual music features (like
| Pandora does, or did before).
| mimanning wrote:
| That's too bad, I'd love to have the ability to explicitly
| trade off the recommendation criteria between music features
| and user preferences. I understand there's no real incentive
| for spotify to do this though.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Things I want from Spotify:
|
| - Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of
| enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do
| that full-screen with zoom.
|
| - Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't
| just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s
| hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop
| songs which includes related artists.
|
| - Hide the damn podcasts. There will never be a situation now or
| in the future where I want to use spotify to listen to a podcast.
| Users should be able to hide them.
|
| - Improve your audio quality. I've shamefully returned to bit
| torrenting flac files because some of what I've heard on spotify
| is so bad. Part of that is because I want access to a vinyl mix.
|
| - Your interface sucks. One thing I liked about Google Play Music
| was easier access to an artist's discography. Please give me an
| option to hide "Popular releases" or put a quick access button to
| reach either Albums or a full discography at the top of the
| artist's page so I don't have to scroll down and hunt for an
| easily missed label to reach the discography when I use the
| Android App. When I start the app, there should be a search box
| ready to go. I shouldn't have to click the magnifying glass and
| then a search box. Either put a search box/icon on the home
| screen which goes direct to an input dialog, or make the
| magnifying glass respond accordingly.
|
| I miss Google Play Music. It wasn't perfect but it was, in my
| experience, a far superior product. It's regrettable that YouTube
| Music is such a dumpster fire.
| whazor wrote:
| For the people who argue that you cannot hear the difference
| lossless and compressed: I agree, however the issue is that the
| lossless versions of the music also received more editing from
| audio engineers. That is what makes Tidal more enjoyable.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| I think Tidal gets better recommendations for me than Spotify
| used to as well (lots of smaller acts I'd never have come
| across on my own), although it's rather irritating how the
| labels keep yanking things from Tidal. I really like Tidal
| but I'm genuinely tempted to move away because of this
| problem.
|
| What never seems to penetrate the skulls of the labels is
| that it's _their_ shitehawk behaviour that drives piracy, not
| their customer 's desire to freeload. This was as true in the
| '60s when the only good radio content in Britain came from
| ships in international waters (hence the name "piracy") as it
| was for things like Napster and remains true today.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Last.FM would have worked for you 17 years ago because it did
| most of that, until they mismanaged it into obscurity.
| anakaine wrote:
| Also, how about giving me the ability to not hear songs with
| certain words in them. I'm not a tea totaller or holier than
| thou Nancy, but I really don't want to hear any more songs from
| the hood rapping about their gangsta money hoes and all the
| other things that are basically domestic violence, gun
| violence, racism, gang mentality and "I'm so tough" stories all
| in one.
|
| Spotify keeps recommending them even though I skip nearly every
| one of them nearly every time. I'm on premium and this annoys
| me to no end.
| hashhar wrote:
| You would love Cigarettes from the Fort Minor album The
| Rising Tied then.
|
| It talks about exactly what you are saying - why do all raps
| have to be about guns, violence, drugs and domestic violence
| etc.
| anakaine wrote:
| I'll check it out. Thanks!
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Surely, that has more to do with common themes in the music
| you frequent than spotify pushing these themes on you. If you
| don't like the themes that frequent the genre you are
| listening to most often, the solution seems to be to find
| alternative genres. I don't tend to get these themes often
| when listening to electro-swing, for example.
|
| And like the other reply said, you can disable explicit
| lyrics and I'm pretty sure you can hide artists.
| anakaine wrote:
| I suspect its possibly to do with my families preferred
| listening - two teenagers. We are on a shared family plan -
| so theoretically each have our own accounts. There seems to
| be some bleed across.
|
| I'll need to check in to whether I can block specific
| artists.
| distances wrote:
| You can disable songs with explicit lyrics in your settings,
| if that isn't too wide a net.
| anakaine wrote:
| This is a bit of a wide net I'm afraid. That said, someone
| else pointed out that I might be able to hide artists. That
| could be a partial surrogate for blocking a theme /
| specific content.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Hmm. I'd imagine you'd end up blocking a lot of good songs
| that simply have the word "fuck" in them, in a non-
| aggressive, non-sexual way, and may still have to endure
| lyrics that sound like a 13 year old bragging about how
| cool he is (yeah, that's mostly rap but not exclusively)
| [deleted]
| avh02 wrote:
| Flipside opinion: I always thought album art was a feature
| every player tried to add for the pleasure of a non-existent
| user who fetishizes album art. Literally the last thing I'd
| want out of a music player.
| alex_young wrote:
| - Allow listening from more than one device at the same time on
| a family plan.
|
| Use case: I listen to something at home and then get in my car.
| People at home should still be able to listen to what they
| want, and I should also be able to listen to something else. At
| the same time.
| Scarblac wrote:
| They already have this family plan though?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Family plan allows you to have multiple accounts, but if a
| single account is logged in multiple devices (e.g. some
| home device that's playing stuff at home, and your phone in
| your car) then they would do what OP says... unless they
| constantly re-log in the home music device (whatever setup
| you're using) to switch accounts based on who is home.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Oh, right. We do that anyway as we have very different
| tastes and sharing the same account messes with the
| suggestions too much.
| d21d3q wrote:
| Haven't tried it yet, but looks like it can address some
| points: https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli
| cja wrote:
| I preferred GPM in every way except that it would silently
| remove songs from my playlists, probably as a result of the
| publisher updating or removing them. This lead to me losing
| songs I had painstakingly worked to discover over many years. I
| discovered this only after several years of using GPM. Spotify
| seems to leave removed songs in playlists but disabled, which
| at least means I don't forget them.
|
| The Spotify UI is atrocious. It must be designed for
| income/royalty maximisation because it certainly isn't designed
| to help me find and play the music I like.
| lrem wrote:
| While YouTube Music is still a clear regression from GPM, it's
| slowly catching up. Any year now it'll be good... But it seems
| it might already annoy you less than Spotify? Which is
| interesting, most people seem to believe Spotify is superior.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Did it stop mixing YouTube likes with music likes? Destroying
| my 'liked' music playlist was an unforgivable sin in my book.
| Fortunately I was able to get my old GPM info with Google
| Takeout before it went away, so I just scripted up a solution
| to recreate those likes on Spotify.
| blondin wrote:
| oh and for streaming platforms. sometimes, it's just because that
| song you recommended (and started playing) should not be played
| after the one that just finished because it ruins the mood. this
| has nothing to do with the song itself.
|
| so again, reducing it to like/dislike buttons is missing a great
| deal.
| shmerl wrote:
| Dislike button will reflect mass market not understanding good
| music. Bad idea.
| blackearl wrote:
| I never used Spotify but I've been happy with Deezer, which does
| have a "don't recommend this song" and "don't recommend this
| artist", plus a "change mood" option which is helpful if I'm
| feeling more phonk than funk
| cushychicken wrote:
| Maybe if it did Spotify would stop trying to convince me that I
| like Kurt Vile.
|
| I never, ever want Spotify to play "Pretty Pimpin" for me ever
| again.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I wrote a blog post some twenty years ago (good luck finding it)
| but the basic point was I went and Googled "Martin Luther King"
| and the third item was hosted on Stormfront (neo Nazi hosting
| site - IIRR cos no one else would host the sort of stuff on it).
|
| I surmised that some academic papers were linking to this and
| Google chose that as a positive recommendation.
|
| I remember realising then that what we needed was not just a link
| but a standrdised way of conveying attributes on the link
| (including not recommended).
|
| As everyone now infers from behaviour (time on page etc) but I
| still think there must be value in "this resource has this
| meaning to me and is important enough that i am labelling it"
| edejong wrote:
| I'd love to dislike all and every autotuned song of the last
| fifteen years.
| cto_of_antifa wrote:
| So pretty much any song professionally recorded, then.
| ljm wrote:
| A small start would be to fix the behaviour on release
| radar/discover weekly playlists. You can mark a song you don't
| like and say to stop suggesting music from that artist, but it
| doesn't do anything.
|
| Yes, Spotify...I played some weird cat music playlist _once_ for
| my cat. Once! That doesn't mean I'm a lifelong cat music fan.
| omega3 wrote:
| I've deleted my Spotify account after noticing that the
| recommendations algorithm is useless.I don't understand how there
| can be regression in that regard from soulseek, what.cd network
| graphs, last.fm or even radio stations. Seriously, how hard is it
| for Spotify to hire some music heads to put together playlists
| for people.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| This is the #2 feature I most want in every music streaming app
|
| (The feature I most want is an interface for tweaking the rec
| algo to my liking - at minimum, for being able to crank up its
| adventurousness. Rec algos are depressingly conservative as a
| rule, I guess because most customers are the kind of people who
| eat at McDonald's when they travel abroad, stay at package
| resorts, and complain movies have gone to shit because they can't
| find anything they like on Netflix or Hulu)
| kortex wrote:
| > at minimum, for being able to crank up its adventurousness.
|
| Absolutely. At times, it makes me wanna blast it with cosmic
| rays, induce a burst of mutations, mix things up. Just give me
| a knob. Sometimes I want to stick on one specific sound. Other
| times I need to explore.
| Groxx wrote:
| I have really been hoping for a spotify-API-driven recommendation
| engine to improve this kind of thing. Which is why I've been
| scrobbling to last.fm for over a decade.
|
| One algorithm will never work for everyone. Even if it's one of
| the best _in aggregate_ , that doesn't mean it's not awful for
| me. It's not feasible (nor does it make business sense) for
| Spotify to identify and build the best system for each individual
| user, so I really don't expect them to do more than optimize for
| the majority.
| mjmsmith wrote:
| Me too. I still find more interesting stuff by following
| last.fm recommendations than anywhere else. Apple Music knows
| the 10k songs that are in my library and its suggestions are
| still meh.
| capex wrote:
| Won't Spotify be able to tell dislikes by how quickly someone
| skips to the next song?
| klyrs wrote:
| An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve
| spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I
| have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a
| musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts
| multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and
| so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them.
|
| Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I only like
| listening to one at a time. I don't want a rap mix to be invaded
| by a Bach sonata. And yet...
| oriolid wrote:
| I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify and I still have
| them on my home screen, so I think that it's hardcoded, not a
| generated recommendation.
|
| The probably autogenerated daily mixes have been surprisingly
| non-bad for me. Nothing like rap mix invaded by Bach, but the
| "classic rock" mix sometimes has Ghost that doesn't really
| sound that out of place.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gundmc wrote:
| I listened to one episode of "Call Her Daddy" because I saw it
| ranked as one of the most-listened podcasts out there and
| Spotify will not let go putting it front and center on my home
| screen every day.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| Pandora's music recommendations are amazing, and the stations
| stay within their genre. I've discovered a huge amount of new
| music that way.
|
| I've never used Spotify, so I can't compare. I don't like
| podcasts either. I get more out of audiobooks.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| It has been years since I've tried Pandora: Back when I tried
| it, they only let you skip a number of songs in a short time
| and often played things I didn't care for. Lots of slightly
| obscure songs weren't available. It might be better for more
| popular music or have improved in the last decade, I don't
| know. I started using Spotify.
|
| And still now as then: It is only available in the US. I no
| longer live in the US.
| a5aAqU wrote:
| > they only let you skip a number of songs in a short time
| and often played things I didn't care for.
|
| If you aren't in the US, then it won't work, but I create
| multiple stations and can switch station if the music isn't
| good. I can't remember it ever not being good though. I use
| the like button to train it.
|
| > Lots of slightly obscure songs weren't available.
|
| If I'm looking for a specific song, I usually go to
| YouTube. Most of what I listen to is pretty obscure, but it
| might depend on the genres.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _An option to hide all podcasts would significantly..._
|
| An option have a personal search expression with a variety of
| tags include and excluded and other stuff neutral is what I
| want for everything.
|
| It's twenty years since Alt-Vista allowed search with logic
| expressions and "recommendation" has gotten more and more
| railroad-y since then.
|
| The "don't give options, make it moron proof" paradigm
| literally forces us all to be morons.
| hugocbp wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I love podcasts, on my podcast app.
|
| I'm really disappointed how Spotify is buying several big
| podcasts and moving to their platform exclusively.
|
| I tried to listen to a Science Vs episode the other day, and
| now my Spotify is almost completely filled with podcasts
| recommendation. Plus, the experience is still far from
| specialized podcast apps.
|
| The result: I'll probably stop following Science Vs (and any
| other podcast that moves exclusively to Spotify).
|
| They could, at least, have a separate Spotify Podcast app so
| things wouldn't be mixed (kind of like Wealthsimple has
| separate apps for Investing and Trading).
|
| I'm still sad Spotify bought Gimlet and apparently will do (if
| not already) this to all their podcasts.
| slig wrote:
| My guess is that they don't have to pay rights for the
| podcasts, so for them it's a win/win if you spend your
| attention on their app listening to free content.
| underwater wrote:
| It's probably that they can get exclusive podcasts, but not
| exclusive music. They want podcasts to be something that
| locks you into Spotify.
| slig wrote:
| Very good point.
| klyrs wrote:
| I mean, I have a paid account... the biggest win for them is
| when I forget to turn the tunes on when I sit down to my
| desk.
| elamje wrote:
| Why Spotify plasters your home page with Podcasts:
|
| Short answer is $$$$.
|
| Longer answer is: Spotify must pay royalties for each song
| played. Imagine if there was a completely free (for Spotify)
| form of content that filled users ears for hours, thus removing
| the need for Spotify to pay royalties. Ahem podcasts. Now
| imagine if Spotify started injecting ads into said media form
| to grow their revenue beyond subscriptions. Again, podcasts. So
| now, you have a very long-form content that both saves you
| royalty $ and drives new revenue. QED. Podcasts will continue
| to be plastered all over your recommendations, be top search
| results, etc, until the above stops being true.
|
| Wrote about this in detail recently:
| https://www.towardssoftware.com/spotify.txt
| Gigachad wrote:
| I think the more likely answer is that podcasts can be
| produced with exclusivity deals while songs can not.
|
| Spotify is large because they were first and because
| apple/google music suck. But eventually apple and google will
| stop sucking and users will drain from Spotify rapidly unless
| Spotify can create content to keep users in.
|
| Spotify is in the position of Firefox 15 years ago right now.
| Eventually the built in apps will take over.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Welcome to McDonalds, home of the Mcadoyble.
|
| Now given that burgers cost us money to produce, wouldn't you
| rather have a podcast?
|
| Does this whole thing not seem insane to anyone else?
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| Selling a burger is inhernelty profitable for McD, they
| sell it for more than they spend on manufacturing and
| shipping and serving it. Each new burger sold adds more
| profit.
|
| Serving music is unprofitable for Spotify. They collect
| your monthly subscription fee, then every additional song
| play makes Spotify lose money. They don't want to have zero
| song plays since then nobody would subscribe, but their
| goal is sell the profitable thing (subscriptions) while
| minimizing the unprofitable thing (song plays).
| varanauskas wrote:
| Just to add to this restaurant based allegory, Spotify is
| like an all you can eat buffet that tries to serve out
| lots of sodas so you get bloated and don't eat the
| expensive stuff they have
| wiether wrote:
| > their goal is [...] minimizing the unprofitable thing
| (song plays).
|
| If that's the case, how do you explain those two features
| : - the repeat button - the "automatically play similar
| songs" option
|
| In the first case, since I don't know how it works, maybe
| they have to pay only one time for a song per user
| listening to it during a period (say a month). But I
| doubt it. In the second case, it's Spotify explicitly
| saying : "here are songs you don't intended to play but
| that we picked automatically and are playing to you".
|
| If you look at Netflix, sure they have the feature that
| automatically launch the next episode. Or they try weird
| stuff like live or play anything... But they also have
| the "Are you still watching ?" feature, to make sure that
| they don't display content to an empty room. Spotify
| doesn't have that, it can just play songs indefinitely
| without any human interaction.
|
| So, I don't know.
| petre wrote:
| This is like adding a MSG and soybean protein based
| filler to your burger because McD doesn't make a profit
| from selling burgers.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| if that's true, then podcasts are only a bandaid solution
| for a fundamental problem with Spotify's business model.
| jolux wrote:
| I mean, they are not currently a profitable company, nor
| do I think the profit outlook is good for them under
| their current model.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Well, yeah, of course there's a fundamental problem with
| Spotify's business model. They're a middleman for digital
| content.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Well...yes, not necessarily fundamental, but it's the
| same class of problem cinemas and restaurants have (to
| pick two). What do cinemas mainly make money from? What
| do restaurants mainly make money from?
| bombcar wrote:
| The popcorn and soda are valueadds for both - it's not
| like a restaurant gets you to "subscribe" and then tries
| to convince you to not eat anything.
|
| The buffets may be the closest and they don't really seem
| to care at all, because the price differential is so
| high.
|
| So Spotify is likely undercharging by 50% or more.
| unglaublich wrote:
| They would recommend you food that's more profitable for
| them: drinks, nuggets, fries.
| shoto_io wrote:
| You're probably right. But then again: who cares about
| Spotify making money? I want to listen to music and not
| optimize the bottom line of the Company.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Does Spotify inject ads in free podcasts? Don't all
| commodities not do that
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Spotify dynamically injects ads into podcasts. I was
| listening to an episode of the Conan O'Brien podcast from
| 2018 and got an advertisement to be safe from Covid by
| enjoying an ice cold Miller Lite at home.
|
| It was extremely unsettling until I realized what they were
| doing.
|
| They replace the ad breaks that would normally be in a
| podcast. (Like when the hosts say "we're going to take a
| quick break to talk about our sponsors for this episode").
| It's not an unskippable ad like you get when listening to
| music using the free tier. It's inserted directly into the
| audio stream.
|
| Edit: I guess it's possible the Conan podcast is doing that
| somehow and not Spotify, but I've never had something like
| that happen when using the Apple podcast app.
| sparky_z wrote:
| Are you certain it was Spotify that did that? Unless you
| downloaded the episode in 2018, it could have easily been
| the Conan podcast. Podcast episodes aren't immutable,
| they're just a url. I've seen podcasts that update the
| ads in their back catalogue to whoever is paying them at
| the time the episode is downloaded.
|
| I've also noticed some location specific ads, which isn't
| that surprising if you think about. There's nothing
| stopping them from serving you a different mp3 file
| depending on your IP geolocation.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| When I listen through the apple podcast app I get ads
| that are clearly from 2018 though. Like for events that
| are long gone and over. Ads that don't match the year of
| the episode have only ever happened to me in spotify.
|
| Also this is specifically a Spotify feature
|
| https://ads.spotify.com/en-US/news-and-
| insights/streaming-ad...
|
| > Spotify Podcast Ads are powered by Streaming Ad
| Insertion (SAI), which leverages streaming to deliver
| Spotify's full digital suite of planning, reporting, and
| measurement capabilities. Spotify Podcast Ads offer the
| intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the
| precision and transparency of modern-day digital
| marketing.
|
| https://www.adexchanger.com/podcast/spotify-snaps-up-
| podcast...
| bkraz wrote:
| I agree. Spotify acknowledged the request to remove podcasts
| from the home screen in June of this year:
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po...
| Keep adding votes and pressuring them.
| lokar wrote:
| No, keep starting chats with support asking how to disable
| podcasts. Draw it out. That costs them $.
| klyrs wrote:
| My time is more valuable than that.
| klyrs wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks for sharing that.
| 015a wrote:
| I don't usually overreact too strongly to big tech making dumb
| decisions like these, but Spotify's podcast pushing actually
| did drive me away from the platform.
|
| I beg Spotify to think Logically about it. There is a limited
| amount of screen real estate available on any display, but
| especially phones. Q.e.d: pushing podcast-related content
| actually hurts the music listening experience. Conversely,
| pushing music content hurts the podcast listening experience.
| This is (mostly) inarguable; any pixel dedicated to an
| interface element related to podcast content is a pixel which
| cannot display music content; its a zero sum game.
|
| I say "mostly" because; there are people who I'm sure love
| Spotify Podcasts, and having both avenues within one app is a
| net win. I'd be willing to accept a toggle in settings which
| could "focus" the app Between Music <> Music + Podcasts <>
| Podcasts. I don't think that's unreasonable, and I also don't
| feel it would be unreasonable for it to default to Music +
| Podcasts.
|
| Though it brings up an interesting point: Imagine the
| experience of someone who does primarily come to Spotify for
| podcasts. Its among the worst podcast apps in the history of
| podcast apps! Its littered with _music_! That 's a horrible
| experience!
|
| The ironic part is, Spotify is probably happy to lose me as a
| customer. I'm a "Music power user" if there were such a thing.
| They may end up paying more in royalties for the music I listen
| to than I pay them, and I can't say I've listened to more than
| a half-dozen podcasts. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show
| you the outcomes": Spotify is not incentivized to build an app
| that benefits people who listen to a lot of music. Their bread
| and butter is people who listen to a bit of music and podcasts;
| just enough to keep them paying each month. So, I don't lose
| too much sleep over their slow decent into mediocrity; I'm far
| more concerned about the unfortunate reality that there are no
| longer any great options in this space, for people like me.
