How bad is your Spotify?

https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify

by feross • 6 years ago

974 606 6 years ago

pudding.cool

MikeWazowski• 6 years ago

Spotify limiting how many people can use this app at once, so you'll need to wait or try again later.

Patiently anticipating how bad my taste is

dbrgn• 6 years ago

I'm a bit wary of logging in. Does Spotify provide OAuth with fine-grained control, i.e. will the page only get access to the music history or could it in theory change playlists and billing information?

as-j3• 6 years ago

Yes. When you click auth you can see the permissive it asks for. Which is profile and history.

xav_authentique• 6 years ago

It looks like they request these permissions: user-top-read, playlist-read-private, playlist-read-collaborative and they also gets your your name, username and profile picture.

rapnie2• 6 years ago

Seems a neat way to collect information for their startup. Maybe a Spotify competitor, or a datamarket for selling people's music preferences.

as-j3• 6 years ago

lol that’s really cute.

Spotify permissions it asks for make sense.

It was really confused by all the kid music I play. Why so much Raffi? Their training set must not include people with children. :)

jedimastert3• 6 years ago

I was asked

"You listen to 'Super Simple Songs' a lot. I mean A LOT. Are you ok?"

jfb• 6 years ago

Yes, I STAN for Leftöver Crack ... and the Wiggles.

as-j3• 6 years ago

Same here just swap in Raffi. I wonder if it asks that if everyone top?

checker• 6 years ago

This looks really cool, but I wish it displayed some sort of lip service guarantee about not preserving my data. As-is I'm unable to determine whether this is a fun project or a kind of trojan horse to grab as much Spotify data as possible. (and obviously at the end of the day it comes down to trust)

throwbacktictac• 6 years ago

Sad that this thought pattern is a thing. I was also too paranoid to sign in with Spotify.

alkonaut• 6 years ago

Any service that has third party integrations like this should let me get a token that is just valid e.g 24 hours.

Lendal• 6 years ago

Interesting. Judging by the people sitting next to me in traffic or at the beach, most people are perfectly fine with letting the entire world know what kind of music they enjoy listening to. Even when the rest of the world doesn't care and really really doesn't want to hear it.

fooblat• 6 years ago

By my reading of their privacy policy, it seems they will keep data they collect as part of a story or project.

Personally, I never use anything that asks me to sign in with something else. My data is my business and IMO there are plenty of ways to get a laugh without compromising privacy.

etherio2• 6 years ago

This is hilarious...

You are 26% basic. You're trying to be cool with Kapitan Korsakov, but your favorites are the same as everybody else's..
Your spotify was please-read-my-manuscript-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad.

Ouch.

Really interesting project by all means. I hope they release the source - I'm curious about how it was built.

Edit: This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513886 here and is not at all getting the same popularity. Anyone got ideas?

dkersten• 6 years ago

Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..

After it picked the one very popular song I listen to in order to laugh at me for listening to non obscure things, ignoring the piles of weird random crap I normally listen to that nobody ever seems to know. Funny but not very accurate.

Overall all I got a good laugh though.

etherio2• 6 years ago

Exactly what happened to me also

mhh__5• 6 years ago

I think the microtonal stuff I listen to is probably too unpopular to even have reviews to go on.

ralphc3• 6 years ago

"You are 11% basic. Red Moon Architect and Ahab? Where do you even find this shit?."

soneil• 6 years ago

12 hours ago was what, 5am London, Midnight East Coast?

Timing is everything. If a tree falls in the forest and 75% of the potential readership are fast asleep, does it make a sound?

(Numbers are fictional - and possibly eurocentric - for the purpose of conversation. I think the point stands with or without their veracity, it's just easier for form a sentence with values)

Stupulous• 6 years ago

In theory you could account for this, right? HN (and reddit, etc.) could score based on how many typical voters have seen it, or just bias directly based on average active times across a week.

ksec• 6 years ago

Anyone got ideas?

The Act of HN submission. But broadly speaking US working time zone get a much higher chance of submission being upvoted.

Sebb7673• 6 years ago

You are 3% basic. MYST and Project One? Where do you even find this shit?.

Hilarious, especially since these are pretty much mainstream artists of my (not so small) niche. I'd love to see how it comes up with those.

ed312• 6 years ago

oh great another Rise Against stan... You've been listening to a lot of Logic lately. u okay? >Yeah why no reason... Of course Twenty One Pilots.

Not gonna lie, I'm feeling a bit judged by this AI:)

young_unixer2• 6 years ago

You've been listening to a lot of Logic lately. > u okay?

Asked the same thing to me, but about Radiohead.

sbarre• 6 years ago

If it's any comfort I got the _exact_ same sequence of comments/questions but with different bands I listened to a lot in 2020..

Hope that didn't ruin the magic.

smarx007• 6 years ago

Ha! I also got 26% score and it was ridiculing me for listening to Ed Alleyne-Johnson [1] and David Hicken [2] even though they are not even mainstream performers :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJwAZMq08xA

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHtdqGy3g5Q or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftAYq1AHiE if you are in a more upbeat mood

tclancy2• 6 years ago

Mine was wonderfully vicious too, though I am noticing we got some of the same synonyms (I was at 17%): "masters-in-creative-writing" instead of "please-read-my-manuscript" and I would much have preferred "walmart-hawaiian-shirt" over "tommy-bahama". That stung.

dm319• 6 years ago

You are 0% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to Mistabishi?.
> Your spotify was ira-glass-in-your-airpods-manic-pixie-dream-girl bad.

Made me laugh!

bartwe• 6 years ago

*Adds Mistabishi to playlist

rongdongdong• 6 years ago

i mean there was him loosing all those bookings after going on racist rants on facebook. i think he used to get banned from dogs on acid a lot for being a dumb asshole too https://mixmag.net/read/drum-n-bass-producer-mistabishi-has-...

pjmorris5• 6 years ago

It rated me 6% basic... what's sad is that I'm now proud of that. I've resisted being called hipster, maybe inappropriately.

My spotify was 'heavy-eyeliner-post-punk-boomer-relaxation-dads-still-cool bad'

tetha• 6 years ago

Curious, I learned something.

You're stuck in the early 2010s. For you, music's been all downhill since Orden Ogan made The Things We Believe In.

Now I wonder if this is because my account is old, or if I really listen to that much old stuff, or if my favorite bands just don't release that much. Weird.

But I'm entirely fine with the other assments:

Your spotify was renaissance-faire -too-much-power metal bad.
Thank your obsessions with medieval rock and power metal (e.g., Sabaton and Dreamtale) for that.
Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
hail-satan bad
You are 0% basic. Ewigheim and Winterstorm? Where do you even find this shit?.

And I think winterstorm and ewigheim aren't even the most obscure bands.

Oh but there is a new stribog album. nice.

gpvos• 6 years ago

That reads like high praise to me.

jdc0589• 6 years ago

this is about how mine went. It's very concerned about where I found Necropanther and Wasteland Riders

letitbeirie• 6 years ago

You're stuck in the early 2010s. For you, music's been all downhill since Kalax made Time Lapse.

I got the same thing with a different song. What's funny about this one is it's from 2017.

madeofpalk• 6 years ago

Now I wonder if this is because my account is old

I made my account this yeah, and i got the same "you're stuck in the early 2010s". I guess I just listen to a lot of music from then.

Teknoman117• 6 years ago

Yeah I don't see what's wrong with that.

It's complaining about me listening to Eluveitie and Ost+Front too much (and Metalocalypse and Celldweller).

I'm sorry that I went searching for other german industrial metal bands when rammstein took forever to put out another album.

progre2• 6 years ago

Where do you even find this shit?.

I don't follow the recomendations, I click "Fans also listen to". Here is the rest of my assesment.

Your spotify was moonshine-renaissance-faire bad.
Thank your obsessions with Johnny Cash and medieval folk for that.
Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
napping-in-your-mancave bad
Here's what else is going on in your aural trash fire:

You listen to these tracks too much:

    Enter The Ninja by Die Antwoord
    Napalm Sunshine by Lying for Friends
    The Lachrymal Sleep by Doom:VS
    Thousands Of Bees by In Gowan Ring
    The Seer and the Seen by In Gowan Ring

You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:

    VNV Nation
    Winterfylleth
    WEH
    Rome
    Falconer

You are 1% basic. Trepaneringsritualen and Svartidaudi? Where do you even find this shit?.

You're stuck in the early 2010s. You only listen to Obama-era jams like Ensigns Of Victory by Winterfylleth and Streamline by VNV Nation.

Analysis completed in 4.012 exhausting seconds.

Thanks for letting me see your music I guess.

Shutting down.

dvirsky• 6 years ago

Interestingly most of the examples it gave me for being stuck in the early 2010s were from the second half of the decade.

ralphc3• 6 years ago

You are 11% basic. Red Moon Architect and Ahab? Where do you even find this shit?.

sunir• 6 years ago

Everyone got the same message about the 2010s it seems. Don’t fail the Turing test. Or the reverse Turing test where an AI makes you question your own humanity. :)

1_player2• 6 years ago

You are 5% basic. Talpa and Villagers of Ioannina City? Where do you even find this shit?.
You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around Ratatat's Magnifique.

The last line is definitely something I will mention to my therapist ... :-)

Still, it validated my hipster taste, even though it made fun of it. Suck it bot, I'm cool and your programmers aren't.

raindropm2• 6 years ago

Gosh I love Ratatat’s Magnifique.

adtac• 6 years ago

You're stuck in the early 2010s.

oof, I'm not even angry lol

screye• 6 years ago

This was so much fun.

You are 5% basic. Old Man Gloom and Distorted Harmony? Where do you even find this shit?.

I feel called out, but also kinda proud.

You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around The Dear Hunter's Act Iv: Rebirth in Reprise.

Early 2010s were amazing era for Prog metal alright.

kome• 6 years ago

i'm 1% basic, i'm clearly the coolest in da room

asciimo• 6 years ago

I got 0%!

gravelc• 6 years ago

I'm guessing 1% is actually common. Mine:

"You are 1% basic. Oh wow Penelope Trappes and Titi Robin! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..

You're too trendy for your own good. You only listen to music made in the last year."

Scarblac• 6 years ago

Hilarious, yes.

You are 15% basic. Yeah, you've got some obscure artists like VanKatoen, but your real top ones are ultra-mainstream like The Weeknd..
Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
dad-rock bad
neverland-ranch bad
nineties-dorm-room bad
studded-leather-jacket bad
wannabe-tenor-but-probably-a-bass bad

As a rock-listening dad who spent most of the 90s living in a dorm room, I felt spied on.

comboy• 6 years ago

You're stuck in the early 2010s. You only listen to Obama-era jams like Nocturne in B-Flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1 by Frédéric Chopin and Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467: II. Andante by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The output it spitted out while processing was pretty good though.

johnwyles3• 6 years ago

The algorithm is more basic than the music it passes judgement on so take the verbiage with a grain of punk-vinyl-you-never-heard-before.

nouney• 6 years ago

But you ARE cool for listening to Kapitan Korsakov!

sandravlado• 6 years ago

6% basic. AI hates me. Apparently, Your spotify was overdramatic-instrumental-yoga-studio-heavy-eyeliner-post-punk bad. And this was just the beginning of the insults.

dang• 6 years ago

This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513886 here and is not at all getting the same popularity.

HN allows reposts of an article when earlier submissions haven't gotten attention yet. This is our way of mitigating the randomness of what gets traction off /newest.

It makes for a something of a lottery in terms of which submission ends up with all the attention, but it's on our list to implement some kind of karma sharing across multiple submissions. It's been on our list for years, but we'll get to it eventually!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Zealotux2• 6 years ago

Haven't used Spotify in over a year now so it'll judge an older me, but it apparently has my favorite Melon as a reference of good taste so it can't be all that bad.

mahmoudhossam2• 6 years ago

Isn't that a younger you though?

Zealotux2• 6 years ago

I meant an older (previous) version of me, indeed! English is hard.

ftio• 6 years ago

Unless GP is an android, in which case it is older for sure.

mhh__5• 6 years ago

Well, it absolutely hated me (Possibly because I have one massive playlist) despite noticing enormous amounts of Death Grips on my profile, and recommending me a Neutral Milk Hotel song at the end (which I was quite impressed with although it could've been a lucky guess)

DC-3• 6 years ago

It asked me to listen to a clip of Oh Comely and asked me if I liked it or not lmao.

moojd• 6 years ago

As soon as I saw melon I knew I was in for a ride.