| zippergz wrote:
| You're probably right but I have yet to meet anyone who loves
| podcasts in Spotify. The two groups I have encountered who
| use it are those who never listened to podcasts at all before
| so don't know any other way, and people who begrudgingly use
| it because some podcast they like went exclusive there. Which
| I guess are both good for Spotify but it puts them in a
| weaker position than if people actually did truly like the
| experience.
| fpgaminer wrote:
| Seriously. I listen to podcasts, but I'm not going to do it
| through Spotify, who's working to build a walled garden around
| a traditionally open media. I'm also not interested in Joe
| Rogan, which they _constantly_ plaster my front page with.
|
| I did try a Spotify podcast once. It was on my recommended list
| and was called daily dad jokes or something. Figured it was
| worth a quick laugh. Well it turned out to be a bot podcast.
| They set up a bot to rip jokes from Reddit, push them through
| TTS, and dump it into a Spotify podcast.
|
| No thanks.
|
| Meanwhile, Apple Podcasts, my go to, works great, doesn't spam
| me, and even added a feature where you can pay for a no-ads
| version of a podcast. Worked seemlessly.
| rsyring wrote:
| I rarely listen to podcasts but was going to try and listen
| to a specific one Joe Rogan did recently. After listening for
| a few minutes, an ad came on. I pay for spotify, why am I
| listening to an ad?
|
| Anyway, I waited like 90 seconds and he came back on. Withing
| about 15 minutes, I had two more ads come on and they were 90
| & 120 seconds each. After the second ad played, the podcast
| didn't start. Fiddling with it caused the podcast to start
| over from the beginning. When I tried to seek to the last
| place I was, it played an ad immediately. Seriously
| unbelievable.
|
| I gave up and will never attempt to listen to an ad supported
| podcast on Spotify again.
| hutattedonmyarm wrote:
| > I pay for spotify, why am I listening to an ad?
|
| Because Spotify doesn't pay anything to the podcast
| producers. So podcasts run their own ads. (Well, some do.
| Others live off donations or offer a way to pay them)
| design-material wrote:
| Spotify didn't pay Rogan to be exclusive to them?
| jonathankoren wrote:
| I was using Spotify for podcasts because they were there, but
| then my home feed got dominated by them, and they occasionally
| get queued up and giving me a mix of podcasts and music, which
| I don't want.
|
| I started migrating to Apple Podcasts so I can context switch
| more easily.
| jspash wrote:
| A "Never recommend Joe Rogan again as long as I live" button
| would come in handy.
| cletus wrote:
| I wonder if you really need a like or dislike button. I'm
| increasingly convinced they're both being used wrong. If you're
| listening to a random stream of songs there are only really two
| actions by the user that matter:
|
| 1. They keep listening. This is about the best "like" signal
| (IMHO); and
|
| 2. They skip to the next song. This is effectively a "dislike".
|
| Both can be situational not absolute too. But what does
| like/dislike gain you beyond those two signals? Liking something
| requires the user to do something but users only really do
| something when they don't like what's happening. Requiring
| explicit action to keep playing songs like the current one seems
| somehow backwards.
| max68 wrote:
| That's not true. I like the beginning of some songs, especially
| when listening to 20 min+ classical pieces, but not the end. A
| skip in that case doesn't mean I don't like it, but that I
| don't want to finish it.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Giving a song 6 minutes of watch time is still good compared
| to other songs.
| mouzogu wrote:
| been using spotify for about 5 years and i swear the
| recommendations get worse and worse. i can't use the release
| radar or discover weekly playlist because they're so awful.
|
| maybe thats a reflection of my usage, but would be nice to have a
| way to reset the recommendations or dislike.
|
| there wasa period when i would keep static noise from spotify on
| the background for a few hours and now 80% of my recommendations
| are static noise. annoying
| liquid_x wrote:
| Biggest issue for me with release radar is that Spotify still
| doesn't handle the case that multiple artists use the same name
| while not being close to the same style of music. (Exodus the
| trash metal band isn't remotely the same as exodus the gospel
| group)
| mouzogu wrote:
| yeah it doesnt seem like a very nuanced system, well at least
| the end result doesnt.
| sabujp wrote:
| i would hope that spotify has an experiments system that they can
| canary
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| First, Spotify likes have been broken since forever, things you
| not liked end up as liked tracks. Second, it is obvious that the
| recommendations are mostly based on what you previously listen
| to. Hence, all parents are spammed with kids songs. I think they
| made a fix for that now though.
|
| People does not act according to there believes and I have a hard
| time thinking that votes would beat history when it comes to mass
| consumption of music. Down votes are in general also known to
| cause problems.
|
| For me, Spotify recommendations are by far the best
| recommendations on any entertaining platform I use. I use them
| all the time. Compare it with Youtube for instance were music
| recommendations are repetitive and mostly irrelevant.
| xkgt wrote:
| I am curious, what was the fix for parent's profile being
| spammed with kids songs? I hate to pay for a family plan just
| to maintain individual profiles when I never plan to listen on
| more than one device concurrently.
| jeffe wrote:
| As someone who listens to numerous genres but is also selective
| with what I listen to, I am confident that spotify simply doesn't
| cater to my demographic. They are really about scaling to the
| masses, as is evident by their move into podcasts and constants
| frontpage ads on new releases, as well as aggressive song
| caching. From a business perspective, I believe its simply not
| worth the compute/development effort from their side to have a
| recommendation engine on par with say Pandora.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Spotify had both thumbs up and thumbs down button a while ago. It
| even asked why do you thumb down something:
|
| Wrong Rec Do not like the artist/show less Do not like this song
| Heard it too many times/pause for a bit
|
| etc...
|
| It got removed... as the whole functionality (Radio) got phased
| out, and the new stuff didn't incorporate it.
|
| Employees changed, and moved on to other companies, and the new
| that came didn't think it will improve things. etc... and the
| feature got forgoten.
|
| I think a lot of people in here are asking a 'reset my
| recommendations' feature. And that did exist as well at some
| point. Not sure why it got removed/it is not in production.
| notyourwork wrote:
| You might be on to something with the idea that it was there it
| was removed. I might presume it was removed because data showed
| that customers don't use it. The rest of this thread seems to
| think otherwise.
|
| The idea of resetting recommendations is a minority feature ask
| from customers as well and I wish companies (including my own)
| handled that better. Sadly its a pretty expensive project for
| such a minority stake.
| lethologica wrote:
| Radio functionality is still there but it's a shell of what it
| used to be. I find it absolutely useless now actually because
| all it ever seems to do is play music I've already added to my
| library.
| amotinga wrote:
| I'd like a ban button on a song. I like listening to various
| genres when I work out depending on the mood, but as soon as I
| hear 'pussy' I want to throw my phone out.
| corobo wrote:
| I always assumed skipping a song had the same effect
|
| My only problem with Spotify is that it seems to heavily lean on
| some songs, to the point I have to block them. I guess this in of
| itself questions my assumption
|
| I have a theory (read: confirmation bias) that "That's not my
| name" by the Ting Tings is cheaper for them to play or something
| the amount shuffle seems to want to play it. No matter how many
| other songs are in the list, if that ones in there it'll be
| played within 5 songs haha
| saltedonion wrote:
| " Piki selects music from a database of roughly 5 million songs
| and incentivizes users by giving them $1 for every 25 songs they
| rate. The Piki interface plays a song, and then gives the
| listener the ability to rate it after different amounts of time.
| Specifically, the user can "dislike" the song after 3 seconds,
| "like" the song after 6 seconds and "superlike" it after 12
| seconds."
|
| These people are training on a completely different set of
| features than what Spotify is using. For example, listen time is
| likely to be a important feature where a short time or a skip
| will be a pretty good proxy for a dislike.
|
| In other words, the authors conclusions are conditioned on only
| using the features outlined in the article, like, dislike, and
| super like. And I'm not sure it will generalize for Spotify.
| nickstinemates wrote:
| The more I use Spotify, the less intuitive it becomes. The left
| bar is a mess. Playing specific albums, looking up discography
| for a band is painful. The home screen is less than useful.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Spotify going IPO was the number one reason I dropped them on the
| floor. They now officially care only about profits and since they
| pretty much have just a single product, this means users are
| fucked.
|
| I begrudingly went to Apple Music and am missing my cd-
| ripped/torrented mp3 collections...
|
| Why does the free market have to consistently ruin every service?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Apple music isn't run by a profit motivated public company?
| Oddskar wrote:
| Of course they can't add this: they're too busy rebuilding the UI
| so the (I assume) new Art Director can climb the corporate
| ladder.
| californical wrote:
| Yup - cancelled my Spotify account a year ago, after they
| changed the UI for the 15th time, making features that I wanted
| to use harder, and pushing things on me that I don't want
| (podcasts). And introducing bugs constantly in some of the non-
| default features that I used a lot (eg. changing playlist sort
| order was broken at one point). Add to that their shuffle
| playing the same ~20% of songs in my playlists, and never
| hearing the other 80%, for some unknown reason. Then being
| gaslit when I tried to report "bugs".
|
| It was just constantly frustrating to battle them, so I
| switched to Tidal, and it's been amazing. The UI is just simple
| and lets me play music, and nothing has broken in the last
| year. The only changes have been minor improvements that make
| it even easier to do the one thing that I want: to play music.
| ant6n wrote:
| I find Spotify is riddled with small annoying bugs and
| antagonistic UI, I'm really really sick of it.
|
| Instead of having a discussion about how it could be
| improved, maybe we can have one about which alternatives
| exist and how good they are (tidal, is it?)
|
| EDIT: I tried Tidal, that app has a confusing mess of an
| interface just like Spotify. Plus they have a "convenient"
| bug during sign up that may sign up students with more
| expensive non student accounts.
| epitactic wrote:
| An interesting parallel, Facebook and Twitter also do not allow
| downvoting, which may also have similar negative effects as
| Spotify's lack of dislikes:
|
| https://questioner.substack.com/p/our-violent-era
|
| > So Twitter artificially removes all the negative feedback (the
| downvotes) and only shows the positive feedback (the upvotes),
| leading many of their users to the mistaken impression that their
| insane ideas are immensely popular.
| hilyen wrote:
| Spotify should have an accessibility feature that shows the
| lyrics for people who are hard of hearing or have APD.
| werdnapk wrote:
| Deezer has a button to not recommend tracks.
| mberning wrote:
| I would like to see varying levels of dislike. For me personally
| there are a wide variety of reasons that I might wish to
| "dislike" something and with something like Pandora I always have
| to wonder if the impact of dislinking will be appropriate.
|
| Some levels of dislike off the top of my head
|
| Hate the whole genre
|
| Hate the artist, but not the genre
|
| Hate the song, but not the artist
|
| And so on and so forth, the same applies on the like side of the
| equation as well.
| winddude wrote:
| I could swear they used to have a button that allowed you to
| remove songs from playlists
| madisp wrote:
| But there is a dislike button in Spotify, specifically in the
| Discover Weekly playlist where most of the recommendations
| happen?
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Discover-...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| The dislike button seems to come and go at random. Sometimes
| it's available in the desktop app, sometimes not. Sometimes I
| have the option to dislike songs in CarPlay, sometimes not.
|
| It's as if they hired B. F. Skinner as an engineering
| consultant.
| siva7 wrote:
| Not only that, sometimes the dislike button doesn't seem to
| do anything
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Exactly, hence the Skinner analogy (the power of
| intermittent rewards being a key observation in behaviorist
| psychology.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_re
| i...
|
| The _real_ hackers understand this sort of thing
| intuitively, and companies like Spotify pay big bucks for
| their insight. We nerds are just their tools.
| coder543 wrote:
| No... unfortunately, that has been gone for probably close to a
| year now, replaced with a "Hide Song" button that doesn't seem
| to influence the algorithm in any way.
| deeblering4 wrote:
| I think spotify should just hire DJs and run live radio shows.
|
| Its been a long time since the algorithmic playlists provided
| anything useful for me. I find most new music by listening to
| different online radio streams these days.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| No dislike button is why I didn't use Spotify.
| mostelato wrote:
| I always thought the skip button would get treated as a dislike
| cjlovett wrote:
| I love my Spotify, especially love I can now use it in my Tesla.
| I mostly use it for podcast channels, like Joe Rogan and Charles
| Mizrahi. But I also rarely use their recommender, I mostly know
| what music I like or I get recommendations from friends I know
| well. A dislike button sounds like a great idea, even if it is
| purely for the psychological pleasure pressing it.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they
| still not let you vote down a song?
|
| They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song.
|
| They also had a dedicated dislike button and removed it years
| ago. Apparently what they are doing now works better.
|
| > Specifically, they demonstrated that a listener is roughly 20
| percent more likely to "like" a song if the algorithm is trained
| on 400,000 likes and dislikes, compared to an algorithm trained
| only on that amount of likes.
|
| Building a naive recommendation engine and giving it more good
| data - paid for, and also not factoring in the difference in time
| spent acquiring it - will obviously yield better results in a
| direct comparison. Striking a comparison to what Spotify is doing
| is pretty naive.
| jorvi wrote:
| > They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song.
|
| This seems very unlikely as some people enjoy listening to just
| certain parts of a song.
| owlmirror wrote:
| Do you know if the algorithm takes that into account? I also
| became suspect of the behavior of the skip button, I
| sometimes skip songs of artists I really like and could
| observe that I did not get them recommended anymore until I
| explictly played a song of them. Of course this could be just
| random luck but it made me careful to skip my favorite songs
| and instead I open the playlist and select the next song.
| heed wrote:
| When you remove a song from one of the auto-generated playlists
| (Discover Weekly / Release Radar) the app requires you to
| specify a reason, "I don't like this song/artist". Isn't this
| effectively a dislike button? Or is this input not used in
| playlist generation?
| another-dave wrote:
| Would be great if Spotify had
|
| * "good fit"/"bad fit" button -- I like a wide variety of music,
| but it needs to be appropriate to context. If I start a radio
| from a song, I'd like to teach it to tailor the suggested songs
| better but that doesn't mean I dislike the songs it _is_
| suggesting.
|
| * Ability to give the social context -- a band playing at a music
| festival will lean more towards hits in their back catalogue. At
| their own gig they may play some obscure stuff that die hard fans
| will really like. Similarly, what I'm listening to will be
| different if I'm having a party, friends over for dinner or on my
| own. On a family account, you should also be able to say who is
| listening & it should tailor to music that you might all enjoy.
|
| * I get that they don't want to block artists/songs completely
| but they _should_ allow limiting how many times they suggest it
| per day. If I've listened to Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac on one
| playlist I probably don't want to hear it again an hour later on
| another playlist
| musingsole wrote:
| Pandora has filters for it's radios labeled as "deep cuts" or
| "most popular" that attempts some of this.
|
| On your first thought, it's always been unclear to me which of
| my music settings in Pandora are global or station specific.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| There is an opening for this. I would switch streaming service
| for a better shuffle algorithm.
| jacobobryant wrote:
| I spent the latter half of 2019 trying to build this as a
| startup. Ultimately I pivoted (now I do newsletter
| recommendations instead), but if I hadn't made some mistakes
| I think it could've gotten more traction. Mostly I should've
| simplified the idea to make it easier to build. If anyone's
| interested in working on this, here's what I would do:
|
| (But first some background: The way I saw it, you can split
| music recommendation into two tasks: (1) picking a song you
| already know that should be played right now, and (2) picking
| a new song you've never heard of before. (Music
| recommendation is unique in this way since in most other
| domains there isn't much value in re-recommending items). I
| think #1 is more important, and if you nail that, you can do
| a so-so job of #2 and still have a good system.)
|
| Make a website that imports your Last.fm history. Organize
| the history into sessions (say, groups of listen events with
| a >= 30 minute gap in between). Feed those sessions into a
| collaborative filtering library like Surprise[1], as a CSV of
| `<session ID>, <song ID>, 1` (1 being a rating--in this case
| we only have positive ratings). Then make some UI that lets
| people create and export playlists. e.g. I pick a couple seed
| songs from my listening history, then the app uses Surprise
| to suggest more songs. Present a list of 10 songs at a time.
| Click a song to add it, and have a "skip all" button that
| gets a new list of songs. Save these interactions as ratings
| --e.g. if I skip a song, that's a -1 rating for this
| playlist. For some percentage of the suggestions (20% by
| default? Make it configurable), use Last.fm's or Spotify's
| API to pick a new song not in your history, based on the
| songs in the current playlist. Also sometimes include songs
| that were added to the playlist previously--if you skip them,
| they get removed from the playlist. Then you can spend a
| couple minutes every week refreshing your playlists. Export
| the playlists to Spotify/Apple Music/whatever.
|
| As you get more users, you can do "regular" collaborative
| filtering (i.e. with different users) to recommend new songs
| instead of relying on external APIs. There are probably lots
| of other things you could do too--e.g. scrape wikipedia to
| figure out what artists have done collaborations or
| something. In general I think the right approach is to build
| a model for artist similarity rather than individual song
| similarity. At recommendation time, you pick an artist and
| then suggest their top songs (and sometimes pick an artist
| already in the user's history, and suggest songs they haven't
| heard yet--that's even easier).
|
| This is the simplest thing I can think of that would solve my
| "I love music but I listen to the same old songs everyday
| because I'm busy and don't want to futz around with curating
| my music library" problem. You wouldn't have to waste time
| building a crappy custom music app, and users won't have to
| use said crappy custom music app (speaking from personal
| experience...). You wouldn't have to deal with music rights
| or integrating with Spotify/Apple Music since you're not
| actually playing any music.
|
| If you want to go further with it, you could get traction
| first and then launch your own streaming service or
| something. (Reminds me a bit of Readwise starting with just
| highlights and then launching their own reader recently). I
| think it'd be neat to make an indie streaming service--kind
| of like Bandcamp but with an algorithm to help you find the
| good stuff. Let users upload and listen to their own MP3s so
| it can still work with popular music. Of course it'd be nicer
| for users in the short term if you just made deals with the
| big record labels, however this would help you not end up in
| Spotify's position of pivoting to podcasts so you can get out
| of paying record labels. And then maybe in a few decades all
| the good music won't be on the big labels anyway :).
|
| Anyway if anyone is remotely interested in building something
| like this, I'll be your first user. I really need it.
| Otherwise I'll probably build it myself at some point in the
| next year or two as a side project.
|
| [1] http://surpriselib.com/
| HeavyStorm wrote:
| I tried every service available in my region trying to find
| the best "shuffle" out suggestion service.
|
| Deezer was quite good for a while, but right now I am
| sticking with yt music.
|
| IMO Spotify is the worst.
| _puk wrote:
| Deezer flow is my go to for this, and they've recently
| added moods, which really helps.
|
| I find I often start flow, get a few songs in and jump onto
| an album based on the currently playing song. Really great
| for discovery of music I've not heard (before or for a
| while).
|
| Spotify seems to always end up merging back to some generic
| tracks that I've heard so many times before.
|
| That said, I've been training Deezer (they have both like
| and dislike, as well as never recommend song / artist) for
| over 10 years, so they better get it right!
| zentiggr wrote:
| I saw Deezer, but it looked like they didn't have much
| mainstream music. Did I read that wrong?
| ytjohn wrote:
| I haven't used it in a while, but this was a big advantage of
| Pandora for me. With pandora, you start a 'station' with a
| few seed songs and as you like/dislike songs, it keeps
| refining the station.
|
| The downside to Pandora is that you can't choose your music.
| You can seed a station with a specific song, but that song
| might not be the first one played.
|
| What I really liked with Pandora was that it was really good
| at producing endless playlists for me to listen to at work or
| car rides. I was a paid subscriber when I worked night shifts
| and drove a lot more. Spotify stations are really hit or
| miss. Sometimes the Spotify stations dive into foreign music
| and I can't find a way to specify which language of music I
| want to hear.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I have good and bad experiences with Pandora. The biggest
| issue was telling it I didn't like a song and having it
| recommend another mix of the same song. Dislike that one
| and get yet another mix of the same song
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I worked in a shop where 8 employees were constantly
| voting amongst ourselves to up-vote/down-vote each song
| as it appeared on a given Pandora station/playlist that
| was broadcast throughout the shop. This made for a great
| sense of consensus and discussion amongst a group of
| music nerds.
|
| However, one issue with Pandora was that no-matter the
| genre it would inevitably throw in a song by Morrissey,
| which would be met by a round of groans and calls by
| everyone in the shop to aggressively down-vote the song.
| The joke became that all roads eventually lead to
| Morrissey.
| yummypaint wrote:
| I have had a great time exploring the entrances to
| various rabbit roles with pandora, but once I try to
| actually descend deeper and really narrow the focus I
| experience the same behavior. It's like it just doesn't
| have a big enough catalog and is pulling from too small a
| pool.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Why is a band playing at a music festival queuing their own
| tunes from spotify?