   > sad-knowledge-worker bad
   > wear-carhartts-to-your-desk-job
   > remember-when-williamsburg-was-cool bad

I've never felt so roasted haha

mahmoudhossam2• 6 years ago

I wouldn't call it AI, but I had a good laugh so thanks for that.

I revoked access to the Spotify API shortly after use, and it didn't seem to do any harm to my account.

hankchinaski• 6 years ago

that is amazing

andybp854• 6 years ago

Or, how to get your app rate limited in one easy step lol. Patiently waiting...

The concept of "objectively good music" is hilarious enough that this is already a win in my book.

andybp854• 6 years ago

Aaaannd it's down. I can't wait until this comes back up so I can send it to a bunch of my ex-bandmates lol.

mhh__5• 6 years ago

Oh wow Taim and Viper! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..

It's vaguely sentient.

It has some really bizarre opinions about certain songs - Guthrie Govan is basically a god amongst men for guitar players but it absolutely hates his work.

A final note: I assume this is a joke, but please don't try to objectively rank music.

jedimastert3• 6 years ago

Guthrie Govan is basically a god amongst men for guitar players but it absolutely hates his work.

They apparently just took public reviews, but I geniuinelycan not imagine someone disliking Guthrie Govan. Maybe the score is also inversely proportional to popularity/# of reviews found? It'd fit into the hipster gag

mhh__5• 6 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaqbbjciqsE&list=RD6MexmN9vF...

Like/Dislike ratio of 6600/98, they must be extrapolating from some bad data (or possibly extrapolating from the genre not being particularly melon-y).

Excuse me, I need to go and practice...

chrismeller3• 6 years ago

I don’t think I’ve ever been insulted that much by a computer before...

andybp854• 6 years ago

That's how I felt when I was learning to compile stuff from source.

chrismeller3• 6 years ago

That’s more like the computer just slept with your sister even though you told it not to and now you’re horrified and no longer friends...

tra3• 6 years ago

Hah, I'm always a bit self conscious about playing my music "in public", this took it to a new high...

eecks• 6 years ago

Does it do anything but gives some hipster insults?

My activity seems to have messed it up:

"You only listen to Obama-era jams like Sleepy Brown Noise by White Noise for Reading" err..

How do I delete my data?

dvtrn• 6 years ago

*ponders if "Obama-era jams" means music that came out during the Obama-administration, or music Obama would have jammed to when he was younger

Both have a lot of potential, as it would seem the former President and I have very similar musical tastes (that is: a very strong love for Stevie Wonder)

Jamie9912• 6 years ago

Huh, I didn't get the zoomer memes this thing spat at me

nkrisc• 6 years ago

It used "stan" as both a noun and a verb and I have no idea what it means.

laputan_machine• 6 years ago

I think it means 'excessive fan', from Eminem - Stan

_whiteCaps_• 6 years ago

Verbing weirds nouns.

pimlottc3• 6 years ago

To be a “Stan” is to be a truly diehard fan, bordering on obsession. The term comes from the Eminem song of the same name. It can be used as a noun or a verb.

whymauri2• 6 years ago

Just some fun history, but "stan" is actually a millennial portmanteau courtesy of Eminem [0]. It came out around the time the older Gen Z's were born, actually. Although, yes, it has seen a revival amongst Gen Z.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)

rmb177• 6 years ago

Thank you for the morning laugh!

jedimastert3• 6 years ago

I love that the first pass for "objectively good music" is Fantano. They know their audience.

pimlottc3• 6 years ago

Ah, thanks, that was the one logo I didn’t recognize.

dx87• 6 years ago

I was hoping it was a questionnaire about how bad Spotify recommendations are. I have no idea why Spotify feels the need to clutter my recommendations with radio stations like "Rap Caviar" and "Music for when you know you're the bad bitch", meanwhile it doesn't show me new releases for music I actually listen to because of all the irrelevant suggestions taking up space. I ended up creating a new account because apparently listening to a couple of podcast episodes means you want half your page filled with recommendations for shows on the same topic.

sk5t• 6 years ago

Spotify really wants people to listen to podcasts... it's oh so much easier to wedge some advertising into podcasts.

BostonEnginerd• 6 years ago

I’m really bummed at the amount of effort which is going into building walled gardens for podcasts. Yet another amazing thing on the open web which is dying.

I keep hoping that someone will crack the micropayment idea and kill advertising on the web.

thr0w__4w4y2• 6 years ago

You're right, but I'm grateful anyway. I used to listen to Joe Rogan's podcast sometimes (on Overcast, which is awesome)... since he moved to the vastly inferior Spotify platform, I don't listen to him at all. The platform is pure shit for podcasts, so I've cut Rogan out of my life, and saved many hours per week in the process. Not that his $100M is going to notice my absence!

martin_a4• 6 years ago

Besides that, Spotify is now getting flooded with all those coaching podcasts.

How to flirt better. How to earn more money. How to be more lucky.

In the beginning there were lots of sex podcasts, seemed like everybody who had sex at least twice got its own podcast on Spotify, but now it's all filled with the generic stuff I already hate in the other places.

tclancy2• 6 years ago

Every generation thinks they invented sex podcasts.

akyang• 6 years ago

Release Radar is usually pretty good at recommending new releases, at least for me.

gxqoz• 6 years ago

Yeah I can't think of anything I've missed by following Release Radar each Friday. It would be nice if it was clearer on Release Radar whether the new release was a single or an album. You can infer this from the single having a separate title than the listed album, but sometimes it's the title track.

parliament322• 6 years ago

It's not just you, I've literally never listened to a podcast on Spotify but they're front and center on the Home page for me too. I wish there was a way to turn them off, I'm just not interested in podcasts.

mackrevinack2• 6 years ago

a big part of my motivation for going back to a local music library soon are those annoying ads at the top of the screen when you first open the app. its even more annoying that I am paying them for premium and there is still not option to disable them.

is pretty much the same reason I moved to linux because microsoft kept trying to push crap apps like candy crush on me even though I bought the "pro" licence. #everythingIsTerrible

chrismeller3• 6 years ago

I wish I could share my results.

frankzander• 6 years ago

WTF? ... I didn't get it. What's so great about it? What is moonshine-bommer bad?

timlod• 6 years ago

I listened to a number of audio books by the same author during a road trip last year, this tells me I listen to this author to an uncomfortable extent ;)

I believe it focuses quite a lot on artists or tracks listened to a lot, and judging from the covers it shows it selects some top N songs for its analysis. Fun stuff though!

pbronez• 6 years ago

So fun! My score plummeted when I answered the interactive questions.

Hit a bug where it asked me “do you recognize this song?” And tried to play some audio, but nothing actually played. (Safari on iOS; could have been caused by an ad blocker)

Jaxan2• 6 years ago

I also couldn’t hear anything. (Also safari iOS)

f0rmatfunction• 6 years ago

Happened to me but it was because the mute switch was set to vibrate. Turning the switch let the song play. I guess unless the ringer is on iOS controls whether Safari can play audio?

torgard2• 6 years ago

It played Don't Stop Believing by Journey, and then made fun of me for liking it loool

Barrin92• 6 years ago

My score was pretty okay until it played me don't stop believing and I liked it, hard to argue with that one

It also absolutely disliked the amount of Daft Punk I listened too, and called me pretentious for listening to Periphery, this was hilarious.

rednum2• 6 years ago

Looking at title I thought it was rant about product quality. But it's not, so I'll provide mine.

Since 2013 when I've started paying for Spotify it has turned from one of my favourite apps to one of those I hate most. On my previous Android phone it would freeze every other day when there was no internet. Why? Who knows. Could be related to me using SD card, or could be something else. The phone wasn't very old, but still on many days it was basically unusable. Somehow I was gifted a new phone and it kind of works. I say kind of, because sometimes when I click on a downloaded album it doesn't work - no tracks display. Why? Who knows. And few days ago something bugged out and tracks suddenly started setting volume to max. Apparently it's known issue that appears occasionally. Why? Who knows. Happily I wasn't wearing headphones so I did not get hearing damage. But who knows, maybe this will happen again.

There is also desktop app which severely crippled local file support few years ago. That really sucked for me, because I record a lot of my own stuff and I want to listen to music in one place. I don't know if this was fixed since then because I pretty much switched to using web app, which usually works. There is also iPad app which seems to routinely delete stuff I have downloaded do my iPad; and sometimes it also freeze in offline mode when browsing my library. At this point I didn't even try filing a ticket with support, I lost hope of them fixing this. I suppose soon I will simply stop paying them and make switch to something else.

EDIT: Why post this here? I hope people at Spotify see that submission about Spotify is on top of HN, and maybe, hopefully, someone sees my comments and thinks twice about setting 2021 OKRs and put some capacity into improving the app reliability. I know, this is optimistic, but who knows.

city412• 6 years ago

I canceled Spotify and switched to Amazon Music Unlimited, primarily due to how buggy Spotify is. AMU does have one annoying bug I've found (that seems to have emerged after the recent redesign) but other than that it's been totally flawless. Reliable apps are such a joy to use. I feel this side of software is not appreciated enough anymore.

tachyonbeam• 6 years ago

To add to the list of complaints... The Chromecast streaming feature is also broken. It will randomly pause in the middle of playback. This bug has existed for months and months. My configuration is very vanilla. Common phone, TV with built-in Chromecast, no other devices you could stream to on the network, stable internet connection...

helmholtz• 6 years ago

I've got the polar opposite opinion to yours. Spotify has been God's gift to mankind as far as my experience goes. I'll get the negative out of the way first: their UI teams loves to keep tweaking stuff, which is annoying. It's a stable app and they should leave it alone.

Having said that, it's wonderful. I can download all my music. It has some truly wonderful playlists for when I'm coding. It's recommendation engine seems to recommend really nice tunes week after week. The yearly reviews, the On Repeat etc. all this stuff is really nice to look back at.

Then, I FINALLY have a podcast search which can search for podcast episodes and then, when I click on the search result, take me to tho god-damned episode instead of the full podcast with 2500 fucking episodes to hunt through. It actually has a sane podcast interface that isn't a cluttered mess.

I was so sceptical of it because I loved Pandora to the absolute hilt, but now it's the only Saas I pay monthly for.

rednum2• 6 years ago

I had similar opinion to yours until around 2015, then things started to break randomly. To be fair, I discovered some good stuff via recommendation and I like other features you mentioned (though I don't really use podcasts). However none of this matters when basic playback functionality is broken.

slfnflctd• 6 years ago

I completely fell in love with Pandora at first. New music discovery is one of my favorite things. Eventually, though, it stopped giving it to me. Despite having over 100 stations, I started hearing mostly repeats. Also, of the artists I liked, they were only playing me a small fraction of their work. And I missed albums.

Spotify has been a breath of fresh air, I switched a couple years ago. It is missing some stuff here & there, but I haven't hit too many bugs like others have (on Windows or Android), and their catalog is much bigger than Pandora's was when I was using it heavily. Turns out, what I needed was more content. What once seemed like Pandora's best strength - that 'special sauce' recommendation algorithm - is now clearly being done to a similar or greater level of competence by damn near everyone else in the space. And like you say, the podcast stuff has been solid & gotten better, too. These things never turn out how I expect.

imglorp• 6 years ago

And they removed most of your opportunities to steer recommendation. There should be a like/dislike band/song at every point in all UIs for paid users; there used to be but it was taken away from most places on most UIs. The community forum has thousands of votes on this matter and Spotify ignores it.

I suspect recommendation is more steered by contract agreements than showing you new bands you might like.

svantana• 6 years ago

I have a similar experience, the mac client has been pretty broken for me in the last few months, it refuses to play about half of all tracks among other things. And opening of links to tracks has been semi-broken for years.

They have over 1k employees, surely many of them experience the same easily fixable flaws? My fav theory is, once a company becomes successful and big enough, noone wants to own problems, everyone wants to be part of new exciting projects with a purely positive outlook. And if business is going well, upper management has no reason nor (informal) mandate to get tough and make strong demands.

Shacklz2• 6 years ago

Couldn't agree more. Spotify is one of those products that I sort of almost can't live without but yet it's painful how bad they have become in the last couple of years. Instead of improving the service and customer experience, it only got worse (if I had the chance to straight up use an outdated client from a couple of years ago, I would!).