| gldnspud wrote:
| Upon reading the parent comment, I don't think this is what
| they were suggesting. They were making an analogy between
| what a band chooses to play live at a show based on context
| of the show, and what a streaming service could do to suggest
| songs based on context of the listening environment.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Isn't that what playlists are for?
| pc86 wrote:
| Yes, if you want to curate an entire playlist. Not
| everyone does. And if _anyone_ has the enough data to
| generate these kinds of disparate playlists on their own
| with minimal user input /direction, it would be Spotify.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I don't really follow. If we're talking about something
| so specific as "what songs would a band play on their own
| set list" that should be manually curated, and in a very
| short amount of time.
|
| If it's just general vibes... spotify already does this
| for you. They have an entire section called "Made for
| you" which seems to cluster your tastes and generate
| playlists of them.
|
| Perhaps you just want to generate a cluster off of your
| own chosen centroid of song profiles. That could be cool
| I guess. I vastly prefer to just play albums.
| Cederfjard wrote:
| They're saying they want even more specific "made for
| you" features - not just tailored for a person, but
| tailored for a person and a certain context (like they
| mentioned as examples - when they're on their own, when
| they're having dinner with friends, when they're throwing
| a party etc). Presumably you would tell the app what your
| current setting is.
| costcofries wrote:
| I have found song, artist and playlist radio to be extremely
| effective at discovering new music. For example, Monday rolls
| around and I hit my discover weekly, say I like a song, I hit
| the song radio and go down a discovery rabbit hole, try it.
| userbinator wrote:
| For brevity and the same length of text, I think it should be
| called the Nope button. (I thought of Hate, but it's too strong
| if the existing one is Like and not Love.)
|
| ...but whatever happened to rating instead of binary choices? I
| have a theory that making people think of things in only binary
| terms intrinsically causes divisiveness.
| marsven_422 wrote:
| People would dislike "woke" music and podcast, we can not have
| that.
| Agentlien wrote:
| It's not just a matter of recommending songs I don't like. While
| Spotify does this a lot it wouldn't solve two more subtle issues
| with its daily playlists and random play:
|
| 1. Even for artists I really like it tends to always choose the
| same few songs. It's especially annoying for artists with a huge
| discography.
|
| 2. There seem to be some categories which Spotify uses for its
| daily mixes which don't make for good playlists. As an example I
| mostly listen to metal but also a fair bit of softer Swedish
| music (Lars Winnerback, Peter LeMarc, ...). For a few months now
| the one of my daily mixes based on this type of music has also
| had a few Swedish hard rock artists that really don't fit. Mainly
| Mustasch, which is a great band, but I don't want to hear them in
| this context.
| dagi3d wrote:
| I just wish they fixed the problem with the bands disambiguation.
| I just hate everytime I get a recommendation in the release radar
| for a band that happens to have the same name as the one I like
| but stylewise they have nothing to do with the music I usually
| listen.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Gaylord!
|
| One is a progressive blend of funk, hard rock, jazz,
| psychedelic from New York, active in the mid 90s to 2010[0],
| and the other is an anti-fascist (anti)black-metal band from
| London formed in 2018[1].
|
| Both are interesting, but I only like the music of the first
| one. Google Play Music used to mix them together.
|
| [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_(band)
|
| [1]:https://genius.com/albums/Gaylord-band/The-black-metal-
| scene...
| gs17 wrote:
| I'm still stuck wondering if one artist I found recently had a
| very different style originally, or if it lumped two unrelated
| acts together.
| oriolid wrote:
| They do lump unrelated acts together. It's somewhat obvious
| when one of them is a current young musician and other had
| their career in 60s.
| n8ta wrote:
| You can email them and they'll fix it. I've done this
| twice. It takes about a month but they do get to it.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I have done it too, they have a standard procedure in
| their support platform.
| switch007 wrote:
| My Spotify Weekly is infested with Swedish songs. I don't know if
| this is because I once listened to a Swedish song or because
| Spotify is Swedish. Their support told me me there is nothing
| they can do
| musesum wrote:
| Hmmm, there is a dislike (Song | Artist) feature on the Desktop
| version -- as least for the Discover Weekly channel.
| endorphine wrote:
| I'm deliberate about any new music I hear, that I never use
| Spotify's recommendations. I prefer doing my own research and
| digging for stuff that I might like.
| can16358p wrote:
| I don't think it's worth the additional complexity and having a
| "negative" element on the user interface. It's not only about the
| engineering and sucking that last bit of optimization from a
| technical perspective, it's also about creating a product/service
| that people love and embrace. Something with a negative-though
| invoking elements like a dislike button wouldn't be in favor of
| that.
|
| Spotify is a big company and I'm pretty much sure that they've
| thought about adding it multiple times throughout years. If they
| haven't, there must be a reason.
| brenainn wrote:
| A dislike button would be handy. There is that feature on some of
| the generated playlists, but I don't think they do anything. My
| two biggest issues with Spotify right now are: 1. Release Radar
| filled with re-releases and remixes, often from artists who have
| long since passed away. I want new music as in released for the
| first time. 2. Name collisions. I'm surprised this is an issue,
| but I will often get songs from different artists with the same
| name. And then I'm unsure if selecting "I don't like this song"
| or "I don't like this artist" will affect the actually intended
| artist.
|
| I've also reached a tipping point where I no longer find new
| music through algorithmic recommendations. To be fair it's taken
| about 5 years to reach this point. Now the good music I find
| comes from searching for curated playlists. It's come full circle
| as before streaming I got my music recommendations from blogs and
| friends.
| S0und wrote:
| 2. "Name collision" unfortunately that's not Spotify's fault
| but the artist who set the wrong Artists ID. So instead of
| creating a new one for themself, they just use an already
| existing one with the same name. What I did in the last i just
| email the record label ( if they have one ) and ask them. In my
| case i listen to metal, but every know and then a mediocre rap
| song shows up in my RR. Usually because the artist is clueless
| and they just "put they new song" on Spotify.
| vintermann wrote:
| Spotify at least seems to have a few humans employed to take
| tips about mislabeled releases and fix them. (For instance,
| they removed the albums of the Salvadorean rapper Spiro from
| the page of the British folk band Spiro when I mailed them
| about it.) Most streaming services have nothing of the sort.
| Music metadata sucks, but Spotify is actually slightly less
| godawful than the norm.
| johnsoft wrote:
| Is it really that easy? Can anyone just sign up for Spotify
| as an artist and upload a Beyonce album?
| vintermann wrote:
| No, you have to sign up with a company Spotify has a deal
| with. Spotify seems to no longer have a deal with the sort
| of "artist services" companies that don't check if the
| uploaded music is a Beyonce album.
|
| Spotify, or rather the old Echo Nest folks I suspect,
| actually do a lot to combat spam compared to the other
| streaming services.
|
| I tried out the French service Deezer for a while, they had
| a huge compilation spam problem. I found one spammer in
| particular, who around four times per months would upload
| 300+ albums, all with the same title and cover art, only
| the artist name would be different. Thus you would get the
| album "Angry Man" by Frank Sinatra, "Angry Man" by Charles
| Aznavour, "Angry Man" by Johnny Rivers, etc. for another
| 300 artists. Thing is, they would contain music from the
| actual artist. The spammer probably speculated that if you
| wanted to add, say, Doc Watson's "Sitting on top of the
| world" to a playlist, searching would lead you to one of
| his "compilations" instead of the original. Or maybe it's
| part of a scam with hacked accounts "listening" to these
| teams. Either way, it must have been profitable, because
| with some searching I found out he'd been at it for almost
| a decade. He uses one of the "artists services" companies
| that lets him pick a new label name every time, but his
| laziness in generating images reveals it's the same guy
| (and I'm pretty sure I know his name, too).
|
| He's not on Spotify, they kicked him off ages ago. But he's
| on literally every other streaming service that I know.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Entity resolution is a thing though, and the Discover Weekly
| algorithm actually tries to combine artists (possibly due to
| collaborations), which is what goes wrong.
|
| For example, I follow Cornelius, the Japanese guitarist. I
| liked several of his song. So the data indicates I'm a fan.
| I've been recommended a new song by a different Cornelius.
| This other guy is an African gospel singer. I don't follow
| him. Never even played a song.
|
| That shouldn't happen. The system knows they're different
| Corneliuses, because the catalogs aren't mixed, but yet
| string match took over.
| andybak wrote:
| Ha! I got excited at a festival to see "Cornelius" on the
| line-up. Turned out to be a local folk singer.
| NamTaf wrote:
| I wonder if, instead of a string match, enough people have
| searched "Cornelius" and (accidentally, out of curiosity,
| etc.) played the gospel singer's songs that it's
| algorithmically linked the gospel singer to the other
| artists these people listen to, which are then linked back
| to the Japanese guitarist.
| playpause wrote:
| Sounds like Spotify's fault to me.
| suction wrote:
| As for the "dislike an artist and I'll dislike all artists with
| the same name", you could theoretically compare the two by
| artist-ids, which you can see when sharing the artist through
| the Spotify client or using a browser to show the profile.
|
| Spotify usually doesn't just give the same ID to several
| artists with the same name, but of course it's not impossible.
| atombender wrote:
| My problem with "Release Radar" are all the singles (and, as
| you say, remix stuff; sometimes it's an EP with one original
| track and multiple remixes). If a musician I follow releases a
| single, I'm not really interested until it's actually released
| on an album. So the only way to consume "Release Radar" is to
| click into every release to look at what's inside.
| pc86 wrote:
| Unfortunately the only thing they seem to do is exclude _that
| song_ from _that playlist_. I 've had things I disliked on one
| radio station come up on a different station 30 minutes later.
|
| I just recently switch to Spotify from YouTube Music (as a
| former diehard Google Play fan) maybe 6 weeks ago. Everyone
| raved about how great the recommendation system was but I'm
| certainly not seeing it yet after spending several weeks
| diligently liking/disliking songs, entering in favorite
| artists, etc.
| 3np wrote:
| Agree on the above (though are duplicates really that much of a
| practical issue? I did discover some Russian rap through that).
| I'd like to add:
|
| 3. Discover Weekly stuck recycling through the same songs over
| and over again (it's also years since the algorithm found
| anything new for me, apart from name collisions)
|
| 4. Geo-language-locking. My CC will apparently only be accepted
| with its registered address in Spain. I barely speak a word of
| Spanish and don't have interest in the music popular in Spain.
| Yet it's what they keep pushing me, especially podcasts
| (including any episode in generated lists). Long-standing
| issues on all their community forums for this, eg
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Browse-Allow-to-...
|
| I recall a 100+ page forum thread on 4 but can't seem to find
| it now.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Curious: how repetitive is your listening history?
|
| I also notice that my Discover Weekly and Daily 1-5 playlists
| are recycling much of the same material. But I also
| frequently listen to my Liked Songs (< 40 songs) on shuffle,
| so I assume Spotify's algorithm is looking at that data and
| saying "you do actually just want to listen to these songs
| over and over again"
|
| Otherwise, a fun experiment I tried last year: deleted all
| liked songs, all playlists, etc. to refresh my
| recommendations. I didn't pay close attention to how new
| suggestions compared to old, but it was one sort of trick to
| find new stuff rather than heading back to existing
| playlists. My Liked songs definitely aren't those from last
| year.
|
| Also, this may seem counterintuitive but I regularly listen
| to playlists that seem like they are out of my interest pool
| (e.g. will deliberately check out a country playlist) as
| another way to move away from my own recommendations.
| jniedrauer wrote:
| I listen to a workout playlist on shuffle frequently while
| training, while slowly adding new music to it throughout
| the year.
|
| Like others have mentioned, Spotify has completely stopped
| recommending new music for years now. Even if I start a
| song radio from a song I've never listened to before,
| Spotify immediately just starts playing songs from my
| current year's workout playlist. That is _not_ the behavior
| I want. Yes, I listen to that playlist a lot, but when I 'm
| not listening to that playlist, I'm trying to find new
| music. It seems really obvious that that would be the
| expected behavior, to me at least.
| tehjoker wrote:
| How do you find good music blogs? I've basically given up on
| the recommendation engines and I don't have a ton of musically
| tuned in friends.
| tkgally wrote:
| A few months ago, I started listening to new-music programs
| on BBC Music Introducing [1], particularly the London program
| [2]. As you might guess from how I spell "programs," I'm not
| British and have never lived in the U.K. But I'm an older guy
| who responds most viscerally to the same old songs I liked as
| a teenager. Listening to music created by young people today
| helps to get me out of that rut.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/M6hmZj0X5c8nxQQ
| ydf...
|
| [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp
| VortexDream wrote:
| I've been enjoying the "All Songs Considered" podcast from
| NPR. Discovered a lot of great music through them.
| kfarr wrote:
| I still like https://hypem.com as a meta music site
| aggregator. Also https://www.indieshuffle.com/
| gundmc wrote:
| I used hypem religiously from 10 years ago or so. Good to
| see them still around!
| philipps wrote:
| Sasha Frere-Jones used to be the music critic at the New
| Yorker and writes a fantastic (although somewhat irregular)
| substack blog > https://substack.sashafrerejones.com/
| brenainn wrote:
| It was a manual process for me personally, finding them
| through message boards and forums (I know that's not much
| help). I'd also use https://www.music-map.com.
| /r/listentothis on reddit is also a good source of tracks.
|
| What I mainly do now is look for Spotify playlists by record
| labels that represent artists I like, or look for playlists
| made by artists I listen to.
|
| Shout out to holyfuckingshit40000 on blogspot, it's long gone
| now. But that was my favourite music blog, to the point I
| wanted to meet the person who ran it and buy them a drink or
| something, because almost everything they recommended I
| loved. Just now I've found that someone compiled a list of
| the recommendations, check it out: https://joseph.pallamidess
| i.fr/2020/05/03/holyfuckingshit400... (it's missing some from
| memory, but it's a diverse collection of some good music).
| stevesearer wrote:
| I've kind of been getting back into listening to the radio
| recently.
|
| Am curious if there are any radio station-style djs one can
| support through Patreon where there is a mix of banter and music
| you can listen similarly to a podcast, though more regularly like
| a morning show.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| I actually wish most networks had a rating system than up/down.
|
| Including social media.
| quadrangle wrote:
| when are we gonna have an anti-pandora or anti-spotify that
| specifically shuffles non-randomly to provide maximum diversity?
| rkuska wrote:
| I always understood that when you skip a song the spotify counts
| that as a dislike.
| kuu wrote:
| For sure they use more than likes as a metric/feature for
| classifying the music you like/dislike. Skip most likely is one
| of them
| nhumrich wrote:
| The reason I still use Pandora.
| jrm4 wrote:
| By observation; why crowdsourced recommendations for music suck
| is that there's no "cost" to being a critic/influencer, and
| therefore no real effective filter.
|
| I realized that this is why current hip-hop is _so much worse_
| now; it 's not (mostly) the artists; its that the "filter" used
| to be much more ruthless. Fewer opportunities for deals and
| "difficulty" in being an influence (e.g. DJ gigs, selling tapes
| from cars, general violence, general censorship etc etc) weeded
| out every content that wasn't good and every participant that
| wasn't dedicated.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I work in this industry and actually we've found from online
| experimentation customers generally don't want to tell you they
| dislike something. The expectation is customers get what they
| like (relevant) and sometimes they want to express stronger
| affinity for specific things. The converse hasn't shown to be
| true.
|
| Generally customers don't have a clear picture of how their
| explicit signals impact recommendations. Though some customers
| have shown desire to want to manage these signals.
|
| Edit: one other consideration is disliking can usually be
| inferred from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20
| seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an
| explicit dislike button.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| You are exhibiting google's mistake, caused by over educated
| people with zero real experience thinking they know better. Or,
| I should correct that - some code they wrote knows better than
| the complex brain of the actual person. This results in "AI"
| (big if/then loop) trying to figure it out, and completely
| blocking any input from the customer.
|
| Here's the issue with "inferred from other activity." You know
| how you can find out? Give the customer a way to tell you. And
| no - you cannot "infer from other activity."
|
| >Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can
| train a model...
|
| ..to be wrong. You know when I usually skip a song after 20
| seconds? When I've heard it too much, or just heard it on
| youtube on my laptop an hour ago. In a couple of days I'll want
| to hear it again. The reason I heard it too much, is I like the
| song. Your AI though - if I skip this favorite song of mine a
| couple of times, will now block it and all other songs like it.
| The literal opposite of what I want.
|
| What this results in, is you have an inferior product, your
| customers leave, then you leave and go screw up another
| company's product without ever learning your lesson.
| djhn wrote:
| I don't disagree with you but that last bit was quite
| unnecessary.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| That last part is the most important point - the main
| point. Your comment shows the exact issue as the "you don't
| need a dislike button because our AI knows better." You
| read my post, you read all the comments on here with users
| either jumping through hoops or ditching the product, you
| read the comment like what I replied to saying "we know
| what you need better than you do."
|
| That last bit is a person thinking some crap code they
| wrote can figure out why someone doesn't want to listen to
| a song at a particular time. They ignore all the inputs
| into that decision - how tired they are, what day they had,
| are they angry at something, have they heard it on another
| medium recently. Then ignore all that data they don't have,
| and have the AI make the decision: did you skip after 20
| seconds? If you did, let's cut this genre out of your
| playlist.
|
| This little thing, destroyed spotify's recommendation
| product. The people in charge of this, are going to destroy
| everything they touch, because they think their little
| piece of code, is smarter than the user, about what the
| user wants. You know, because the user can't code.
|
| People making these decisions - well all I can say is I've
| met them. I've been personal friends with some. They have
| been passed up for jobs when I get called for a reference
| check. Because once they're on your team, they'll destroy
| your product, so they can feel personally superior.
|
| So that last part is very necessary, because it's an
| extremely serious issue, exactly as I put it. But in your
| opinion it's not, so let's cut that part out because it's
| not necessary for what I was saying. Because you know
| better than me what I was trying to say.
|
| <dislike>
| onecommentman wrote:
| Some people get very, um, engaged with the universe of
| sound they wish to live in and have much stronger opinions
| about that than, say, world hunger. It directly impacts
| their experienced quality of life, and is one of the few
| cultural constants they retain over the course of their
| _entire_ life. Lovers, employment, friends come and go but
| the music remains. I may be one of them myself. Profanity
| generally results when it is mucked around with. Count
| yourself lucky the opinion was expressed as mildly as it
| was.
|
| I will not permit a company/algorithm to _directly_
| determine what I want to hear. I'm old enough to know about
| the Payola scams with radio DJs to trust anyone with that
| authority.
|
| My solution: buy CDs or vinyl, find a group of like-minded
| friends to share music recommendations (email newsletters
| would work, perhaps even...physical interaction), read
| music journalism, buy music online and build your personal
| library. Just the music on my hard drive, all directly and
| legally purchased, would play continuously half a year
| without repeats.
|
| I use/used the Apple iTunes others-have-bought
| recommendations for tracks related to tracks I'd purchase.
| Invaluable for discovering alternative artists by someone
| who is nowhere near the target age demographic for that
| sort of music. And you buy the flippin' track and you know
| the artist/rights holder is directly getting a reasonable
| number of pennies from that transaction.
|
| Worst case -- buy CDs and get a CD changer. New ones are
| still being sold. You can still get the 300-400 CD units
| used. No fans are more rabid than classical music fans, and
| they are still ecstatically buying huge boxed sets of CDs.
| They are expecting to listen to these tracks for decades,
| and there is wisdom there.
| spurgu wrote:
| Not necessarily, if he otherwise were to leave and go screw
| up another company's product without ever learning his
| lesson.
| notyourwork wrote:
| > What this results in, is you have an inferior product, your
| customers leave, then you leave and go screw up another
| company's product without ever learning your lesson.
|
| I'm not sure what you're suggesting and I don't need to
| qualify my experience in the software industry or within the
| domain of recommenders and personalization.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| I did not suggest anything. I very clearly stated what I
| stated, in plain English that is very easy to understand.
| Your qualifications are irrelevant. Your point of view on
| the issue we are discussing is wrong for long-term product
| success, and destroys the hard work others have put into
| the idea, in order to feel personally superior to your
| users. I don't know how more plainly I can put it for you
| if you had trouble understanding that. I do believe however
| that not understanding something, is not something that has
| ever prevented you from action or strong and wrong opinions
| on a subject matter.
| notyourwork wrote:
| You're speaking as if you work beside me and have a clue
| about anything in the music industry. There's a reason
| Spotify doesn't but uses to have dislike buttons more
| accessible. I'm not sure why you are disagreeing with me
| but there's no need to speak down to someone because of
| different perspective. I have real world data and work in
| recommenders I'm not sure what your background is.
| henriquez wrote:
| You have real world data but it's not at all clear that
| you've been interpreting it correctly.