The fun thing is, my company has jumped on the agile train a while back (nothing wrong with that per se in my opinion), and Spotify was always that cool example "where agile works". Well, no idea what they're doing, but if their KPIs mainly consist of how bad of a UX they get away with, they for sure are very successfully improving their product.

It constantly forgets which episodes of a podcast I've already listened to, or where exactly I've stopped when in the middle of an episode. Their support for downloaded songs at this point seems to be almost non-existent (I stopped using spotify offline quite some time ago as it became too much of an annoyance). If a song I liked is not available anymore but is then available again, I have to like it again. It still can't differentiate between studio and live versions of songs which I would like to filter out (I hope someone corrects me that I'm just too dumb to find the right button). I once got an email that one of the bands I liked released a new album - but it was a band with an identical name (and never heard of before!); apparently, they send out mails by matching band names instead of some unique IDs (no idea how that passed any kind of review; must've been some mashed-together 11-hour release).

... the list could go on and on. The thing is; I really want Spotify to be good, it's what made me stop pirating music, it was just way more convenient. It still is, but it could be so much more, especially given all the cash they're rolling in.

allenu2• 6 years ago

Spotify on the Mac has given me lots of little issues here and there in the last year. It's incredibly frustrating to have to restart it now and again.

I have encountered situations where I hit PLAY and nothing happens, or I hit PLAY and it says it's playing, but there's no audio, or I hit PLAY and the app says it's unable to play the track. Restarting the app seems to fix most of these issues.

There are also scroll bugs when browsing podcast episodes. The scroll position will just jump to the same spot as you try to scroll down the page, making it impossible to view the episodes in a series.

alex_c• 6 years ago

Probably related to this 3-year-old unresolved issue with Bluetooth headphones:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Spotify-won-...

city412• 6 years ago

This is the main issue I had as well. I'm on Linux, and tried all Linux flavors of Spotify that exist to no avail. I switched to Amazon and haven't looked back. You press play, music plays.

Slikey• 6 years ago

Spotify became entirely unusable for me when I started using Bluetooth headphones on my computer. When I turn them off, Spotify goes into some weird attempt to play every single song in rapid succession as it has no Output device to play to. Finally crashing so bad that I have to end the process and reopen it. It doesn't help that I've reported that a long time ago and even though the QA triage should have marked this as a low hanging fruit, nothing has happened. // rant end, I know this post doesn't help anything but venting is always a form of self-therapy haha

WillYouFinish• 6 years ago

I agree about the Spotify desktop app. It got worse and worse. But for me there are different reasons. Especially the performance got worse enormously. Still running the 0.9.7. The old Android apps were way faster, too. I really miss those times. Hardware got better but software got so much worse it's pure insanity.

m000• 6 years ago

You are 6% basic. Acrimonious and Inherit Disease? Where do you even find this shit?.

Yup. That's me.

wjvdhoek• 6 years ago

You are 2% basic. Wombripper and Blindfolded and Led to the Woods? Where do you even find this shit?

m000, you are my new best friend.

merovigiam• 6 years ago

You are 3% basic. Lost Symphony and VIRTA? Where do you even find this shit?.

Liked those two, try these two.

tossthere2• 6 years ago

Funny, but I was hoping this might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.

Spotify constantly queues and recommends songs to me that are so bad, I can’t even imagine how there could possibly exist any data indicating that any significant sample of listeners has ever enjoyed hearing them. Spotify has 5+ years of my listening history, and orders of magnitude more data from listeners all over the world, and yet every time I set it to recommend anything to me I just sit there pressing “skip” repeatedly until I give up.

I always blamed myself, thought I was just becoming old and curmudgeonly in my 30s. But yesterday I finally discovered the problem isn’t with me. I switched to Apple Music, and it queued up 50 songs I’d never heard, and I enjoyed almost all of them.

I can use my HomePod now, too. I’m really loving Apple Music so far, highly recommend it to anyone who thinks their Spotify account is permanently broken like mine was.

Sebb7673• 6 years ago

I always thought my recommendations are that broken because I listen to two very different music directions. For now, I fixed it by finding new Music via YouTube and using artists playlists etc.. Apple Music is probably no option, though, as I'm exclusively on Android.

CloudButWhy• 6 years ago

Apple Music does have an Android app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

bartread3• 6 years ago

I've had the same problem. I like multiple genres but Spotify recommendations tend ever more toward overly harsh and angular electronica. I've tried retraining it multiple times by intentionally listening in a different direction but it never fixes the problem for long. Really frustrating.

adley• 6 years ago

Android does have an app for Apple Music though it's been years since I've used it. I was quite happy to pay the subscription fee but an update broke the whole app for me. It would play only a part of the song and then suddenly skip to the next one.

My music taste also diverges drastically but Apple seemed to handle it quite well IIRC.

zeku• 6 years ago

Spotify is fantastic for me with everything. My only complaint is their webapp causes random bugs and eats whatever resources it can find.

Just as a counter point.

joseph_grobbles• 6 years ago

Same here. Wonderful playlists. Constant exposure to new music. This discussion seemed to get people in the mood for the airing of grievances, so here we are.

Just a couple of months ago Spotify temporarily blocked playlist exporting and there was an uproar. And it turned out that a lot of the uproar was about those Spotify automagically created playlists. Read some sentiments, coupled with some Apple Music comparative opinions, here-

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24747636

I guess it just turns out that maybe Spotify isn't for all people. Nor is Apple Music. Some discussions just draw out the edges from whatever side and it becomes the narrative.

Taste is a tough nut to crack.

tinmandespot• 6 years ago

+1 for the general fantasticness. I use the app on my iphone - no problems whatsoever. They even recently updated their watch app to stream directly (without the phone being nearby). Apple music has had this feature for a while.

mhh__5• 6 years ago

In my experience Spotify's recommendations for my big anything-goes playlist are terrible, but the one's for my smaller playlist for mostly British D&B music (https://open.spotify.com/track/22Z4p2gRkDPqmw8DgVixML?si=jeb... - for a taste of the genre) can give very specific and quite good recommendations of smaller artists.

eli• 6 years ago

I'm not typically one to buy into conspiracy theories, but I really can't help but wonder if the Spotify algorithm favors songs that have more favorable licensing terms.

They have already announced they intend to let artists buy their way into playlists in the future https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/could-spotifys-new-discovery-...

rapnie2• 6 years ago

I had exactly the same feeling. The daily recommendations contain 80% from albums I've either already downloaded or liked (or auto-liked, which was also a very annoying thing I had for a while). The remaining 20% is recommendations of different songs of the same artists mostly.

With New releases it is different. If I ever play, say, a song someone else sent me to listen to in a different genre, then it screws up my recommendations here for months, sometimes forever.

cmehdy• 6 years ago

Two years ago they were already shoving Drake all over paid subscribers' playlists[0]

I've paid for spotify for more than a decade and I definitely wasn't pleased to have every single playlist recommending an artist I don't like, and it was just ridiculous how EVERY[1] playlist had his photo regardless of the genre.

[0] https://exclaim.ca/music/article/drakes_face_was_all_over_sp...

[1] https://twitter.com/DanieleRose22/status/1013845491757568000

numpad0• 6 years ago

I think that is the case for every freemium services and social networks: they (must) reward and optimize users for profitability.

runT1ME• 6 years ago

I'm surprised that they haven't taken a page out of Netflix's book: sign small artists that sound close enough to what's popular to their own internal record label and push them in playlists?

namenotrequired• 6 years ago

That doesnt require a conspiracy (really hard), just an imperfect incentive structure (really easy)

gcpwnd2• 6 years ago

Don't wonder. Just be realistic. Did you ever work in an IT business environment? Remember the situations when good taste slowly morphed into business interests? Yeah, that's natural in a capitalist environment. By no chance spotify dodged that bullet. Positivity and goodwill is fine but don't spare anyone from corruption.

Xevi• 6 years ago

It feels like it's a self-fulfilling spiral of bad music. The more I listen to the recommended music, the more of the same crap keeps getting recommended to me. Even if I skip them.

I remember that Spotify actually had pretty good recommendations when I first started using it at the start of this year, because I had only listened to the songs I actually liked so far. But now I'm lucky if I find one decent song out of a hundred recommended ones.

rutthenut• 6 years ago

Seems there is exactly the same sort of discussion on another HN thread about poor recommendations from YouTube, also leading into a spiralling decline to more and more rubbish

jarek83• 6 years ago

Similar experience for me - they always shuffle me most awful songs ever - I could never rely on their algorithms to the extent that no matter the mood/kind/playlist I choose, I end up skipping 20 songs that are just horrible and I just quit Spotify.

I wonder how much better algorithm could be if they'd recognise a skip within 10 seconds of a song as "no, bad choice, never play it again".

bitexploder• 6 years ago

Their recommendation engine is really bad IMO. I was hoping for a futuristic machine learning + listening based recommendation engine that could find similar songs based on what they actually sound like. Mostly they just find songs based on what other playlists your song exists in. It's really boring and not good at finding new music for me. It does OKAY and it isn't why I use Spotify, but I can't help but feel like they are missing the boat here. I remember working with Gracenote software like 15 years ago and it could fingerprint songs and find similar music at least that long ago.

e: my overall sentiment on Spotify is very positive, I just wish recommendations were better.

nineumbrellas• 6 years ago

Check out SAGE from the guy at Hate5six. It's more punk/metal based, but if you're into that, you'll definitely find some new music.

https://hate5six.com/sage

voisin• 6 years ago

FWIW, I’ve had the exact same experience. Started a 3 month Apple Music trial and was so blown away by the number of bands I’d never heard of and absolutely loved that I am ditching Spotify. I somehow found my Spotify account recommendations either recommending songs of bands I’d already told it I liked (duh!) or new bands that I absolutely detested.

Findeton• 6 years ago

Honestly, I switched to funkwhale and I'm not looking back. I prefer to control my own "sound system" like in the old times.

zamalek2• 6 years ago

might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.

That's just Spotify. The AI did a better job of figuring out what I like (138 and uplifting trance) than Spotify does (EDM). I blame it in Armin van Buuren: he is an extremely popular EDM DJ and he plays a very wide variety of EDM. If you listen to EDM chances are he has at least a few dozen sets you'd enjoy. That's the problem: he's prolific and he connects every genre of EDM to every other genre of EDM. He's a "super-connector" and I could easily see how this wrecks recommendation algorithms, all roads lead to Armin.

Basically: recommending music is not the same as recommending goods, and I think the same approach is being used.

pjc50• 6 years ago

I don't think that's a bad thing per se, if the algorithm correctly identifies that you like EDM. We then come to the micro-genre discussion - how specific are you in your tastes, and how precise is the algorithm required to be?

shrikant• 6 years ago

Wow, a mention of Armin van Buren! I wonder how much discovery of his work is just happenstance. His track is the first thing on Google and Bing that gets thrust into your face when you search for "this is a test".

That's my default browser bar search term for checking that my interwebs are still wired up, and I've often thought that this was either genius or a really happy accident.

tossthere2• 6 years ago

Good point. I started to notice a lot of the Spotify recommendations sounded like half of an EDM track I might like, mixed with half of something that it should’ve never been mixed with.

Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.

It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!

Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.

I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.

Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.

CydeWeys• 6 years ago

I can't speak to Spotify but YouTube Music seems to do a good job with recommendations. If I start by seeding it with a "radio station" built off an artist I enjoy a lot of the follow-up music is enjoyable and helps me to discover new bands. YouTube Music even has a free ad-supported tier, which is nice.

xerox13ster• 6 years ago

Hahahaha YouTube has 8 years of my Google Play Music listening history, as well as my entire music library I uploaded back in 2012 when Zune (later XBM/Groove) got killed.

I started it on "The Little Things Give You Away" by Linkin Park, and let it play. For a while it was alright, it gave me chill downtempo kinda emo music selections with some like newer stuff from Linkin Park and like Green Day.

Normally I listen to slow/soft shit from bands like 3 Days Grace, Breaking Ben, 3 Doors Down, My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and so on with my Linkin Park (especially the Minutes to Midnight album), so Green Day and Fall Out Boy aren't bad per se even though I like my older stuff. And I do have lots of playlists with GD + LP + FOB + other random pop punk bands.

But then it started throwing in shit like NF, Machine Gun Kelley, Eminem, Logic, then D12, Run DMC, DMX. The Smart DJ on my decade old Zune HD does a better job at building a playlist and recommending music (with the same library).