| notyourwork wrote:
| It is also not clear that your opinion is grounded in
| reality. Not sure what more to say.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| It is a no-brainer to use the collected data points
| instead of user feedback in this case. Only a small set
| of users would down vote enough to make it relevant. Also
| hard to measure the quality of the votes and how they
| age.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| I am speaking as if I have no idea about your work and
| what you do. I am speaking as if I am addressing the
| specific incredibly stupid thing you said, from a user
| point of view. You know who does not care about your
| music "industry" or your "work?" The users of spotify.
| They care about listening to music they want to listen
| to. My background is I listen to music using things that
| play it. Spotify is absolute crap because the people that
| make it do exactly how you said. The fact that you think
| you know better than the user is why I put that last
| paragraph in. You still don't get it, and you never will,
| and that's the whole point. People who think like you
| shouldn't be allowed to have any input on features or
| product, because you make inferior products, and destroy
| good ones. It happens a lot, with a lot of stuff. Because
| of you.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Based on how you talk to people you sound like a terrible
| person to work with.
| soylentnewsorg wrote:
| Based on assuming I talk at the office to my coworkers
| the way I talk to some stranger with a really bad opinion
| online, you have deduced that coworkers at my presales
| job in data storage are not treated well.
|
| Based on how you talk here, you sound like you paint a
| fake little world around yourself full of straw men to
| make you feel better. Which goes well in line with your
| opinion you know better than the user of a product, what
| that user wants. Living in a fake little world where you
| da man, courtesy of your brain.
|
| This is called deep seeded insecurity - where your brain
| makes subconscious coping mechanisms to avoid depression.
| Bullied a lot in high school?
| didibus wrote:
| Not OP, but I think they're suggesting to spend a bit more
| time listening to customers, and a bit less time thinking
| that you know better what they want then they do
| themselves, even if you believe that your experience and
| expertise would make it that you do.
|
| I'm using the impersonal "you" here. Don't know if you do
| that specifically, but OP seems to complain about software
| workers who do have this tendency, and seems to think that
| eventually leads to losing the customer.
| greggman3 wrote:
| This and your responses below remind can be applied to
| handicapped parking or handicapped ramps (ie, they aren't used
| by most users therefore we shouldn't have them).
|
| I prefer and use the dislike button when it exists. I don't
| care that 51% or 99% of users don't use it. Further, I want to
| send a concrete signal. Skipping a song doesn't mean I don't
| like it. It might just be that I didn't want to hear that
| particular song right now. Even if I skip it 10 times in a row
| that doesn't mean I don't like it.
| laserlight wrote:
| > we've found from online experimentation customers generally
| don't want to tell you they dislike something.
|
| I'm curious. Can you tell what kind of experiments you ran and
| what results you got?
| yuliyp wrote:
| It's honestly really stressful using systems which do this. I
| have to worry about the signals I'm sending to the system all
| the time. Did I hover over that clickbait too long? Did I alt-
| tab while a song I liked was playing? Did I accidentally click
| like on something? Did I misclick onto the wrong song?
|
| Sure I might enjoy some clickbaity content every once in a
| while, but that doesn't mean I want the system to show me more
| of it, _even if_ that will lead to me watching more things.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Though some customers have shown desire to want to manage
| these signals
|
| Let me be one of those. I want to be able to control the
| algorithm in all of its parameters, but even the ability to
| control the values for new/familiar and how far to stray from
| the current genre would be very welcome.
| kortex wrote:
| > I work in this industry and actually we've found from online
| experimentation customers generally don't want to tell you they
| dislike something.
|
| > Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can
| train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike
| button.
|
| Really? Cause I _constantly_ wish for granularity in my ability
| to dislike something. Insta-skip might mean I 'm just not in
| the mood. Or it might be "never play goddamn clownstep in my
| neurofunk mix". Or it might be "I actually love that song but I
| reserve it for special occasions to get into a specific
| headspace and if I listen to it too much it loses spark". Same
| signal, three radically different valences.
|
| I just wish services didn't treat all their customers like
| simps. I'd easily pay double for the ability to like, specify
| "Tuesday is flying microtonal banana day" or "start switching
| to prog house around 16:00 because that's when I start to get
| really deep into code but also easily frazzled." I'd pay gobs
| of money for Pandora's ability to discover new music with the
| library of Youtube+Spotify.
| syshum wrote:
| >>>one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred
| from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds
| for example can train a model
|
| GOD NOOOOOO
|
| that would be terrible, there are all kinds of time where I
| will skip a song because I do not want to Listen to it RIGHT
| NOW, not because I do not like it or never want to listen to it
| ever again...
|
| Music is very emotional, some times you just do not want to
| listen to X at the moment, 30 mins later you might.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Yesterday I tried to book a plane ticket on eDreams and no
| matter which card/bank I used I got a bank authorization error.
|
| So I tried to contact eDreams, which requires a trip reference
| number.
|
| Since I couldn't pay them for a plane ticket, I didn't have a
| trip reference number. So all their ticketing and phone tree
| systems would hang up on me.
|
| eDreams customers, evidently, don't want to contact them
| without having a trip reference number. And they know this for
| sure because they've never had a customer contact them without
| one.
| somebodythere wrote:
| Disliking something is scary; if I press the dislike button am
| I going to be cut off from that whole artist/genre/etc?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my
| recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I
| didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to
| the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my
| recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button,
| or at least a "forget everything you think you know about
| me"-button.
|
| Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of this
| and other frustrations.
| 1_player wrote:
| I keep hearing from people how good is Spotify "Discovery"
| playlist. I've been a paid customer for 5+ years and their
| recommendations have a hit rate of 2%. I listen to a lot of
| different genres, artists, mostly dictated by my mood. Today
| it was some easy Dire Straits song, yesterday QOTSA, the
| other day some psytrance. So Spotify recommends all genres in
| the same playlist, creating an awful cacophony of songs that
| don't flow into one another.
|
| Spotify recommendation system is very bad in cases like mine
| apparently. It's so bad I keep listening to the same old
| songs instead of discovering something new, which is why I'm
| no longer a customer until they improve their AI.
| newsbinator wrote:
| Same here. I like Christopher Tin (e.g. Baba Yetu) and
| therefore for 6 years I've had no way to tell Spotify I
| don't like 8-bit video game music.
|
| No amount of skipping or "I don't like this artist" seems
| to convince Spotify to stop offering me variations of 8-bit
| Tetris themes or MULTIPLE 8-bit Cowboy Bebop Tank! theme
| variations per every single Discover Weekly. I'd be
| thrilled to even get a 2% hit rate on music I like.
|
| Seriously Spotify: two separate "Tank!" versions per
| Discover Weekly is too many.
| kortex wrote:
| Man, the spotify algo makes no sense. The other week I
| was in a _really_ specific mood, starting with Sonic 1 /2
| OST and moving into 8bit/chiptune/keygen. I probably
| listened to every rendition of Chemical Zone out there.
|
| Rest of the week, much the same. Nothing in Discover
| Weekly.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think the relative "power" of a music genre is in
| relationship to its popularity compared to the popularity
| of what you usually listen to. Stands to reason that if
| you listen to rarer music (i.e. stuff the algorithm has
| less information about), then stuff that is more common
| (and the algorithm knows more about) will have a
| disproportionate effect on your recommendations.
|
| This seems to be a problem with this general type of
| recommendation algorithms in general. YouTube suffers
| from it as well.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I listen to a LOT of different genres of music and their
| Discover reccomendations (not the playlists, the actual you
| like X artist you might like X) are absolutely brilliant.
| Got to be approx 50-60% hit rate.
|
| It seems to differ wildly between people - I've heard
| plenty of people making the same case as you, but many that
| have the same as me. It never appears to be 'its ok', its
| either 'brilliant' or 'terrible'. I've been using Spotify
| for 10+ years at this point, so maybe that makes a
| difference?
| notyourwork wrote:
| Without specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but
| in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So
| exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that
| most customer's have no use for and won't use.
|
| In general, you had to be doing something to be getting
| recommendations so there is some action that when most
| customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will
| like some genre and it just so happens you don't.
| toofy wrote:
| Each of the comments that mirror yours illustrate a major
| problem we have in the tech sphere--assuming _we_ know
| better what the end user needs therefor we don't listen to
| the actual user. In our defense, we're _very_ disconnected
| from the end users.
|
| I've done some work with a couple disaster organizations in
| the past and we continually get massive praise and thanks
| from the victims of these disasters. The actual victims
| have the same praise over and over again: Unlike the red
| cross, salvation army, and FEMA we actually ask them what
| they (the victims) need. We don't assume they need water
| and and a tarp, we assume they know whether or not they
| already have those things. Often the victims need diapers,
| help with flood mold remidiation, a chainsaw to cut limbs
| from their street so they can get their cars out so they
| can go help the neighbors a few streets over etc.... They
| know what is prohibiting them from getting out to help
| others much better than we.
|
| When people are telling us what they need, we should listen
| to them and we should actively try to avoid our tendencies
| towards " _I_ know better what _you_ need."
|
| I have a couple friends who work on recommendation
| algorithms full time and in their defense, they're fully
| aware how terrible the recommendations are--I still get my
| music recommendations from friends, from the local music
| store employees, and friends who work in music venues--
| their recommendations are infinitely better.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| > in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So
| exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter
| that most customer's have no use for and won't use.
|
| A feature does not need to be used often to be useful.
|
| Take a fire extinguisher for example. Going by this logic,
| since most people will never even touch a fire extinguisher
| and most of them are never actually used, we should get rid
| of them because they're a cause of clutter.
| feanaro wrote:
| I must say your dismissal of this is rather annoying.
| Multiple users are telling you they are facing a real --
| and completely obvious and predictable -- problem due to
| the feature not being available. In a comment section
| regarding research showing it would be an improvement to
| recommendations.
|
| Increased UI clutter due to a _single_ extra icon is _not_
| a good nor sufficient argument for not including it.
| notyourwork wrote:
| My dismissal is based on a many-million digit customer
| base and online real world data. Sorry if a few
| hackernews users feel they want a dislike button, most
| users don't and if you give to them most users don't use
| it. I don't mind disagreement but dismissing real world
| data from this industry is sort of silly to counter with
| 'because I want it you're wrong'.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| I think for technically minded or abnormal users a
| dislike button would be valuable, but that's a minority
| of the population and I understand why a company would
| choose to focus on the larger market to the detriment of
| the enthusiasts. Props for taking the heat and trying to
| present this perspective.
|
| I personally had these same complaints and acknowledged
| that I'm unusual and my needs are best served by my own
| hosted solution. I'd encourage people who are unhappy
| with major streaming services to roll their own if they
| truly feel strongly about it- I did and I'm happier for
| it.
| kortex wrote:
| This totally ignores effects from the long tail, black
| swans, power users, and criticality dynamics.
|
| Downvotes are way more "potent" than upvotes. If I'm
| listening to music that I like, I'd say I probably log
| over 100x upvotes than downvotes. But when I downvote, I
| usually want to nuke the site from orbit.
|
| What is the ratio? What ratio of users use downvote? What
| ratio is that compared to users that interact in any way?
| How are you controlling for sampling bias? Berkson's
| paradox? How much utility are the users that downvote
| obtaining, vs the disutility of being unable to?
| feanaro wrote:
| I'm not even saying you're wrong, I'm saying your
| argument for not including it for (at the very least) a
| sizeable minority is weak and somewhat silly.
| notyourwork wrote:
| What is a sizable minority aside from an oxymoron?
| hulahoof wrote:
| A sizeable minority is something that is still visible on
| a pie chart.
| feanaro wrote:
| A minority is anything that is not a majority (this is
| the definition I'm using). So a < 50% group can hopefully
| still be viewed as non-negligible, even though it is not
| the majority.
| laserlight wrote:
| How could people dismiss real world data that you didn't
| share? You only shared your interpretation of it and
| people pointed to lots of ways that this interpretation
| could be wrong. What data is this? Did you conduct a
| survey asking people if they "want" a dislike button? Or
| did you just measure usage frequency of the dislike
| button and decided that people didn't want it because it
| wasn't used as frequently as the like button? How could
| low usage frequency mean users don't "want" it?
| Oddskar wrote:
| I disagree that your reasoning is entirely sound. It's a
| bit of an elitist point of view I suppose; but
| fundamentally I don't think all customers are created
| equally in terms of importance. One could even in this
| day and age call some of the more important ones
| "influencer" or something similar.
|
| While the general customer base might not be served by
| this feature, what if a subset of the customer base
| enjoys this feature to an _extraordinary_ extent? Maybe
| it fixes a lot of problems they have with the service;
| and negates a lot of complaints they otherwise would have
| posted.
|
| Would it still not be the correct choice to "clutter the
| UI" with this?
|
| I don't think it's as easy of a choice like you're trying
| to make it.
|
| But I could also be jaded by the fact that Spotify for
| years has trying to pull me into listening to all kinds
| of odd European folk music that I have no interest in
| what-so-ever.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| For a long time we called this sort of user a "power
| user". People who are not necessarily technical but who
| love your application and use it extensively will
| appreciate power user functionality.
|
| It's probably fine to not have anything to appeal to
| power users, but those power users probably will be the
| sorts to be influencers to talk up your application to
| everyone they know.
| Oddskar wrote:
| It's interesting isn't it, why did we stop talking about
| power users and catering to their needs?
| feanaro wrote:
| Because the masses are now large enough that you don't
| need to have an actually useful application. You just
| need to make it kind-of work and for it to become
| popular.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| What industry just out of curiosity? I see dislikes used
| judiciously in youtube and reddit fwiw
| notyourwork wrote:
| Music but I don't work for Spotify currently.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I absolutely love it when people working on a product tell
| their customers that they don't need a feature they're all
| asking for and that would clearly improve the experience,
| just because not everyone uses it all the time.
| simion314 wrote:
| > absolutely love it when people working on a product
| tell their customers that they don't need a feature
| they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the
| experience, just because not everyone uses it all the
| time.
|
| We need a name for this, personally I call it GNOME
| mentality but probably is bad name since most developers
| are not familiar with GNOME (though the file picker issue
| get on top HN a lot )
| notyourwork wrote:
| > they're all asking for
|
| All is the flaw in your comment. One person does not
| imply all and data speaks for itself.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| If x number of people are asking for something, _all_ of
| those people are asking for it. I think it was pretty
| obvious I wasn 't claiming all spotify users are asking
| for this.
|
| I'm a PO so feel sufficiently qualified to state that
| user analytics data is completely redundant for looking
| at small use high value features & undervaluing direct
| user feedback from your 'power users' is generally a bad
| move.
|
| Again, just because not _everyone_ needs /wants a feature
| does not make it useless or not worth implementing.
|
| Data doesn't tell you how useful a feature is, it tells
| you how frequently it's used & how many people use it.
| They are not the same things.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The data does not speak at all. You are drawing
| inferences based on the data, inferences of a type that
| are pretty easy to poke holes in by looking at the pretty
| large class of things rarely used but situationaly useful
| (often life saving).
|
| This type of bizarre logic makes me feel like I have to
| habitually use features even when they are not useful in
| order to protect them from UX designers in case I'm
| subject to some misguided A/B test.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| UX designers not sufficiently held in check by strong
| product teams are lethal.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably
| ruin my recommendations.
|
| Similarly any app or website that pulls "top artists" from
| Spotify tends to include stuff I listens to a bit several
| years ago, but never stuff I've listened to nonstop for
| months.
| 0134340 wrote:
| Yes that's very frustrating. I'm scared to even listen to new
| music on it because I'd try to use it for discovery but it
| would mistake what I listen to for what I like. Besides that
| it hardly recommends me any new music anyway. I now just use
| youtube for discovery.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| They should add an incognito mode or something.
|
| You could even do this maliciously. Send someone a Spotify
| link to a Steely Dan song and a Skrillex song, and now
| yacht rock and dubstep will follow them around until they
| delete their account (I'm assuming the intersection between
| those fan-bases is vanishingly small).
| Oddskar wrote:
| That already exists.
|
| Profile > Private Session
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Doesn't that just hide your activity from other people?
| Oddskar wrote:
| From their support docs:
|
| _Note: Anything you listen to in a Private Session may
| not influence your music recommendations, e.g. Discover
| Weekly._
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| High school me would have been very offended to be
| labeled "vanishingly small."
|
| But you're not wrong.
|
| By the way, I believe Spotify _does_ have a private mode,
| which at least blocks your plays from showing up in the
| social pane and on your profile. But I'm not sure if it
| cuts them out of your recommendations.
|
| Please, dear God, Spotify: just because I listened to the
| Hamilton soundtrack once does not mean that I want to
| hear it every week in Discover Weekly and multiple times
| per Duo playlist, because Lin-Manuel Miranda is
| apparently a genre of himself.
| oriolid wrote:
| > Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can
| train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike
| button.
|
| So, basically if I dislike a song but want to give it a chance
| and then decide that you want to never hear it again, your
| industry thinks that I liked it. That explains a lot.
| user-the-name wrote:
| > one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred
| from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds
| for example can train a model as well as incorporating an
| explicit dislike button.
|
| This is nonsense. The fact that I skip a song does not mean I
| don't like it _in general_ , it means I don't want to hear it
| right now. Music taste changes with mood and situation. If you
| treat a skip as "I don't ever want to hear this again" you will
| collect absolute garbage data, and if I know you are doing
| this, it will make your app unusable because I can't do normal
| everyday actions without ruining my recommendations.
| notyourwork wrote:
| It depends right. If you skip a song everytime its played in
| a sequence is a stronger indication of dislike compared to
| skip it once but listening to it a few times. The point is
| there is more to context and recommenders than a adding a
| dislike button and having a magically awesome recommender.
| oriolid wrote:
| Have you read about illusion of control (search for
| elevator door button for one well known example)? If we
| take the idea that recommendations are really hard and
| dislike button doesn't help at face value, wouldn't it
| still improve the user experience to give them the illusion
| that they can directly affect the recommendations?
|
| I'm not really convinced about recommendations being hard,
| though. Pandora could do them a long time ago, Netflix had
| good recommendations at one point but not since they
| dropped the star ratings and at some point Amazon wasn't
| that bad either.
| rednalexa wrote:
| Is this within a global context or a local one? Liking a song
| in Spotify is global - Spotify then adds it to a list of liked
| songs.
|
| But from my experience with Pandora, radio stations were
| localized. Liking a song did add it to a list somewhere, yes,
| but disliking a song just meant that a particular radio station
| on Pandora wouldn't have a song in that particular style, and
| other stations did not seem to be affected by this.
|
| In other words, what you want to listen to, for me, seemed to
| be very contextual. And since I felt my dislikes were captured
| in a context (radio station), I didn't have any qualms
| disliking frequently using Pandora.
|
| And my experience with Pandora for song discovery has always
| been much better.
| ics wrote:
| A problem I have with the inferred dislike is that when I skip
| a song it's only something I dislike half the time. The other
| half I'm simply not in the mood to hear it, maybe for another
| 10 minutes or another 10 months. The result has been that I've
| become more willing to listen to certain genres on another
| platform (say Youtube) because it won't contaminate the
| prevailing mood which I want the main service to recommend.
| notyourwork wrote:
| That's a good point and the next evolution recommenders try
| to do is to become contextual. There may be songs you like at
| dinner or on weekends but not vice versa. These types of
| things like time of day, device and other types of data
| points can make a recommender more precise.
| ozzythecat wrote:
| > Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can
| train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike
| button.
|
| How do you know I dislike the song? Instead, maybe I just heard
| it (or a similar song) on your platform or elsewhere outside of
| your app and don't want to listen to it again right now?
|
| I guess you could try to build a more complex model that
| determines what songs or music I like at what times of the day
| or what day of the week, or based on what I just listened to.
|
| IMO this is rampant in FAANG companies. We create complex
| solutions to problems that didn't really exist and pat
| ourselves on the back when our experiment show positive
| results.
|
| The experiment might show you some metric (total time in app,
| play time at whatever percentile, etc) increased. Great! Now we
| launch the model in production for all customers and pat
| ourselves on the back. Meanwhile, the actual experience became
| shittier. A few promotions come out of this, and we continue
| living in the bubble.
|
| Alright, end of rant.
| notyourwork wrote:
| The paper is making an obvious claim. If I have data showing
| positive and negative affinity, that will perform better than
| a model which just has positive day. I don't find this very
| surprising but my point is in practice exposing dislike
| buttons to customers are a CX that is hardly ever used. So
| the point that a model will perform better with data that
| customer's rarely offer up to your platform makes their claim
| moot in my opinion.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| Maybe the button's utility doesn't come from its use, but
| from its presence. The user may enjoy having the option to
| dislike a song, even if they never exercise that option.
| Taking away their choice robs them of that agency.
| corin_ wrote:
| I downvoted your comment to demonstrate that I disagree
| with you.
|
| I've heard some good arguments against allowing users to
| show dislikes/downvotes as well as likes, but I've not
| heard your argument before and it doesn't strike me as
| accurate. Less used than the positive direction, sure, but
| still significantly used when available.
| notyourwork wrote:
| Netflix, Youtube and reddit aren't the same medium as
| short lived music streaming is. Streaming music is a show
| lived precision game of guessing what's relevant. There
| is a lot of it depends scenarios, are we showing
| recommendations on a landing page, are we sequencing
| songs in a station or are we ordering results on a search
| page. The CX context is a big part of how you can use
| signals to benefit the customer.
|
| My argument isn't an argument so much as a from real
| world data in this industry at a major industry
| competitor that customer's don't use the dislike button
| enough to justify it taking over your CX. Using co-
| occurrences of playback across a customer segment and
| combining that with likes or other signals is good
| enough.
| hulahoof wrote:
| Form should follow function. CX used to mean customer
| experience, and when your customers are telling you they
| want this feature back then you should reinterperate your
| data, not tell them they're wrong.
| notyourwork wrote:
| It amazes me how tech savvy users think they know what
| the entire population of users want. I'm not telling
| anyone they are wrong, I'm simply sharing real world data
| that counters the idea that users actually want a
| downvote button for music streaming. The fact that most
| people in this thread have really strong opinions but
| don't work in music streaming baffles my brain.
| [deleted]
| somebodythere wrote:
| I know that these implicit signals affect how I use the app.
| I might force myself to listen to a song I like, but would
| rather listen to something else at the time because I don't
| want my choice to skip to impact my recommendations in opaque
| ways.
| Groxx wrote:
| Skipping doesn't imply dislike, though it does correlate
| (because the reverse _is_ generally true, people skip songs
| they dislike). But I routinely see skip mentioned as non-
| downvote sources of dislike information.
|
| Easily half of the times I skip it's because I don't want it
| _right now_. Some of my favorite songs reproduce absolutely
| horribly in a car on a highway for example, because the
| surrounding noise utterly destroys subtleties. So maybe you add
| "but it's not a downvote if it's hearted or otherwise
| positively ranked"... but many other times I'm just not in the
| mood for [a song I had never encountered until now].
| anticensor wrote:
| Correlation does not imply causation, and neither does
| causation imply correlation.
| marcinzm wrote:
| The dislike button is if nothing else a sanity check for
| someone to have control if your model goes haywire.
| Realistically it will go haywire in a non-trivial number of
| cases. If every month your model goes haywire for 1% of users
| then you may see dislike used 1% of the time. That's tiny,
| right? However without it those users may leave and then next
| month another 1% will be hit and so on. Users remember the bad
| things a lot more than the good things so they will remember
| your AI f-ups and the lack of a way to fix it.
|
| The problem with data driven UX is that the data is often short
| term (ab tests are expensive) and doesn't cover long term
| complex user impact.
|
| Edit: For example, I've seen a lot of Etsy users complain about
| their front page being filled with NSFW recommendations and no
| way to get rid of them. I doubt they'll be using Etsy much in
| the future.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Oh, what I'd give for a dislike button. I tend to use Spotify to
| listen to nursery rhymes in the car while traveling with our
| toddler. This doesn't mean I need to have a daily mix full of
| nursery rhymes and there is no way to tell Spotify that.
| toomanyrichies wrote:
| I've said this in another comment here, but I see a lot of folks
| debating about the utility of a dislike button in terms of its
| improvement on recommendations, and I think that misses the
| point.
|
| If enough users want the button, that seems like a good enough
| reason to have it, _even if they don't use it_. They may enjoy
| having the ability to express their opinion, which is an entirely
| separate derived benefit from such a button's influence on their
| recommendations.
|
| It might even be a bit like the "Close door" button on an
| elevator. Sure, it's rumored not to even do anything in some
| cases, but it's widely available anyway because users appreciate
| feeling like they have agency over their circumstances (even if
| that feeling is built on a lie).
| tempestn wrote:
| I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the
| 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to
| rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how
| much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted.
|
| I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a
| ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love,
| 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could even be optional; they
| could just treat like and dislike as 4 and 2 or something, and
| let people who want more precision use them.
| beckman466 wrote:
| It'd be better as:
|
| +2 love
|
| +1 like
|
| 0 don't mind it
|
| -1 dislike
|
| -2 never again
| ochrist wrote:
| It's called a Likert scale:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale
| nonfamous wrote:
| Itunes (well I guess it's Apple Music now) does still support
| 5-star rankings, it's just hidden behind a context menu. I
| still have a Smart Playlist (can you even make those anymore?)
| of my 4-star and 5-star songs that serves as my daily shuffle
| rotation.
| HighlandSpring wrote:
| I've thought about this in the past and figured something
| geometric could better capture engagement
|
| -1 -> dislike, +1 -> like, +2 -> favourite, +4 -> heart
|
| Labels are arbitrary. How might this weighting affect learning?
| pixl97 wrote:
| There is something I've never seen in a voting system before,
| but I'd love for it to take off.
|
| Slice open an orange along its equator. Looking at this slice
| you have a shape kind of like an *
|
| Each of these wedges can have a different tag. Those wedges
| facing up would have a positive value, and down a negative.
|
| The site the orange slice voting system is used on can easily
| decide the number of wedges that make sense and the tags
| associated.
|
| Instead we get binary or unitary choices that don't really
| mean much.
|
| Edit: Image for example
|
| https://i.imgur.com/0uVQl3s.jpg
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| There are two issues with 5 star ranking. One the more thought
| required to give feedback the less likely users give feedback.
| More interactions is very helpful for ml so minimizing the
| decisions needed by a user helps a lot. Great ui/ux for
| engagement aims for signals to require as little action from
| the user as possible. As a side effect short content is very
| nice as finish/playtime become strong signals that require a
| user to do almost nothing.
|
| The second issue is a lot of people use it like 1/5 system.
| While yes some users use more of the intermediates and you can
| adjust on per user basis for that feature it's just not as
| useful as you'd expect.
|
| Of course any decision like this I recommend a company ab test
| and I'm just summarizing past experience in this area.
|
| I had a similar discussion at a prior job on having creators
| add content tags to there submission. The main avoidance was
| while good tags would be nice for recommendation, if tags are
| required less content would be submitted and that hurts the
| platform.
| cardanome wrote:
| > One the more thought required to give feedback the less
| likely users give feedback.
|
| That is great! This means the people giving feedback would
| tend to be power users that are able to giver higher quality
| feedback.
|
| > As a side effect short content is very nice as
| finish/playtime become strong signals that require a user to
| do almost nothing.
|
| Perfect! It is clear by now that users vastly prefer short
| content that gets to the point quickly.
|
| So basically 5 stars ranking would vastly increase the
| quality of the content but that is bad, how?
|
| The only issue I see is (political) vote brigading. Maybe set
| additional hurdles like minimum account age and the like for
| voting. Strong content moderation could help. I guess there
| is no silver bullet for that issue.
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| Your first point isn't true because most of the 5 star
| usage boils down to 1/5 stars and not 2-4. There are some
| users that use whole range and the info does have value.
| The main problem though is while that system may be better
| for certain users, it will be worse for the entire user
| base as you want a system that works well for both casual
| and power users. Really you want a system that works better
| for casual users as most users on typical system like
| YouTube/spotify/tiktok/etc would be casual users. And while
| having model distinguish between user types is possible, ui
| wise you aren't going to want to have both thumps up/down
| as an option and 5 stars. A toggle is possible but even for
| users that would use full ratings, a toggle is fairly
| unlikely to be used.
|
| Even for power users it may not be net benefit for them.
| Recommendations are not based solely on that user's ratings
| but all ratings. If power users give better signal but
| total quantity of signals decreases then it's likely that
| recommendation quality drops for both casual/power users.
| Making up guess numbers a 5 star system is likely to get
| you 3x less data points and many of those data points are
| of similar quality anyway (users that only rate 1/5 stars).
| Worse signal that has higher volume often leads to better
| model.
| cardanome wrote:
| My argument was based on the premise that votes from
| power users are more valuable as they better at judging
| the quality of the content. While the quality is partly
| subjective, it is not entirely so. Meaning power users,
| having more experience, know better what casual users
| should watch and would like then the casual users
| themselves. It is in the interest of the casual users for
| them to not be able to vote/their vote to count less.
|
| I later suggested ways to make the hurdles for voting
| higher, which would fix the problems you mentioned.
| Required account age, maybe even how much content you
| need to have watched. Honestly, we could just filter out
| the people that only do 1/5 star votes. (With niche
| content of course there would be the issue of having
| no/just a few votes but voting would not be the only
| metric anyway.
|
| I am very heretical towards common held UX believes and
| think trying to design for the lowest common denominator
| just results in all around awful experiences for
| everyone. We should rather strive to empower users.
| watwut wrote:
| > My argument was based on the premise that votes from
| power users are more valuable as they better at judging
| the quality of the content.
|
| That is quite unlikely. What you call power user is
| someone distinguished by willingness to rank. It does not
| make that person better representation of all users or be
| more knowledgeable off quality or more experienced. Just
| more judgy.
|
| It means you will be recommended based on tastes of
| special minority and likely alienate the rest of users in
| the process.
| Mehdi2277 wrote:
| I don't think counting there vote less is useful. Low
| quality signal that is plentiful is very often better
| than sparse higher quality signal. My past experience is
| working on recommendation systems at tiktok/snap. Having
| a lot of weak signal from casual users is extremely
| helpful for power users. Recommendations are often based
| on large amount of basic engagement data. I think a large
| aspect to TikTok's system being considered strong at
| recommendation is because Ux is designed for very
| frequent simple signals.
|
| I can also say working at companies like that generally
| any system changes require an ab test and long running
| back test. I've generally seen companies move from 5 star
| to simpler like/dislike system and those changes would
| have been ab tested and found that user experience is
| overall better. I don't know for specific systems whether
| overall better was across all users or some users.
| jorvi wrote:
| Apple Music still has star ranking, although it's a bit buried
| away.
| petre wrote:
| I can't rate using 5 stars, it's either like, dislike or don't
| care, so 1 star 5 stars or no rating. With Tidal that's either
| listen to <30 seconds, skip or maybe listen through the full
| song, maybe fave or go back and replay. So they don't even need
| a dislike button. They just need to look at user actions if the
| algorithms are really optimized for tailoring content to the
| user's preferences, rather than pushing sponsored content in
| order to make money really fast. I don't even look at their
| recomendations (they're BS), but I do play artist radio if I
| happen to like something. That's how I found about Toshiko
| Akiyoshi a few days ago while listening to some artist's or
| track's radio.
| lanevorockz wrote:
| The more information the better, thing is platforms want to
| sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user
| input was pushed by the business so they could push content
| regardless of personal interest.
|
| Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?
| NegatioN wrote:
| I'm pretty sure stars were discontinued because the best
| proxy for "what you will spend time watching, is what you
| spent time watching" and not your curated ratings. As in: the
| datapoint they funneled into their models was "time spent on
| video X" and not, "rating on video X".
|
| Business of course wants to keep churn low, and they think
| time spent on the site is the best way to do that.
|
| That (and "people mostly don't use ratings beside 1 and 5")
| is at least the reasoning I've read every time I've seen this
| topic mentioned in blogs/talks.
|
| I do also feel Netflix is pushing it's in-house content way
| more these last few years, to the detriment of their
| recommendations though.
| amir wrote:
| One reason to keep on pushing bad content despite knowing the
| user will not watch them is to hide the fact how small their
| catalogue is and shift the blame onto user's particular
| taste.
| kettleballroll wrote:
| Do you have any evidence for that claim, or is that pure
| speculation on your part?
| speedybird wrote:
| > _" Netflix Ditches 5 Star Rating System, Is Amy Schumer
| to Blame?"_
|
| > _" This past week, Netflix officially debuted their new
| Amy Schumer stand-up comedy hour The Leather Special. And
| it was instantaneously met with negative reviews. Some
| claim that Schumer's biggest critics got on Netflix and
| purposely drove down the rating of the special, some
| without even watching it. Schumer herself blames the 'Alt-
| Right' for sabotaging her latest effort. Now, it is being
| announced that Netflix is ditching its five-star rating
| system for something much more streamlined, a rating system
| that owes itself to the legacy of the late Gene Siskel and
| Roger Ebert. Did Amy Schumer have anything to do with this
| new rating system? Probably not. But once in place, it will
| certainly help her Leather Special find a more appropriate
| audience."_
|
| https://movieweb.com/netflix-cancels-5-star-rating-system/
|
| _' Probably not'_, but it sure seemed like coincidental
| timing to me.
| tybit wrote:
| I can't even imagine the senior product and data people
| I've listened to deciding to change this based on one
| artists experience.
| nickmyersdt wrote:
| I don't have any written or direct evidence, however I
| worked for a public service broadcaster, who regularly
| dealt with Apple and Netflix, and the feedback from both
| was that star-rankings were driving a lot of royalty
| payments and user choice (people would ignore poorly ranked
| content). The impact of this was that low performing
| content providers made less money. By removing the
| collective scoring, the company would implement their own
| recommendations algorithms, which gave them the ability to
| both deliver 'better' recommendations based on what the
| user consumed and spread the royalty payments more broadly.
| If what you wanted was to see what everyone else was
| watching/listening to though, that's not in the interest of
| their business. Anecdotal and third hand but I believe the
| people that relayed this to me.
| kettleballroll wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks for elaborating! I could imagine
| a different solution where instead you just don't report
| the overall star-average, to make it a harder metric to
| game, but still get to have a stronger feedback signal
| for your recommendations.
| lrem wrote:
| What is Apple selling to have so little settings in MacOS? ;)
| vidarh wrote:
| It needs more than that. I often hesitate to rank because my
| preference often varies by time and mood and setting. I might
| not dislike a song, but don't want it played when I want
| something mellow to fall asleep to, or when I'm happy or when
| I'm sad. Having a given song show up in one context might
| irritate me because it breaks the mood while I might love it
| another time.
|
| A good recommendation system for music needs to take into
| account proximity in play order to other songs you've ranked
| when you rank it, and their tempo and genre, time of day, etc.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| It would improve any social network. Leaving dislike out is like
| voting without a Ney button
| skrebbel wrote:
| At the risk of pointing out the obvious: Google's Spotify clone,
| "YouTube Music", has such miracles of UX design as:
| - a dislike button - a playlist that works like you'd
| expect - a "play album" button
|
| And tons of other similar totally obvious things that Spotify
| doesn't have1 for no good reason at all.
|
| If you have no qualms about using a Google product that might end
| any day, then I think it's simply just Spotify, done properly. I
| think it's especially impressive since how meh Google tends to be
| at UX.
|
| As an extra bonus it has a huge catalog since it has both the
| usual label-provided music and everything that ever got uploaded
| to YouTube that their AI thinks is likely a music video.
|
| 1 EDIT: I noticed, before rage-quitting Spotify over their
| terrible UX, that some of these omissions are platform specific.
| Eg IIRC their web player had a "play album" button but the
| Android app didn't, you had to either play an album on shuffle or
| hope that today's playlist state + star alignment would
| miraculously let you play the entire album when you started the
| first song.
|
| (YT Music looks and works exactly the same on every platforms
| I've used it on)
| aeturnum wrote:
| There are plenty of features on spotify I think could be
| improved but I have always been pretty happy with their
| playlists. What are the things that google does better?
| rapnie wrote:
| I don't know about YouTube Music, but YouTube's recommender is
| doing such bad job for me, that I stand little chance to become
| 'engaged' (like eternally recommending the same video that I'm
| uninterested in but Google thinks I must see). I watch videos
| found by search queries, mostly via DDG too and not YT search.
| lkbm wrote:
| Fun fact: you can downvote a song on YouTube Music and they'll
| continue to recommend it in your mixes or when you reaches the
| end of your current playlist.
|
| Since I have YouTube Premium anyway, I use YouTube Music, and
| before that used Google Music, but it's pretty terrible in a
| number of ways.
| jiahaiqi wrote:
| It's a good idea, and when I'm listening to a song, I want to be
| able to recommend songs to me through my favorites, so that I can
| hear a lot of songs that not famous but that's nice
| Pelam wrote:
| I mostly use playlists generated by this service
| https://everynoise.com/ (you can get to them with desktop client
| by pasting playlist links from the site to the spotify client
| search box.)
|
| From the site: "Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an
| algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of
| the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for
| 5,646 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2021-10-16. The
| calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is
| more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more
| atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier."
|
| I personally think that an algorithm trying to learn my tastes
| and recommend music to me is the wrong approach... especially as
| the algorithm does not actually seem to care anything about the
| actual waveform content.
|
| I feel I get get this strange "personal echo chamber effect"
| where I at least think I notice the effect of my past listening
| habits or the outsized weight of some stuff that was on powerplay
| some time ago. It gets hard to find new stuff or to learn to like
| new stuff.
|
| This varies though, sometimes the recommendations are great.
| Perhaps they work best for me if I don't constantly follow or
| listen to them, but instead listen to playlists curated by humans
| or everynoise.com.
| carvking wrote:
| Wouldn't it be racist ?
| spurgu wrote:
| I'm sure a lot of artists would be offended.
| hooande wrote:
| I could swear that spotify had a dislike button, at least on the
| android mobile app. I remember using it on songs that I found
| annoying. It would continue integrating them into playlists
| anyway. The thumbs down dislike was removed from the app years
| (?) ago. I didn't use it very often, which is why I assumed they
| got rid of it
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I'm very confused at the article and the comments here. Spotify
| does have a dislike button. It's the minus symbol. You click it,
| and can choose from "I don't like this song" or "I don't like
| this artist", and it will block them from recurring.
|
| For some reason, it seems this doesn't appear in music that
| you've curated yourself, but it does appear in playlists spotify
| makes for you, like discover weekly. Odd, but in my case that's
| the only place I'll be seeing new recommendations so it seems to
| fit my needs well.
|
| I find spotify's recommendation algo to be top tier. I get tons
| of low visibility artists on my recommendations that I think are
| awesome.
| DigitallyFidget wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/k3doFqL.png
|
| This is my relationship with Spotify.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I'll never use Spotify again. My account was hacked by a latino
| and now my recommendations is 100% latin music. They told me
| there is nothing they can do to fix this. My recommendations are
| broken and my only option is to create another account, cancel my
| subscription, buy it again... Not gonna happen.
| soneca wrote:
| It happened to me with someone that loves Simple Plan. I only
| noticed in those end-of-the-year lists that Spotify prepares. A
| bunch of Simple Plan stuff on most played tracks.
|
| I changed my password and it took me almost an year of
| listening to my songs to Spotify stop recommending me Simple
| Plan and similars.
| bdcp wrote:
| I keep getting recommended German music. I'm not German.
| gs17 wrote:
| Listening to metal gets a lot of recommendations for me in
| languages I don't understand much of. You would think Spotify
| would have a way to not change languages between songs at
| least.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Metal fans who listen to things beyond the mainstream hits
| tend to listen to a lot of music in languages they don't
| speak due to how much of the best metal out there isn't in
| English. If you listen to a lot of bands whose fans listen
| to music in other languages then I'd expect you to get a
| lot of recommendations in other languages.
| gs17 wrote:
| I understand why it happens, but it doesn't mean I want
| it to happen. Unfortunately, this is a case where a
| recommender system runs into issues. Outside of these
| songs, I likely overlap a lot with the people who are
| okay with non English recommendations.
| emerged wrote:
| Look I'm sorry but you love German music. The sooner you
| accept that the sooner we can all move on.
| detaro wrote:
| ... is it really that odd that you get suggestions for music
| from other places in other languages?
| Oddskar wrote:
| The algorithm clearly says that you're German. Maybe you
| should just embrace it.
| ascorbic wrote:
| I once didn't properly unlink Spotify when I returned my car to
| the leasing company. The driver taking it back played bhangra
| for about half an hour using my account before I noticed.
| Changing the password, unlinking devices nothing worked. I
| eventually got him to stop by constantly switching it to the
| Barbie Girl by Aqua and then finally Spotify support was able
| to unlink it. I was then recommended bhangra for months. Four
| consecutive Discover Weeklies were 100% bhangra. Now I like the
| odd track every now and then, but playing less than an hour of
| a genre should not be enough to do that.
| eachro wrote:
| Hmm, I had a similar situation with an ex-partner contaminating
| my recommendations. I emailed support and it was pretty easy to
| reset my recs to a blank slate.
| ikt wrote:
| the fix is to listen to other music...
| smoldesu wrote:
| When this happened to me, I just changed my password. Seems to
| have worked so far, though it doesn't filter out Latin music.
| mikeywazowski wrote:
| Yeah me too, a couple of years ago. Initially I was in denial
| that my account might have been compromised, but eventually I
| changed my password and haven't had that issue since.
| jcastro wrote:
| I found out you can break your recommendations without losing
| control of your account.
|
| I listened to one podcast episode and it's been stuck on my
| home screen for two months. I've tried listening to it,
| ignoring it, unsubscribing, deleting (you can't!). It's just
| there forever now.
|
| And of course, that means it's always recommending related
| podcasts all the time so most of my homepage is now filled with
| this stuff and I have no way to remove it.
| jzb wrote:
| I imagine they're pushing podcasts because they aren't paying
| royalties on most or any of them.
| [deleted]
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| I've never listened to a podcast ever on Spotify. Refuse to,
| given their approach of trying to wall off podcasts in their
| own app.
|
| I've had an entire top-level list of podcasts recommended to
| me for over a YEAR now. I will never use it, but I have to
| constantly scroll past it and dodge podcast recommendations
| in new podcast + music playlists (that aren't clearly marked)
| as well.
|
| I used to _love_ Spotify. I got so many friends to sign up, I
| discovered so much music in my Discover Weekly, I convinced
| friends to switch from all kinds of other platforms, I built
| collaborative playlists with friends...
|
| but the recommendations seem stuck in a rut for me, probably
| because they can't handle the size of my library (hundreds of
| artists and thousands of albums that I listen to regularly).
| The product doesn't respect me. I'm actively researching ways
| to host my own music library and use something else for
| discovery. Recommendations welcome so this frog can escape
| this slowly boiling pot.
| rchaud wrote:
| They paid a lot of money to make those podcasts Spotify
| exclusives. It follows that they'd advertise them as
| heavily as they can.
| lethologica wrote:
| Argh, I've been having this exact issue too. Worse still,
| it's a thumbnail and title I would really rather not be
| plastered front and centre of my home screen all the time!
| Absolutely frustrating.