Pandora, Last.fm, GPM (after 8 years it finally started to "get" me FUCK YOU GOOGLE), Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, etc. They have all done this to me, they all inevitably end up playing some sort of rap, or move to super modern pop music. I do not understand it at all beyond 'it makes them money'.

I do listen to rap music, and I do like listening to those groups and artists. I have quite a few playlists built with just that music, and aside from Eminem, they do not intersect with my emo/punk/rock playlists. If I start listening to Linkin Park, I am never going to want to go from there to early 2000s rap.

I. Don't. Give. A. Rats. Ass. if every other person on the planet listens to Linkin Park with Eminem and DMX. I don't and I tell them every time I play a song or build a playlist, or skip, or remove a recommendation what I like and don't like.

Why can my deprecated Zune appreciate that and keep my genre interests separate and accurate and a billion dollar AI algo can't?

ant6n• 6 years ago

After playing an album I select (usually soundtracks), Spotify falls into a tiny selection of 10-20 tracks that it plays on shuffle forever. It appears music discovery is incredibly poor.

...I'm also afraid to play something for my son, then the recommendations while coding will surely be polluted by that; just like if you play one or two kid's videos on youtube.

have_faith• 6 years ago

Counter anecdote: I've built up playlists full of tracks from good recommendations from Spotify. The genres are relatively niche and electronic (sub-genres of house, techno, uk garage, electronica, etc). The only downside is it gets a bit too eager to recommend the most played few tracks from a given artist, but I've discovered a lot of new artists this way though.

gcpwnd2• 6 years ago

I remember that my suggestions were pretty obscure the last time I tried the spotify algo. But actually it is pretty natural that they suggest niche or less known artists because those have shittier deals and are less expensive to stream. Also, in that position you don't want to promote the top artists for free.

marricks• 6 years ago

Hilariously I just switched from Apple Music to Spotify and had the exact opposite experience! I wonder if recommendations get "stale" so you get bad ones, where as if you switch services you get recommendations based on different data sets so they're temporarily better.

jehb• 6 years ago

I made the same assumption about what the link was going to be about.

My solution to terrible music algorithms this year has been to, well, give up on them entirely, and go back to the world of curated music. When Google Play Music died, and YouTube Music left an even worse experience in its place, I was done. So now people curate my music instad of machines. Whether that's in the form of letting the artist curate it for me with albums, letting myself curate my favorites with playlists, or letting a DJ curate music discovery on a streaming radio station, I find that humans do it better.

College radio stations (and their streams) are great, by the way. I can't evangelize them enough. Minimal or no ads, and some of the most interesting and creative sets I've heard in my life.

mackrevinack2• 6 years ago

sometimes spotify recommends songs that are so bad it makes me wonder is it some sort of test to check if i am even paying attention :)

i get good results from discover weekly for the most part though. I used to spend a lot of hours on social music sites like thisismyjam and the like, where I would stumble across a gem every 1 in 50, but with spotify it feels more like every 1 in 20 or 30, so I'm happy with that and it's also less work not switching between multiple services

other people I know have nothing good to say about discover weekly so I dunno. maybe I just have low standards!

emerged2• 6 years ago

It seems to always give me the best songs first and last in the Discover Weekly and Release Radar auto generated playlists. But in the middle there are sometimes unbelievably ill suited songs for me. Maybe it’s the artificial intelligence attempting to probe the boundaries a bit.

nvarsj• 6 years ago

I think it just gets stuck on old songs you played. My kids played "The Bacon Song" a few times on my spotify, you can imagine what my recommendations are like now. I wish Spotify had a way to remove "bad songs" from whatever algorithm is used.

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

"I can't judge your music without seeing your Spotify. I mean, I can guess from your browsing history and cookies that your taste is rough, but that's all I'll say for now.

I never used Spotify, so he was doing this assessment from my cookies...from where? Youtube? I don't login there either, I just browse it. Anyway, that's my test on this.

pimlottc3• 6 years ago

It’s part of the joke; it insults your tastes no matter what they are.

unnouinceput2• 6 years ago

Oh, it's a joke? I didn't realized that. I thought that legit it does some AI stuff, not just randomly takes insults from a database and throw it at you.

mratsim• 6 years ago

This is just a generic statement. Even in a container with no cookies it gives that statement.

newsbinator2• 6 years ago

Your spotify was horny-soundtrack-movie-soundtrack bad.

I suppose because soundtracks and 90s dance remixes are what I listen to while programming.

For soundtracks, I made a playlist that goes for 28hrs 30 mins full of:

* Hans Zimmer

* James Horner

* John Williams

* Alan Silvestri

* David Newman

* Danny Elfman

* Christopher Tin

* John Powell

* Michael Giacchino

* Ramin Djawadi

* etc

perryizgr8• 6 years ago

Do you mind sharing that playlist? Sounds interesting :)

iamd3vil• 6 years ago

Please do share the playlist. Will love to listen to it.

newsbinator2• 6 years ago

Here's the playlist link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/31buZEaVGW9f5Y4cEcKtbt?si=...

jdc• 6 years ago

Have you heard much Vangelis? I think you'd probably like him.

bartread3• 6 years ago

Appears to be dead (likely hugged). Getting an application error from Heroku.

ozychhi• 6 years ago

Probably killed by hackernews, not everything is webscale unfortunately.

bartread3• 6 years ago

I think so. Imagine the bill if it were simply allowed to autoscale without an upper bound.

hi5eyes• 6 years ago

its at the top of reddit music subs too

traveler01• 6 years ago

Thing sh on my music tastes...

partyfaker1• 6 years ago

Seems like it was hugged to death within half an hour, ah Hacker News.

DJBunnies• 6 years ago

Best to worst in the last few years.

dqpb• 6 years ago

Excellent data mining strategy.

rodiger5• 6 years ago

Not sure how much damage / utility music activity + profile pic + username have.

fbelzile• 6 years ago

The problem with this service is that most times, I don't chose what I listen to. Spotify does.

I play music all day while working and I'd love to listen to more artists but most times, I'm stuck in the routine between my Release Radar on Fridays, Discovery Weekly on Monday, and Daily Mixes during the rest of the week. I add songs I like to a variety of personal playlists and sometimes I start a "Song Radio" for a song I like. But even then, I just end up getting the same songs Spotify seems to think I liked only because they've already played them to me over and over. Part of me wonders if their algorithm favours songs that costs them less in royalties...