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| It seems extremely unlikely that nobody at Spotify has considered
| this. It's probably safe to conclude that Spotify are optimizing
| their UX and algorithms for different metrics than the ones used
| in this academic study.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| woke is broke
| campground wrote:
| I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's
| recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes,
| and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music.
| I think you do have to prime the engine a bit. I "like" a lot of
| albums and songs. Every time I hear something new that I like I
| press the little heart button. Same when I discover music outside
| of Spotify (I listen to WFMU a lot). I make a lot of playlists.
| And I use the radio feature all the time. Click on the ellipses
| next to any song, artist, or album and you can "Go to radio" and
| Spotify will spin off a playlist of related music. I'm
| continually discovering new things that way. My Discover Weekly
| and Release Radar playlists are always full of great stuff.
| ascorbic wrote:
| I also find it strange. I find the algorithm incredibly good. I
| did link it with iTunes back in the day, so it started off
| knowing what I like, and I always Like tracks when I like them.
| Now I often find myself pressing like on most tracks on
| Discover Weekly because it's so good at recommending things
| I'll enjoy, and quite a lot in Daily Mix and Artist Radio too.
| hkon wrote:
| Yes, same, I enjoyed the weekly recommendations for about a
| year, each week being recommended some songs which remain
| favorites. But the algorithmic recommendations then got heavily
| skewed towards Finnish rap music. Which made the
| recommendations garbage. The convergence towards Finnish rap is
| not uncommon on Spotify.
| oriolid wrote:
| I've never had the problem with Finnish rap, but at one point
| the discover weekly was full of death metal. Also, for some
| reason they pushed really hard Ricky's Hand by Fad Gadget
| (awful, but at the time they had a well hidden ban button),
| Swamp Thing by Chameleons (kind of OK, but don't they have
| other songs?) and Love Will Save You by Swans (kind of OK,
| but do have long discography so why always that one song?)
| emerged wrote:
| It's really good for me. But I had a large catalog of mp3
| accumulated over the years and then manually followed a ton of
| those artists and liked their tracks.
|
| Good recommendations obviously require good data. You sort of
| get what you put in to an extent.
| 3np wrote:
| I've been stuck in the same local optimum for years, getting
| the same songs and artists in the same genres (that I do and
| did like, but it's gotten old now)
| nikanj wrote:
| Spotify's recommendation algorithm comes with a healthy pinch
| of Payola. "Hey you've been listening exclusively to chiptunes
| and power metal from the 80s. Here's a new single from
| $local_mumble_rapper you might love!"
|
| And you can't dislike the recommendation, so next week the
| algorithm is going to go "Oohh last week he played some mumble
| rap, let's give him a little bit more of it!"
| lwkl wrote:
| If you go to the artists page you can open a menu right next
| to to ,,follow" button and select an option to not play any
| song from this artist.
|
| I remember this being easier to find. I guess Spotify might
| have changed it.
| darthrupert wrote:
| Agreed. A lot is wrong about Spotify, but the recommendations
| are superb.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _I 'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's
| recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure
| tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover
| new music._
|
| I too have "eclectic, obscure" tastes and I couldn't get
| anything from the recommendation algorithm and canceled after a
| month. I don't remember the thing recommending anything that
| seemed _more_ obscure than what I searched for. And I made
| playlists.
|
| But seriously, some people's tastes are served by Spotify and
| some find it frustrating. It would be nice if those who don't
| get immediate satisfaction had a more sophisticated approach
| available. My hunch is the company would prefer less customers
| and more control.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| To be fair, the recommendations are based on what you
| listened to lately in addition to what you've listened to in
| the past. A month probably wasn't long enough - it isn't
| really an immediate satisfaction thing when you have off-
| center tastes in music. If 70% of folks like popular music,
| that's the easiest thing to recommend.
|
| They might want a bit more control, I don't know, but I very
| highly doubt fewer customers is the goal. If they wanted
| fewer, they could just pull the free model completely. I'd
| guess piracy would increase and they'd get blamed, but I
| don't know.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _To be fair, the recommendations are based on what you
| listened to lately in addition to what you 've listened to
| in the past_
|
| So each day when my mood changes, I'm suppose start
| searching for a bunch of tunes and after an hour, I get
| what I want?
|
| _If 70% of folks like popular music, that 's the easiest
| thing to recommend._
|
| "Brilliant AI" ... turns into just top40 radio and victory
| is proclaimed.
|
| _They might want a bit more control, I don 't know, but I
| very highly doubt fewer customers is the goal_
|
| This is what I said with a slightly different spin -
| they're willing to trade control for customers. Whenever
| companies engage in annoying or abusive policies that drive
| away customers, it's not that they don't want customers in
| the abstract, it's that they prefer control and profit
| margins over customers.
| xvector wrote:
| It definitely took a couple of months before Spotify honed in
| on my tastes, but it was definitely worth the wait.
| hk__2 wrote:
| The radio feature is awesome to discover new music. You can
| make a short playlist of a few songs you like, and start a
| radio from that. You can later tweak the playlist to change
| what you get in the radio while it's playing.
| feffe wrote:
| I did find it to be extremely poor but once I started liking
| individual songs, not whole albums it does better. Still, I'm
| not sure it uses other listening habits to feed the engine such
| as:
|
| - Early skipping a song from a generated play list (-1). -
| Repeat playing the same song from a generated play list (+1)
| 0898 wrote:
| Discover Weekly is remarkably good at suggesting new music. But
| I'm surprised at how few of my friends use it. It doesn't seem to
| be promoted prominently now.
|
| It's a bit like how Steve Jobs proudly demoed Expose in Mac OS X
| 10.3, but then subsequent versions of the operating system
| progressively hid it - to the point almost no Mac user knows it
| exists.
| Yuioup wrote:
| Yeah if I could dislike Coldplay a million times I would.
| [deleted]
| HKH2 wrote:
| A 'don't play any of [artist]' feature would be very effective,
| so they will never implement it.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| You can do this if a song is on release radar or discover
| weekly
| dfdz wrote:
| I have seen this article before. The author are so close to
| understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button
|
| >To dislike a song is easy - to like one, you have to actually
| invest time in it.
|
| Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the
| user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the
| dislike button.
|
| In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult:
| there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a
| song and the user not paying attention (in that case the user
| will provide no input whether they like the song or not.)
| sethgecko wrote:
| > there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user
| enjoying a song and the user not paying attention
|
| There is a way to do this, the signal is adding the song to
| your favourites or a playlist
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| There are 3 artists that Spotify continually play to me and I
| preemptively will fast forward them even during the crossover
| play because I dislike them so much. I've submitted requests
| before to have a "don't play me this artist" feature. I don't
| know why this is so hard for them.
| petre wrote:
| Shouldn't they have at least have a report as inapropriate
| content button? So my mom could then report Cradle of Filth.
| prepend wrote:
| Probably because Spotify takes payment from artists to play
| their songs. Promoting before a new album, etc.
|
| If they let you block artists then this is less money for
| them.
| oceanghost wrote:
| Youtube for me, fixates on a couple of videos-- as in it
| recommends them every single time I use it-- one is a Marques
| Brown retrospective on the Gameboy, and one is the TYT (news
| outlet), story about a woman who had her face bitten off by
| an ape and is at least 8 years old.
|
| I don't know why these show up in my recommendations every
| single day. I will never watch them.
| graftak wrote:
| With YouTube you can mark them as 'not interested' and
| poof, they're gone.
| oceanghost wrote:
| I mostly use the YouTube app on my google TV which is
| notoriously... behind the times. I will look for that
| thank you!
| Ageodene wrote:
| Deezer have that option. When you're listening to something
| you don't like you can click on a little frowny face, then
| they will ask you if you want to never hear this song again
| or the artist. It's neat.
| oriolid wrote:
| Skip could also mean "I like this song, but I want to hear
| something different at the moment".
| Talanes wrote:
| Sometimes it even means "I love this song, but I'm trying to
| listen to something new."
| verve_rat wrote:
| But there is a difference between "I don't feel like this now"
| and "I hate this" that skipping a track doesn't capture.
| PeterisP wrote:
| That difference is easily captured by the cases where you
| don't skip that track. If you have listened to a track two
| times and on the third case skip it, then that's "I don't
| feel like this now"; if you have been offered that track
| twice and skipped it both times immediately, then you
| probably hate this.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I often leave my computer playing music, and step away for
| 15+ minutes to have a conversation. So "you have listened
| to a track two times" may be a false indication of "like".
| owlmirror wrote:
| Or I just am not in the mood again. If I do not like
| something I want a way to tell the engine that and not be
| afraid of skipping my favorite songs because I want to
| listen to them at another time. I think alogrithms are
| great but feel really frustrated and helpless because it
| somehow became impossible to explicilty give it signals or
| tweak it. It's like living together with someone who always
| tries to guess your needs but you are not allowed to talk
| to them. That's just a broken system.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Surely they have some context as to what "now" means?
|
| I read that YouTube Music recommends different music
| depending on time of day, whether I'm at work / home / in the
| car, and even takes the weather into account. I'd be
| surprised if Spotify didn't have some context awareness as
| well.
| oriolid wrote:
| I haven't noticed that Spotify would do anything like that.
| Instead they're pushing their podcasts and curated
| playlists. To be honest, I've thought that they're more
| like banner ads on websites rather an attempt at custom
| recommendation.
| smrq wrote:
| They can't possibly have sufficient context.
|
| I recently got super into the band Squid. But I hated them
| the first time I heard them. It was because I was depressed
| and looking for more music like Black Midi-- Black Country
| New Road came up and was perfect. Squid came up and made me
| want to punch my speakers.
|
| If they have enough data to predict my mood to that extent
| then I would like to hire them as my therapist.
| nimonian wrote:
| Same! Started with Squid and Spotify took me to Black
| Midi, Yard Act, Dry Cleaning, all of whom I'd skipped in
| the past because I just didn't get it, now I'm obsessed.
| Some music just defies understanding on a first lesson.
| jdsully wrote:
| Sometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or
| genre. A skip doesn't imply I'd never want to hear a song
| again.
| Socketier wrote:
| It would be nice if when you skipped a song it would do a
| soft pop up or something to ask why you skipped it. You could
| ignore it most of the time but if you felt strongly about the
| recommendation then you could at least vent your frustration
| on the "I don't like this song" button.
|
| I think the main issue here is, is that users feel a bit
| powerless to influence the algorithm with thier dislikes as
| much as thier likes. Even though a song skip may be
| functionally similar to the dislike button, the user has no
| "haptic feedback", for lack of better term, when they really
| feel the need to have their negative opinion on the song
| heard by the algorithm.
|
| I think most people's gripes with the nature of these
| recommendation algorithms deciding things, centre around the
| feeling that the algorithm doesn't listen to them and their
| opinion as much as it obeys other overriding trends. Giving
| them tangible and tactile options to deliver their opinions
| in hard and fast way gives them some more peace of mind that
| the algorithm is working for them, and not for some other
| entity.
| charcircuit wrote:
| A song you always want to listen to is better than one you
| only want to listen to sometimes.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's far more complicated than that.
|
| Some songs have extremely long shelf life and others are
| extremely short. For instance, an "adult contemporary"
| station could probably get away with playing Elton John's
| "Tiny Dancer", a 49-year old song, without anyone thinking
| anything is weird.
|
| More popular songs of that year such as those by Roberta
| Flack or Gilbert O'Sullivan would not get the same non-
| reaction
|
| Some songs have even longer shelf life that are associated
| with real world things like birthdays, holidays, seasons,
| etc. It's pretty common to hear a set of Christmas music
| that was literally recorded during WW2 with everyone's
| approval.
|
| Some songs grow on people, others grow tired quickly. The
| classic example is novelty songs that specify a dance such
| as the cover of The Birdie Song by The Tweets or Black
| Lace's Agadoo, which reached impressive popularity and then
| were promptly forgotten forever. Ones that you may be
| familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena, probably gave
| you a headache just thinking about it.
|
| But not all. Chubby Checker's "The Twist", a song in this
| category of instructional dance pop music, has escaped the
| ban hammer of time.
|
| But overall the pattern of memory holing proscribed dance
| songs is robust, even for songs that developed a dance
| without actually calling it out, such as "Achy Beaky
| Heart".
|
| Also there's no asymptotic drop after release date. Some
| songs that are popular now and symbolic of an era weren't
| as popular when they were new and some have second lives
| when featured in say a television show, video game, or
| covered by a more contemporary artist. Every few years a
| new version of Gershwin's "Summertime" seems to come out
| followed by renewed interest in previous versions by people
| like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald.
| Should Ella Fitzgerald albums be recommended to people for
| the next 18 months now? Probably not the right way to
| interpret those results.
|
| There's an exogenous contextual reason for such things and
| those have to be accommodated for
|
| It's completely non-trivial and a simple model of skips and
| likes without sophistication behind it will dramatically
| fail to be anything other than an irritation
| asveikau wrote:
| > Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick
| Martin's Macarena
|
| It was done by a group from Seville. Los del rio. Very
| southern Spanish accent which is quite different from
| Ricky Martin.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Gosh you are correct on that. My apologies. I don't know
| why I associated the two, I try to be pretty good on this
| stuff.
|
| I'll need to review 90s Latin pop again. Sorry about
| that.
| petre wrote:
| You should see the video: two elderly men and some
| underage looking dancers. Nothing like Ricky Martin.
| crucialfelix wrote:
| It can also just mean that I've heard it too many times. Give
| me something fresh, a hit of dopamine please
| ascorbic wrote:
| I'm sure they can take that into account.
| dfdz wrote:
| I suspect that this same effect is close to the reason so
| many services removed the dislike button: humans are
| emotional and were, in some cases, disliking songs which they
| were not in the mood for, but would like at another time.
|
| As a result, the signal coming from the dislike button was
| not very useful, and just added unnecessary complexity.
| Instead, the algorithm can present the user a fixed song in
| different settings to see if they continue to skip it. A nice
| result is that the user doesn't have the negative reaction
| "hey I disliked this song why are you presenting it to me
| again"
| xerox13ster wrote:
| I frequently will find one of their auto-mixes I like, and
| listen to it for a while throughout the day skipping songs
| I don't like or I'm not in the mood for. Then when I go
| back the next day, even if I didn't restart the mix, it has
| updated, and what plays isn't the stuff I liked and
| repeated. It was the stuff they have financial incentive to
| get plays on that I skipped the day before and "might be in
| the mood for now".
|
| This alone drove me back to my local music library.
|
| I would rather dislike a song and have it recommended in a
| "How about now" playlist to determine if I actually hate it
| or if it was a mood in the moment.
| bombcar wrote:
| I used to track "skip counts" in iTunes and would review
| the most skipped songs every month or so and determine if
| they needed to be reduced in star count.
| homami wrote:
| Deezer has added a "don't recommend this song again" button. I
| used a couple of times only but I feel that my recommendations
| have been indeed improved.
|
| Before, I had to skip the songs that I did not like, and Deezer
| was keep putting them back in my 'Flow' a few days later. That
| was pretty annoying.
| didibus wrote:
| No, I often have fear of skipping because I think it might
| teach the algos I don't like it, when it's just not what I want
| to listen to now.
|
| Ideally, they should let me like, dislike, skip, hate,
| completely block artists, and allow me to like multiple times,
| to teach them the ones I like over and over from the ones I
| like a little.
| dfdz wrote:
| > I often have fear of skipping because I think it might
| teach the algos I don't like it
|
| So basically Spotify is performing reinforcement learning on
| you-- beautiful!
| VortexDream wrote:
| Beautiful? No, fucking awful. How can you consider this a
| good thing when there's no way to teach the service what
| you want to listen to and when?
| golergka wrote:
| One problem that I have with Spotify is just how often does it
| repeat songs. Yes, I liked it, I still do, but may be don't play
| it the times in one week? How do I communicate this and get to
| discover new music instead?
| greggman3 wrote:
| I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who
| proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted
| to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully
| not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your
| history
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we...
|
| Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never
| done a good job for me recommending music, ever
| MKTSPCLST wrote:
| Spotify used to have a private listening feature for people to
| play their music, but I've also deleted it so IDK
| dehrmann wrote:
| Private listening is still there.
| krn wrote:
| > I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who
| proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account.
|
| There should be an Incognito mode on every music streaming
| service for this reason.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I made the mistake of letting my daughter watch nursery
| rhymes on YouTube a few times. Guess what happened to my
| YouTube Music....
| jessriedel wrote:
| FYI, Google gives you some decent tools for managing your
| YouTube watch history. You can search by date or title, and
| you can also turn on auto-delete.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Spotify has an incognito mode.
|
| https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/
| onkoe wrote:
| It hardly matters now, but before you do anything with a guest,
| you can start a private session to make sure their history is
| ignored. Still a very weird feature to omit; I'd reckon that
| most people would use history deletion at some point
| vgrafe wrote:
| I use this a lot when playing music for my kid, but
| unfortunately the feature is clunky: weird path to find it,
| self-auto-disable much later but with the song still loaded.
| Hopefully this changes someday.
| [deleted]
| sam_bristow wrote:
| I'm in a similar situation at the moment. Somehow Spotify has
| decided that I listened to a bunch of Hindu music a couple of
| months ago and now over 50% of my recommended playlists and
| podcasts are in that genre.
|
| Their refusal to let you delete history is just puzzling.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Sounds like your account was stolen and sold for premium
| status, possibly.
| sam_bristow wrote:
| I think more likely is I searched for something, hit the
| wrong result, then got distracted while it was autoplaying
| through related artists for a few hours.
| jcims wrote:
| I just checked in to an airbnb and someone left their google
| account signed in to the youtube app on the TV. The
| temptation to spike the recommender with something is very
| strong. :)
| blackoil wrote:
| You mean Hindu religious/fusion music or Indian music?
| sam_bristow wrote:
| It seems to be a bit of a mix. Some is definitely religious
| Hindu music, other bits seem to be more broadly
| Indian/Bollywood.
|
| As is the curse of modern technology I don't want to
| interact with it at all in case the algorithm decides I'm
| into it and undoes my work retraining my preferences.
| andai wrote:
| My account got hacked for a few weeks while I was on holiday,
| and it took literally years for my recommendations to recover.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Account deleted. I know I 'm not the norm but Spotify has
| never done a good job for me recommending music, ever._
|
| Last.fm has always been great for recommendations.
| milofeynman wrote:
| I have a similar problem where I play Disney music/movie music
| in the car when I drive my kid to school. Every time I have to
| go find "private mode" deep in the settings. Typically I just
| forget. I am primarily a discover weekly and release radar
| user, so it's definitely frustrating. They have basically done
| almost nothing positive for users in years in terms of UX. They
| tried to git rid of dislike, but brought it back because it
| ruins those suggestion playlists, when you can't hide awful
| songs.
| justinc8687 wrote:
| If you contact their support, they can probably help you. My
| account got hacked a while back and I started getting all sorts
| of weird recommendations. I contacted their support and they
| were basically able to reset it to an arbitrary date in the
| past, thus restoring it. In UI would obviously be better, but
| FYI, this is an option...
| npteljes wrote:
| Regarding recommendations, Mixcloud's approach worked for me
| best. Starting from a genre, label or song, it lists popular
| mixes that often have been selected by DJs, radio presenters,
| curators etc. And when I find someone with a similar taste, their
| suggestions are wonderful. And often I find that songs work
| better in the context of the mixtape, than standing alone. But of
| course this depends on the type of music.
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| I don't use the like button. Works for me. I think it picks up on
| me adding to playlists or skipping.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > But Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do
| they still not let you vote down a song?
|
| Sorry, but what's the fucking answer?
|
| Yes, children know about dislike buttons. Why does Spotify
| (Google says worth $10-$66 billion) not have one?
|
| It's certainly not because the algorithm is hard.
|
| So, once they can answer that question perhaps they might be able
| to improve things?
|
| Or is academia officially just a citation farm now? Does HN think
| a multi-billion dollar company is to stupid to think up and
| implement a dislike buttons because that's the game now, we think
| we are smarter than them on nonsense criteria?
|
| Clearly Spotify will have looked at Dislike from the start, will
| have looked at Dislike from inference (Users actions, like skip
| or lower volume might imply Dislike) from the start, will have
| looked at interactions (what was played previous, is it their
| first time hearing it) around Dislike from the start and rehashed
| this 100's of times using highly intelligent, well trained
| mathematicians and whoever else's.
| nvr219 wrote:
| I feel like I'm the only one that doesn't really care about
| recommendation engines because I still don't use them. I get
| music recommendations from friends or music journalism the way I
| did pre-Pandora and it still works for me. Maybe I'm missing out
| on some sick bands though.
| dgellow wrote:
| I expect to be an outlier here, I also never use recommendation
| because I listen to the same stuff since 15+ years, and I
| couldn't be happier :)
|
| Elder Scrolls and Castlevania OSTs (Symphony of the Night and
| Super Castlevania mostly) represent at least 90% of what I
| listened to during the past decade. The other 10% is Shpongle
| and other soundtrack from games I enjoyed.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| At the risk of wildly upheaving your music listening habits
| -- give the Starbound soundtrack a try. I like the
| soundtracks you enjoy a lot and Starbound definitely makes my
| heavy rotation.
|
| And Stardew Valley, but that has the addedcool factor of
| being made entirely by one guy.
| refracture wrote:
| I feel you. I haven't paid heed to a single recommendation
| Spotify has ever given me; Most of the bands I've discovered in
| the last several years were by way of Reddit or word of mouth.
| MutableLambda wrote:
| I used to use Pandora (even in Canada with VPN), but the sound
| quality deteriorated for some reason and player options aren't so
| great. Even with a paid account it sounds worse than Spotify and
| library is not that huge compared to Spotify.
|
| But back in a day in was an example of a perfect service, where
| you could just say what music features you like and it would play
| everything close to it, expanding the boundaries. You could also
| dislike songs and like them (which made channels really really
| convenient). I wish Spotify could do something like that.
| beezischillin wrote:
| Most platforms should have easily accessible "don't show me this"
| or "show more of this" buttons on their home page where most of
| the algorithmically generated results are shown.
|
| On YouTube it's hidden behind menus and on Facebook it's also
| kind of a chore to try to curate stuff.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Back when lastfm still had a radio it had a ban button and that
| was essential (think it got removed after getting bought)
| splintercell wrote:
| I think the main issue is that sometimes you just don't want the
| song but other songs like that are fine, and other times you
| don't want that song or any song like it. - Don't play this song
| again but others like this are fine
|
| - Don't play songs like this again
| zizee wrote:
| I'd like something similar for Netflix. Let me click a "never
| show me this again" button. It would unclutter the interface so
| quickly.
|
| I suspect the reason we'll never see such a feature is because it
| would be quite revealing how little content Netflix has that is
| of interest to any one person, and how much filler they have.
| bombcar wrote:
| I also suspect that these companies have tuned the algorithms
| to emphasize content that is cheaper for them to play.
| juanitolol wrote:
| Spotify does have a dislike button on their recommendation
| playlists and also, Spotify's recommendations engine is by far
| the best that have ever been on the market. It managed to
| discover new artists that I'd have never found unless I lost
| several dozen hours on Discogs. The important part is to train
| recommendation playlist accordingly.
| ipaddr wrote:
| For us oldtimers what is the best way to create a personalized
| spotify clone from your mp3s? Something to simulation the spotify
| experience or something to simulate a pandora clone?
| lanevorockz wrote:
| Some smells fishy about the criticism of podcasts on spotify.
| Stop lobbying against features... it's regressive and just open
| doors for competitors.
| blondin wrote:
| i am actually impressed to see this come out cornell. i tend to
| see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic. they greatly
| reduce why a user would dislike something.
|
| i am annoyed at youtube only allowing me to choose from "i didn't
| like it" or "i have already watched it" for example. i have
| thousands of other reasons.
|
| that's why i don't use dislike buttons.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| > i tend to see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic.
|
| Same here. I'm still a big fan of star ratings in iTunes,
| though I'm not sure if they do anything or influence playback.
| I have a pretty eclectic taste in music and only want to hear
| certain songs once in a while and I give those songs get three
| stars. (Sorry Donnie Iris if you are reading this.)
| 1_player wrote:
| A dislike button is too simplistic, but having no way to
| dislike something is extremely bad user experience. How do you
| train a recommendation engine without a negative signal?
|
| Sometimes I dislike something and I don't want it around
| anymore. Which is the reason I've migrated to Youtube Music,
| which is an inferior product, but has a dislike button.
| Noam-grin wrote:
| SO Cool
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I seem to recall Spotify did at one time have a dislike button.
| They removed it over the course of several UI iterations that
| renamed it, moved it to a menu, then the option vanished
| altogether. The closest thing they have now is "don't play this
| artist."
|
| Apple Music still doesn't compare well with Spotify, but at least
| there's a "play less music like this" menu item available.
|
| Edit: after reading more comments here - I definitely want
| options that include "dislike", "not in the mood", "you're
| playing this to much", "this does not belong on this 'radio
| station'" -because I like the music, I just want it categorized
| correctly.
| young_unixer wrote:
| Mi problema con Spotify es que cuando le hackeo la cuenta a un
| gringo y escucho mi musica, a este le molestan las
| recomendaciones latinas y despues de un tiempo deja de pagar la
| cuenta.
| schmorptron wrote:
| hue hue hue hue
| vadfa wrote:
| How do you even handle this? You can't both be listening music
| at the same time. Are you sure the gringo doesn't stop paying
| because he keeps having his playback stopped?
| young_unixer wrote:
| It was a joke referencing another comment in this thread, but
| it got flagged, so it was probably coinsidered bad taste.
| approxim8ion wrote:
| YouTube music has both like and dislike buttons. I don't use them
| as much as I should, but I'd be interested in the results.
| judge2020 wrote:
| YT Music works pretty well for me, using the dislike/like
| buttons for when I know what I think about the song and just
| skipping when i'm just not in the mood for that song.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Last.FM could have been great. Back in 2005 (17 years ago!!) it
| had a veritable encyclopedia of artists, albums and tracks, a
| decent recommendations system, "neighborhoods" that matched you
| with other users who listened to similar artists (and they even
| told you what you had in common so you other ignore users whose
| 12 year old also likes the Barbie song). You could add specific
| users to a 'Friends' section. You could look at their music
| libraries. Last.FM invented scrobbling (AFAIK)... Once upon a
| time my wife and I both paid them a monthly subscription for ad-
| free music. You couldn't play whatever you liked, because of the
| licensing model - instead you could pick a "radio station" based
| on your neighborhood, a specific neighbor, your likes, a band, a
| genre or even your whole library (ie: everything you ever
| listened to). It was really great for discovering new music, had
| a great interface, and had built-in love/ban buttons. Right when
| the world was about to lose its shit over the inferior Spotify,
| Last.FM absolutely fucked up. Instead of running a stable
| infrastructure and licensing music for on-demand streaming like
| Spotify did, they mismanaged their infrastructure, making music
| borderline unplayable. They had site outages. They broke their
| API with backward-incompatible changes. Once they proved beyond
| doubt that they couldn't run the streaming infrastructure, they
| gave up trying simply added a Spotify play button. And there went
| the only reason to give Last.FM your money, because now you had
| to pay Spotify anyway. Pathetic. A wasted opportunity. If I could
| have the Last.FM from a decade and a half ago with on-demand
| music and stable infrastructure I'd take it over any other
| service available right now.
| spondyl wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that Spotify used to
| have explicit upvote and downvote buttons like 5 years ago?
|
| I assume they decided they could infer the same metrics from
| users skipping tracks for example
| mey wrote:
| The time invested in my Pandora stations keep me on that
| platform. I actually really hate that they recently removed the
| downvote buttons in the Android auto interface.
| unglaublich wrote:
| I listen to some background noise during the night when sleeping
| (rain, wind, that kind of stuff)... now, any mix, recommendation
| and whatnot consists of "soothing noise; relaxing Japanese
| traditional music; sounds of the beach" etc.
| jerhewet wrote:
| A "dislike" button would be helpful, but what I really want is a
| "I already own this album / track, and your recommendation is
| completely spot-on" button.
|
| You recommended this to me, and I agree 100% with your
| recommendation. Now _that_ would be brilliant.
| unstatedAnswers wrote:
| Sure, it would be useful... if users used it.
|
| My guess is they don't. Did you use the like/dislike buttons they
| tested on Spotify radio? I didn't, too much effort.
|
| They probably get more signal from the skip button
| short12 wrote:
| I've used it extensively on Pandora for probably a decade now
| and it makes a station go from great to spectacular
| mey wrote:
| It blows my mind that some of my Pandora stations are more
| than a decade old and still listened to regularly.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| I would use it, and dont understand why its only avaiable in
| Spotify Radio and not everywhere. I think my dislike of a song
| in an album can still be utilized to refine my suggestions.
|
| Whats worse, there was a song that was constantly playing after
| my playlist ended. No matter how many times I marked the song
| as Dislike, it was always in first of 5 songs that play when
| playlist finished. Made sure the song appeared nowhere in my
| playlists (had to manually search in each), and neither did the
| artist. After contacting support and jumping trough few
| "restart app" styled suggestion, I was suggested to mark the
| artist as "never play this artist". This surprised me, as I
| never seen that option before. And then I understood why: its
| only in mobile version. You cant solve it on PC.
|
| Bleh
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Oh happy days :) Spotify recommendations - at least for me - are
| generally useless. It feels like "here are some palatable
| suggestions. You might not actually like them but we're confident
| they're inoffensive (in a not at all interesting sort of way)."
| Mind you my range of musical styles is wide. But I went 2 or 3
| weeks listening to Daily Mixes and heard nothing at all worthy of
| my attention.
|
| I hope Google does similar with YouTube. Why does it keep
| suggesting things I've scrolled past 5 or 10 times?
| dmitriid wrote:
| You know what would improve _any_ recommendation system?
|
| A button that says (and does) "wipe my recommendation profile
| clean, and start learning recommendations from scratch".
| snthd wrote:
| Listenbrainz[0] looks like an interesting project for building
| better (or at least more open) recommendation systems[1].
|
| [0] https://listenbrainz.org
|
| [1] https://blog.metabrainz.org/2020/12/24/playlists-and-
| persona...
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Fuck Spotify's recommendations. What counts are recommendations
| from people instead of algorithms. Intent is everything with
| making a recommendation. If someone I know recommends me x
| because y, then I know it'll be at least interesting, if not
| great.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| So basically they're developing a product marketed to streaming
| platforms to identify what's "more attractive" to consumers. The
| algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and
| engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user).
|
| That's exactly why I'm unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I'm
| being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what's currently in
| vogue, and not just artistically but politically, with playlists
| like this-gender-race supporting this-cause. I actually just want
| to listen to music.
|
| I still use it but stumble my way through looking at related
| artists while avoiding playlists and recommendations.
| rumblerock wrote:
| On top of that, if you listen to a wide range of genres the
| attempt to shoehorn your history into 6 Daily Mixes yields some
| comical results. Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana.
|
| Give me a home screen with 12 or more Daily Mixes that segment
| my listening behavior at a finer resolution, and I'd be a lot
| happier with the service.
|
| I understand why all the other playlists exist, but I generally
| have an idea of exactly what I'm trying to listen to, so these
| low effort curated playlists are pretty useless for my
| listening style.
| stevewillows wrote:
| I've considered getting a spotify family account, using
| separate accounts for major genres and one for browsing. I
| have a browsing profile for Netflix so I can freely explore
| without messing up the suggestions.
|
| For me, I listen to a lot of 40s, 50 - 60s lounge / exotica,
| early to mid 90s hip hop, 80s metal, and the standard indie
| stuff... then I have a bunch of chillwave and synthwave stuff
| that throws another wrench in the mix. The daily mixes I get
| are a total mess, much like yours.
|
| The genre-specific mixes they make are pretty decent, but
| discovery is low.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I use my family account for other uses too.
|
| I have a separate account just for Amazon Echo because I
| don't want my kid's selections to influence my main account
| suggestions.
|
| I also have my own account for the car, where explicit
| songs are disallowed. This allows me to listen to the music
| I like, but it avoid explicit songs for when my kids are in
| the car and that setting doesn't affect my main account.
| stevewillows wrote:
| it's crazy that we need to jump through hoops. these
| providers should allow an opt out for specific devices or
| at least the ability to apply context.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I like the variety of them so I'm happy to have them mix
| genres like that, except they're too repetitive.
| leppr wrote:
| Then you can simply find a song that matches what you're
| exactly wanting to listen to and start the "song radio" from
| there. For me the problem is exactly the contrary, I can't
| find enough diversity in the daily mixes, it's mostly all
| songs I've either explicitly "liked" or heard a couple times
| before.
| rumblerock wrote:
| Diversity in daily mixes is an issue for sure. I do use the
| song radio feature but find it's hit or miss - they usually
| start off strong, but seem to lose the thread at a certain
| point.
|
| It's a fine balance between existing liked songs and
| expanding within sub-genres, but I have at least noticed
| the recommendations improving over the past few years.
|
| I suspect it would help to port over my entire pre-Spotify
| music library into Spotify to provide a bit more data, my
| current library is all post-Spotify so it fails to capture
| the breadth of my music taste. I've just never gotten
| around to it.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana.
|
| What's inherently comical about this?
|
| One of my least favorite experiences is having a radio
| station based on a song and getting nothing but songs that
| sound just like it.
|
| Unless you have only played 90s grunge or 70s soft rock I'm
| not sure why this juxtaposition is not considered a feature.
| Arainach wrote:
| That example might be OK, but my daily mixes include "Weird
| Al, Nerdcore Comedy, and also Radiohead" and "60s/70s/80s
| Rock and also Broadway Show Tunes". The transitions are
| very bizarre.
| rumblerock wrote:
| I made the example up, but this is a better example of
| the phenomenon I was getting at.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| My recent favorite was an auto generated "Soul playlist."
| It had some super old school R&B tunes...then Dark Souls
| boss battle music.
| [deleted]
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Well for me at least, I listen to music depending on mood.
| It's not generally that I dislike mixing, quite the
| opposite actually. But when I'm in the mood for metalcore,
| I'm not in the mood for happy hardcore. And when I'm
| looking for something quick, I don't want a slow song mixed
| in.
|
| I like the idea of mixing genres, but Spotify seems to
| totally miss on what aspects I want mixed.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| If you are listening to these songs back to back, you
| aren't getting the value either one offers.
|
| It's like watching a movie that's half Fred Astaire and
| half Freddy Kreuger.
| laumars wrote:
| I agree. I love the wider scope of Spotify's mixes. If I
| wanted a narrow scope then I'd just have created the
| playlist myself like the old days (or just thrown an album
| on). The reason I use Spotify mixes is for a variety within
| an approximate mood. And I've discovered so many good news
| tunes and artists through their mixes.
|
| That all said, I do wish I could turn off their podcast
| recommendations. I never listen to podcasts and worse yet
| they keep shoving that same comedians is absolutely hate
| (and there aren't many comedians I dislike; which just goes
| to show how far off the mark their podcast recommendations
| are)
| simmo9000 wrote:
| Or even search for someone else's playlist!
|
| Not happy about being forced ads though (on some
| podcasts)... I thought the idea of paying monthly was the
| value exchange for the content.
| saghm wrote:
| The local classic rock radio station I listened to growing
| up has continued to slowly expand what they consider
| "classic"; whenever I go back home, it's always interesting
| to hear stuff like grunge and some metal (like certain
| Metallica songs). Hearing a Nirvana song right after the
| Doobie Brothers is exactly the type of thing I've probably
| heard before from them!
| ufo wrote:
| And for those that are actually into the sort of thing, I
| recommend Doobie Brothers + Linkin Park:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cXjcKTRWcg
| Strs2FillMyDrms wrote:
| I will never not enjoy the lack of self awareness of the
| ""apolitical"" IT crowd on hacker news, amazing.
|
| There are lots of things to worry and complaint about in
| recommendation algorithms, but the thing that's just too much
| for you (*angry high heel stomp) is "political correctness".
|
| It's better than comedy.
|
| Maybe universities need to diversify their pensum a little bit
| more, because it is becoming somewhat ridicule.
| [deleted]
| tibbar wrote:
| With respect, your comment illustrates the issue - a burden
| to reeducate people by shaping their culture. Music can make
| a statement, sure, but a world where people are force-fed
| curated playlists designed to mold them into some Standard
| Issue set of beliefs, this is a dystopian vision.
| jcims wrote:
| Typically there's another p-word used to describe this.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I think that people bristle at it in the same way that people
| used to bristle at having Christian-normative culture pushed
| on them. Not everyone enjoys cultural imperialism.
| sabellito wrote:
| Sarcasm and belittlement are a terrible way to engage in
| conversation. You seem more interested in aggrandizing
| yourself than to actually make a point or bring some food for
| thought.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Tidal is a pretty good alternative and also has lossless.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I've never used Spotify or any other recommendation service.
| Music is like food: it's far too important too substitute with
| junk. I won't eat Subway, I won't listen to auto-generated
| recommendations. I browse (and support) rateyourmusic.com, I
| use the last.fm API (to find out what my neighbors are
| listening to) and I listen to music for free on YouTube before
| I buy it. I also heavily use tags on my purchased music so I
| can easily put together a playlist matching my mood.
| amelius wrote:
| The problem: you don't want to be DJ-ing at work, where your
| time is better spent on more important things than what music
| you will listen to.
| emodendroket wrote:
| To the contrary, that's precisely what I want to be doing
| at work often enough.
| amelius wrote:
| Heh, between DJ-ing and reading HN, do you find the time
| to do actual work?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, of course, and I doubt my colleagues are putting in
| eight consecutive productive hours every day either. Hard
| to be on all the time.
| tjr225 wrote:
| "More important" :P
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| Disagree with the premise - you don't have to sacrifice
| productivity to put time into finding good music. For one,
| you don't have to do your music research during working
| hours. But even if you do, it doesn't mean you're trading
| off productivity in order to do it.
| andreilys wrote:
| _you don't have to do your music research during working
| hours. But even if you do, it doesn't mean you're trading
| off productivity in order to do it._
|
| Trying to find music when you could be focusing is by
| definition, trading off productivity.
|
| I'd rather have an algorithm dictate what songs I want to
| listen to (in order to focus) than spend an hour wading
| through junk to find something i like before I start
| coding.
| tjr225 wrote:
| And I would rather not. Obviously plenty of music
| enthusiasts here are disappointed with the results the
| algorithms come up with!
| wara23arish wrote:
| 100%
|
| I remember seeing a promoted playlist about empowering women
| voices (this is music)
|
| I was so confused. In literally most of the world, this isn't
| even a point of contention.
| snthd wrote:
| They're probably trying to offset the guilt they feel from
| payola[0].
|
| https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-
| in...
| leppr wrote:
| If the product is free, you're the product. And if the
| product is paid, you're also the product.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If the product uses your data as AI inputs you are the
| prodict.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| "In honor of the revolution, it's half-off at the Gap"
| schmorptron wrote:
| Yeah, this is the exact reason I switched to Apple Music even
| though I'm on Android, since their playlists (for the most
| part) seem to actually be made based on what they think will be
| interesting for the listeners, not what they got paid to
| promote. I might be wrong though and just getting played.
| j56no wrote:
| similar experience here, after 12 years with spotify I had
| enough of the confusing UI and poor recommendations. They
| literally know all the music I like and still I don't
| discover enough new music as I did just listening to the car
| radio. Bought into Apple One and will see how that goes, I
| just need to migrate some playlists.
| ranieuwe wrote:
| Did the migration last night with tune my music[1] and it
| worked flawlessly. Also, they didn't want yet another
| account to spam mail me for months.
|
| [1] https://www.tunemymusic.com/
| fermentation wrote:
| whoa thanks for the heads-up! I've always wanted to try
| other platforms but I've thought it impossible since I
| have so much data in Spotify. Any gotchas here?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I use Apple Music because it works well with the rest of the
| ecosystem. But the official playlists just seem to resurface
| what's already popular, at least for dance, electronic and
| hip-hop. Whereas Spotify introduced me to new music. Maybe it
| depends on what genres you listen to?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I think it is sad that there isn't a way to recognize the
| development of competence in music listening-- with an
| achievement motivation. Like, mastering genres with a music
| collection. Aesthetic pleasure in pleasant recommendations
| without any principles makes me feel vacant after a time.
| krono wrote:
| Anything that can be exploited by the user for self-exploration
| and discovery is being removed - for the purpose of serving
| content that generates more revenue, I assume.. At first it was
| subtle, but the gloves came off with the recent UI overhaul.
|
| Playlist search result page is just an endless grid of images
| and truncated names. For the playlist duration, description,
| number of songs, follower count, etc. you have to actually open
| each individual playlist. Good luck finding what you were
| looking for.
|
| More and more Spotify-fabricated content is being pushed. Most
| of which contains the same limited selection of songs that
| Spotify keeps feeding you over and over anyway.
|
| Podcasts aren't my thing, Spotify wants me to listen to them
| really badly though. Majority of the ones they're suggesting
| I'm not at all interested in, and sometimes some of the
| podcasts they're advertising seem to contain some pretty
| disturbing content. On a sidenote: I don't know who he is, or
| what he does, but I hate Joe Rogan and Spotify is to blame for
| it.
|
| There is a setting hidden under advanced that is supposed to
| make Spotify stop messing with the shuffle functionality. It is
| labeled "Allow smooth transitions between songs in a playlist"
| vague huh, it's also placed directly underneath the song
| crossfade slider. I'm fully convinced that this was done on
| purpose. Also this setting seems to do precisely nothing at
| all, so I'm not sure why they even went through all the effort.
|
| Shuffle is not random. If this is so on purpose, that purpose
| does not involve happy users. Else perhaps their devs are
| afraid of touching some jank script that might be holding it
| together.
|
| Edit:
|
| Almost forgot about the new artist's pages! They used to
| consist of a long list of all songs grouped by album. This was
| far too convenient for us users, so with the redesign they
| simply removed the lists of songs leaving only a grid of
| albums, forcing you to go into each individual album to find a
| specific song and play it play it.
|
| After many complaints they implemented something vaguely
| resembling what we had before, but with such odd UX that it
| must be sabotaged on purpose again. But of course, adding this
| overview back to the artist page was out of the question.
| Instead what they implemented as the only way to access this,
| and I kid you not, is a plain text link in the most random
| place ever.
|
| No one is going to use this feature if they don't know it
| exists. All this just to get a reason for removing it that is
| spinnable. Machiavelli would have been proud.
| wincy wrote:
| What's funny is that I used to love listening to the Joe
| Rogan podcast and hate Spotify just as much, because I tried
| to listen to his podcast and somehow ended up listening to
| about TEN MINUTES of ads and the podcast NEVER started
| playing. I finally uninstalled Spotify and haven't listened
| to his podcast since, sorry. It's mind boggling that Spotify
| could drop the ball so hard, as ostensibly they were trying
| to funnel people like me into their platform, and whiffed in
| an absolutely astounding manner while also alienating people
| like you who already use Spotify.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Get a CD player. It's what I did when I got fed up with
| Spotify.
| psKama wrote:
| That's the exact reason I switched to YouTube Music. I remember
| even about 10 years ago, last.fm's algorithm on bringing songs
| I would enjoy basing on previously listened/liked songs was far
| more accurate than Spotify's today.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I think Youtube Music does a decent job on recommendations
| but its android app is annoying. How does it still not have a
| horizontal screen mode?
| 1_player wrote:
| The iOS and web app are _bad_. And knowing Google, it won't
| get any better anytime soon.
| LegitShady wrote:
| their development team is a goldfish swimming in a bowl
| beside a keyboard, I think
| aeyes wrote:
| Does the algorithm of YouTube Music behave similar to
| standard YouTube? YouTube (not Music) basically always
| recommends the same tracks in the same order and within the
| same genre bubble. It is hard to discover anything new which
| makes me not want to try YouTube Music.
| notatoad wrote:
| This was my experience with YouTube music - no matter what
| genre station I started off with, it eventually settled
| back onto the same small number of currently-trending
| songs. I get much more diverse recommendations from
| Spotify.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| My experience is the algorithm is a bit different. I have
| not been on the platform for long, but my recommendations
| have been great. I've also been listening to music on the
| same youtube account for 10+ years, so I assume they have
| alot of data.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I just switched to youtube music, its leagues better than
| spotify. YouTube music seems to have a pretty solid
| recommendation algorithm, and I frequently find music more in
| tune with my tastes there than on spotify. Honestly, I would
| not mind seeing spotify disappear.
| didibus wrote:
| I'm thinking of going the other way, I just dislike how YT
| Music doesn't have some small feature like saving my queue
| to a playlist. But perhaps I should hold out.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Fwiw, I was shocked how much better YouTube music was than
| Spotify. I turned on the trial on a whim, and now I actually
| miss it (it expired a few days ago).
|
| It was so nice that I'm seriously considering just turning
| off Spotify. It's sort of interesting to analyze why we don't
| --- for me, it's become unconscious habit to reach for
| Spotify and not anything else. Plus a lot of other stuff
| integrates well with it.
|
| (What if... what if we can use both? Mind asplode, it's not a
| decision.)
| taurath wrote:
| YouTube makes recommendations around engagement metrics only
| (1 political video gets you Fox News recommendations for
| years), spotify still gives me plenty of small bands - I
| think if you're listening to very popular music you're
| screwed either ways
| harles wrote:
| I get mostly small bands in Spotify and I worry that
| Spotify is actually bias towards them. I assume the
| royalties are cheaper for smaller bands and that may factor
| into recommendations.
| [deleted]
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I was at a conference the other week and Spotify had a
| Keynote. They talked about the tradeoff between playing
| "diverse songs" and "consistent songs". It is a hard
| problem to solve.
|
| When you start your listening session they try and predict
| how long you are going going listen (based on your past
| history and time of day). If you are probably going to
| listen for a while, they are more risky and might play
| something "different". Playing different stuff is risky
| (short term) because you MIGHT not like it. Playing the
| same stuff is safe (short term) because they know you will
| like it - BUT people will eventually go searching for
| something new, so they have to risk diversity eventually.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| They could just ask. I promise my answers will be more
| accurate than any AI guessing for me.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Exactly. There's no reason the "personlized" Daily Mixes
| can't be built/labeled to indicate "acaccuracy" rate. It
| annoys me when I'm in the mood for new or different -
| which is 60% of the time - and all the new Daily Mixes
| feel like the day / week before.
|
| I'd love a personalized playlist titled "Curveballs" that
| contined things different and/or challenging.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| Funny you say that, because Pandora has that option
| charcircuit wrote:
| People rarely know what they actually want
| ratww wrote:
| Bullshit. What people rarely know is what _some rich tech
| company_ actually want them to want.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Sometimes yes, but a lot of times they actually do know
| what they want if you ask them the right way.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Let me fuck my own shit up please
| foota wrote:
| Youtube music isn't the same as youtube.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| Weird, I switched to Spotify once Google Play Music (or
| whatever silly name it had when Google ate songza) became
| YouTube Music because I found it such a poor experience.
|
| Perhaps I was missing something but the change def did not
| improve the recommendations - it made them drastically worse.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| In my experience, Spotify's recommendations are good for a
| few months, and then stick in a rut at some point for
| reasons I don't understand. So you're probably in that nice
| honeymoon phase where it's actually allowing you to
| discover new things instead of surfacing the same 20
| artists over and over and over again.
| bryan0 wrote:
| For me Spotify was discovering good new music for years
| before getting "stuck" recommending the same artists over
| and over again last year. I do mark them as "I dont like
| this song" but it still will recommend them later. I
| think it's time to reset and start over.
| T00TH3M00N wrote:
| Haha same. I couldn't believe how much better YT Music was.
| There's no going back
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Its funny how much better Googles side show product is.
| Shows that the internal technology is truly advanced and
| capable of swiping away another company at the drop of a
| hat.
| jcims wrote:
| I'm just trying it out now based on the recommendations
| in this thread. When you start it asks you to pick some
| favorite artists. The first few rows were clearly based
| on artists that I've watched recently on YouTube, so it's
| pulling in history (I mean...no surprise).
|
| Then I scrolled down a bit b/c I wanted to give it a
| strong signal of what I liked. I found an artist, clicked
| it, and noticed the recommendations below changed
| immediately afterwards.
|
| So then I scrolled some more (because there were still
| 95% misses), found one I liked, scrolled to see the next
| row then clicked on the artist I liked above to see if it
| indeed changed.
|
| It did. But not only that. I _love_ every artist on the
| following row. Then it quickly diffuses back to noise,
| but holy cow that was a bit of a spine tingler lol.
| batiudrami wrote:
| I just wish I could turn off fucking podcasts. I am a paying
| customer, I have been for years!
|
| I podcast elsewhere, and am never going to switch to Spotify
| for it, just let me turn it off!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > I feel I'm being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on
| what's currently in vogue, and not just artistically but
| politically, with playlists like this-gender-race supporting
| this-cause.
|
| I feel the same way. It's not just music either. I get this
| feeling every time I try to consume anything. Everything is
| just so fake. Like it was made just to push some silly agenda.
|
| "Recommendations" are ads in disguise. I already block them on
| YouTube. Wish I could block them everywhere.
| onion2k wrote:
| _So basically they're developing a product marketed to
| streaming platforms to identify what's "more attractive" to
| consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing
| sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the
| user)._
|
| It's possible that the recommendations are both good for users
| _and_ good for corporate interests. They might not work for
| you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work.
| People listen to them a lot.
|
| I listen to my recommended "Discover" playlists occasionally.
| They're decent. They include things I haven't heard and quite
| like. Maybe record labels are paying to be on them. Oh well.
| Hokusai wrote:
| > They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify
| users they seem to work.
|
| That is the most reasonable explanation. HN users are not the
| average user of Spotify.
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I've never really understood what variations of the
| rejoinder "you are not the target user" are intended to
| accomplish, at least in conversations like this.
|
| When discussing things like product strategy it makes some
| (more than a little) sense. But in a conversation about
| personal preference, what do you expect the reader to take
| away from it? "Oh okay, sorry, I didn't realize I wasn't
| meant to like this. I guess my opinion's invalid."
|
| Who cares who the average user is, when someone is saying
| something doesn't appeal to them? Is the sentiment some
| kind of scolding for not liking it? I sincerely don't
| understand.
| spiffytech wrote:
| I think the remark is meant to address internet comments'
| tendency to jump from "this product doesn't meet my
| needs", to "consequently it is a bad / mismanaged
| product".
| onion2k wrote:
| _I've never really understood what variations of the
| rejoinder "you are not the target user" are intended to
| accomplish, at least in conversations like this._
|
| It's simply a reminder that when you work at scale you
| can't please everyone. Someone complaining that a feature
| doesn't work for them is not the same as saying it
| doesn't work.
|
| On a site like HN the conversation is usually about the
| broader picture rather than individual complaints unless
| someone is responding directly to the CEO of a company. I
| think the CEO of Spotify posts here occasionally, so
| maybe he'll reply. The rest of us are talking about it in
| more general terms.
| Hokusai wrote:
| From the original comment: "The algorithms are still
| optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not
| improving recommendations (for the user)." That is an
| opinion about 'product strategy'. The answers, in this
| context, are confirming that 'not for the user' part. I
| find relevant to highlight that HN may not be the most
| representative crowd in this situation.
|
| I do not use Spotify, nor I had for years. And I do not
| like the level of influence that all those algorithms
| have on the population decisions. So, it's not about
| protecting Spotify but an observation to try to add
| another point of view to the discussion.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| That's just the appeal to the majority fallacy. People may
| just use Spotify because it's free with ads and they have the
| hook of personal libraries to keep you stuck on the service
| as a paying member.
| [deleted]
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| Crap like this is why, to this day, my collection is digital
| files, cds, vinyl and streaming only for radio - like pandora
| mdoms wrote:
| The fact that Spotify doesn't optimise for discovery and
| recommendations is why you use physical media which has
| absolutely no mechanism for discovery and recommendation?
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| I didn't need Spotify for discovery when I was 15. Or 21.
| Or 30. I don't need it now.
|
| Spotify can't even do a Playlist larger than 50 songs on
| shuffle. It's a garbage web app.
| echelon wrote:
| I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily
| access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile,
| etc.
|
| I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-
| configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists
| that interpolate between these.
|
| I want to be able to pay a fee to subscribe to music
| discovery, then be able to mix these with my own library. If
| I really like a track, I'd like to buy it and add it to my
| collection.
|
| I want an open API so desktop apps can be written to use it.
| Also, let me export my annotations and music library on
| demand.
|
| Music for power users. Don't give me a single button. Give me
| hundreds of them.
|
| I'd pay $30/mo or more for this.
| MonaroVXR wrote:
| >I want a service where I can upload my own files and
| easily access them from a player interface in the browser,
| mobile, etc.
|
| https://www.ibroadcast.com/home/
|
| Is what you are looking for, it has been changed since the
| last time I've been using it.
| oneplane wrote:
| Apple Music does this for half that price.
|
| - Rating and tagging
|
| - Upload and download your own stuff if you want to
| (marketed as iCloud Music Library)
|
| - Works offline
|
| - Discovery services available
|
| - API exists but mostly used to implement web players for
| some reason, works fine in desktop apps too, on top of that
| the current state of your music library is always available
| as an XML file even when you don't use the API at all.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applemusicapi/
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| Is it a true upload or some crappy file/fingerprint
| matching?
|
| Most of these services aren't ever true uploads and do
| matching to save time, bandwidth and space.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| It's fingerprint matching, and yeah it's poorly
| implemented. Most recent complaints I've seen on this
| were for the fan made explicit version of Kanye's Donda.
| It was basically impossible to upload since it would just
| get matched to the clean version.
| oneplane wrote:
| Matching is optional. If a song cannot be matched, your
| own copy gets uploaded instead to your private iCloud
| library.
|
| Edit: well, it's a bit nuanced of course, you can not
| match and not sync or match and sync but you can't mix
| and match that configuration. So it's either sync with
| matching when possible or no syncing.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| I have a lot of rare stuff. Demos, live albums (grateful
| Dead, dmb), live captures of daft punk at Coachella,
| underground hip hop mixtapes, CDrips of local punk and
| Ska bands from the 90s
|
| Fingerprint matching barfs on all this stuff.
| oneplane wrote:
| I haven't had an active subscription for a while (when
| iTunes was the desktop app instead of Music being the
| desktop app) but I distinctly remember being able to set
| metadata in the Info panel on a song or multiple at once
| that prevented fingerprint matching.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Check out Navidrome [0]. It's the closest one that I've
| found. It supports the Subsonic API so there are plenty of
| mobile apps and probably some desktop ones that work with
| it. I use play:Sub on iOS.
|
| 0: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Unless I'm mistaken, this doesn't fulfill the
| requirement:
|
| > I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-
| configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists
| that interpolate between these.
|
| I'd actually pay for a 3rd party metadata service that
| doesn't actually provide the music at all, but just let's
| me tag and rate some across all music streaming services.
| I've even thought about building that (simply for myself
| to begin with). I want ratings, instrument tags, mood
| tags etc. Let me search for songs with 'piano + synth +
| dreamy + weird' instead of throwing some stupid
| recommendation my way. And use those tags to find similar
| tracks across genres and decades of time, instead of just
| saying "Nirvana and Pearl Jam must be the same because
| they're early 90s Seattle bands".
| spurgu wrote:
| This looks really nice, thanks for sharing!
| Fnoord wrote:
| What's the advantage compared to Airsonic?
|
| I use Airsonic right now, it is basically Jellyfin for a
| music collection. I use both of these as reliable
| alternative to Netflix/.../Spotify (where ... is a
| plethora of other video services such as Disney+).
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| I used to host my own Java based one for a while out of my
| house. Worked OK on my phone.
|
| The software just wasn't as good of an experience of just
| having my trusty 400gb sdcard.
| dangravell wrote:
| My service, Astiga, does this. You can upload your files to
| any supported cloud storage service, pair it with Astiga,
| then play either via the Web, our apps or any other client
| that supports Subsonic.
|
| https://asti.ga/
| f1refly wrote:
| funkwhale has the web interface, the subsonic api (dunno
| how well that works i dont use it), you can create your own
| "radios" based on genre and artist
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I want a service where I can upload my own files and
| easily access them from a player interface in the browser,
| mobile, etc.
|
| Amazon used to provide this service, but they shut it down.
| emodendroket wrote:
| iTunes still has it, I think, as iTunes Match.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| But as the name already implies, that one preferentially
| tries to _match_ your files to the ones already available
| in Apple 's music catalogue, with file upload only
| serving as a fallback if it can't find any matches.
|
| And from what I've heard, the fingerprinting algorithm is
| fuzzy enough that it will often match songs/song versions
| that are very similar, but not actually identical, like
| censored/uncensored lyrics, different masterings,
| differing fade ins/outs, alternate takes and live
| versions, etc. etc.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Well, so did the Amazon one.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Oh interesting - somehow in my mind I've mainly
| associated this phenomenon with Apple, but of course in a
| way this make sense and saving storage space that way is
| a tempting target for that kind of service I guess.
|
| It makes me curious though how the accuracy vs.
| deduplication efficiency trade-off looks like in
| practice: How much storage is Apple saving with their
| current settings, and how much deduplication would they
| lose if they made their audio fingerprinting more
| accurate, up to a level where even audio buffs would stop
| complaining
| emodendroket wrote:
| I used iTunes Match for years and never noticed anything
| off, to be honest.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Google Drive with a custom media player UI?
|
| I looked for that when Play Music got shuttered but could
| not find a satisfactory solution. I even paid for one iOS
| app but it wanted access to my entire drive, and maybe some
| other unnecessary permissions.. so hell no. I should be
| able pick one folder and that's it.
|
| I guess I could have made a separate Google account just
| for music.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I bought a jelly pro (miniscule phone), rooted it, added
| some automation to autoload a music player on boot and
| activate airplane mode. I added a 256gb memory card with
| a lot of tunes. It's now my mp3 player. When I deactivate
| airplane mode it scrobbles my played tracks and 15
| minutes later it automatically reactivates airplane mode
| unless the phone is charging, in which case it's
| available for wireless music sync from MusicBee. It also
| powers itself off after 30 minutes of being idle. Best
| damn mp3 player I've ever had.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's fascinating to hear this feedback on Spotify because I've
| never used it this way. I don't let it guide anything. I just
| use it as a music repository and I pick the albums and make my
| own playlists.
|
| Do others generally find that auto play (or whatever it's
| called) works well? Or does it just feel like payola radio?
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Yeah it's odd to me to see comments like this.
|
| Why would you let a streaming service choose what you want to
| listen too or a premade playlist by someone else? Then you
| might as well just listen to the radio. All these on any
| service are always rubbish. I make my own playlists and I
| only listen to them, sometimes I search others for some
| inspiration to see what songs I forgot etc, but most of them
| include a lot of trash so I make my own.
|
| The only 'auto' feature I use, is my release radar playlist
| which I check every Friday to find new songs from Artists I
| like and then add those to my playlist titled for the current
| year.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I use it for both.
|
| "Discover Weekly" tends to be one of my primary sources of
| new content discovery. I tend to listen to a significant
| amount of Death Metal, Doom Metal, Folk Metal, German metal
| and rock, random music in languages I don't understand
| because the sound is cool to me, and various other never-
| been-pop subgenres. Discover Weekly has been pretty on point
| for me to find new and interesting stuff in a way that hasn't
| felt like them pushing a message or some corporate catalog.
|
| I don't tend to listen to the genres that are full of artists
| who are trying to push politics through their music (at least
| that I've consciously recognized) (except maybe System of a
| Down). Not because I'm necessarily against their messages, it
| just the sets haven't overlapped much for me at this point.
| It could also be that music isn't much about lyrics for me,
| it's about if it's something that sounds good to me.
|
| I have a bunch of playlists and saved albums, but I do listen
| to discover weekly in the first few days of the week.
| Sometimes it's meh and I just go choose what I want to listen
| to, sometimes it's really good and it's on loop through the
| week.
|
| Their "Daily Mix" playlists seem to be 90% stuff I've clicked
| "like" on in the past, so I listen to those as well.
| qq4 wrote:
| I went back to my iPod. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, they all
| suck compared to good ol' mp3s at my leisure.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| It's only a matter of time comment like this will decrease your
| social score...
| ipaddr wrote:
| Do you want a high social score? A good citizen badge?
| intricatedetail wrote:
| You will have no choice if you don't want to be excluded.
| lugged wrote:
| Check out Tom McDonald, will fix up your recommendations real
| quick.
| [deleted]
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