Playlists made by real people seem way better than any Spotify playlist, but they are difficult to discover. I'd love a feature that recommends me playlists from people that share my music tastes. One example, is a playlist called "Sexy Bath" by Nicoleta Tataru.

ubermonkey2• 6 years ago

The problem with this service is that most times, I don't chose what I listen to. Spotify does.

This is one reason I never really clicked with it, or with Pandora, and why I have really enjoyed and used Apple Music. I'm not really interested in algorithmic playlists most of the time. I want what I want. I've been listening to music a long time; I can make connections on my own. ;)

kwakja• 6 years ago

I follow artists I like as a way of adding them to my library and "like" particular songs if I want them more accessible without having to go to the artist page. This is the way I listen to what I want (along with occasionally making playlists).

I actually really enjoy the ability to effortlessly discover new music I never would have found otherwise that Spotify gives. The recommendation algorithm can be weird at times, but I hear liberal use of likes and dislikes helps though YMMV.

As an aside, everyone else I've seen using Spotify tends to strictly build playlists and not really follow any artists. Not really sure what to make of that.

EvgeniyZh2• 6 years ago

I have no proofs, but I feel that liking/disliking songs does make difference (even though I'm still struggling to get rid of tons of bad covers and mediocre music in Slav languages)

whymauri2• 6 years ago

Liking/disliking makes a difference, but for some reason my likes from 2014 seem to have an identical weight to my likes from today.

trinix912• 6 years ago

even though I'm still struggling to get rid of tons of bad covers and mediocre music in Slav languages)

What region is your Spotify set to? It seems to base the recommendations on the region (I live in the Nordics, but used the US version for some time and got recommended a ton of spanish music).

scpedicini• 6 years ago

I wish the playlists were better but half the time when I search for a playlist to suit a specific mood, It'll have a minimum of 5000 songs on there which means that the overall average quality of the songs is probably going to be pretty low.

You know that the individual who created the playlist in no way hand curated that list, hell they probably haven't even listened to half the songs that they added to their playlist, much less vetted them.

makbol• 6 years ago

Does not work for me :(

guidovranken• 6 years ago

It looks like the API is overloaded.

With regards to taste, you usually need to find a suitable gateway into an unpopular genre to begin appreciating it. I always hated jazz until I turned 30, when I heard the melodic jazz of Avishai Cohen [1] and Phronesis [2], which led me to Eric Dolphy [3] and ultimately to free jazz outfits like Alexander von Schlippenbach and Peter Brotzmann. Having grown bored of everything else also helps.

I recently cancelled my paid subscription to Spotify after 10 years and I use Youtube a lot now. The Spotify web app is not great and Youtube recommendations are a lot better in my opinion.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6KYbpDditU

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEw0swsmqYk

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln8naZpOJ0o

runarberg3• 6 years ago

I’ve never had a spotify account and whenever I want to listen to a specific song I go to youtube, even if I had already bought the song on bandcamp. It is amazing, sometimes I discover for the first time that the song has an amazing music video, or—better yet—a fan made music video (see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOeL6PYrU8M).

I can’t speak much for the recommendations, as I am fine with getting my recommendations from the radio and I prefer listening to whole CDs over playlists.

mariusor• 6 years ago

Great suggestions. You might know them but I want to add Nik Bärtsch's Ronin[1], The Bad Plus[2], Nils Petter Molvær[3] and maybe some Ibrahim Maalouf[4].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8eL95fIQbk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNI-2i6t7Zs

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edT6QGBmkrc

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpg8jBFaj3c

simplify• 6 years ago

The Bad Plus (version 1) is such an unreasonable concentration of extraordinary talent, I haven't yet found anything else that comes close.

conformist• 6 years ago

I had a similar Jazz experience. Thanks to Spotify, I ended up going to Bad Plus, Brad Mehldau, Avishai Cohen and similar concerts and started to appreciate free Jazz and the local scene more, too. I found this incredibly enriching, and it has made me try to play the piano again.

nefitty• 6 years ago

I study the Spotify web app a lot. What is it about the app that you don’t like?

welcometomiami• 6 years ago

Ew.

Finnucane2• 6 years ago

It doesn't seem to work with the desktop web player. I keep getting application errors.

fireattack2• 6 years ago

It doesn't care which player you use, does it? It just uses the API to read your account. For what it's worth, I exclusively use web player and it can get my data fine.

Finnucane2• 6 years ago

OKay, I got it to work. It was disturbed that I listen to Daniel Kahn, and seemed to disapprove of listening to jazz. Zero percent basic, whatever that means.

I guess it would be even worse, except that most of the Tzadik Records catalog isn't on Spotify.

iamsaitam• 6 years ago

long gone are the days of Pitchfork having "objective good taste"...

NikolaeVarius2• 6 years ago

Well that was dumb. The entire thing was generic insults that could be applied to literally anything.

You are 0% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to Perihelion Ship?.

Screw you, they're great. Its Opeth with growling.

animal_spirits2• 6 years ago

Thats the point. Its designed to make fun of you

NikolaeVarius2• 6 years ago

So much AI for something that seems like a list of random insults that could be used in any situation. Why bother?

brobinson• 6 years ago

Its Opeth with growling.

So... Opeth before Heritage? lol

scamify• 6 years ago

Sounds like a scam, no way am I connecting this to my Spotify account for them to leech out my personal data.

bb101• 6 years ago

I find it disconcerting how many people here are allowing a random service, most probably unheard of till now, to view their Spotify profile.

rodiger5• 6 years ago

It's a spotify profile- would love to see how someone could weaponize music taste

Peskier• 6 years ago

Anyone that wants to revoke the access this (or any previously used) app had to your spotify account, you can revoke access here: https://www.spotify.com/uk/account/apps/

humanistbot• 6 years ago

Yeah, the absolute lack of any privacy statements makes me wary. They get access to my entire music history and personal info, and just say that they won't post anything? Pass.

aroman• 6 years ago

To be clear, it looks like the oauth scope they're requesting only allows read-only access to your account. So it's not like they could actually post on your behalf without additional express permissions, barring a Spotify API bug (as far as I understand).

That said of course I agree they should have an explicit privacy policy regardless.

samename• 6 years ago

The privacy policy is here: https://pudding.cool/privacy/

dieg0• 6 years ago

For taste... We have colors

borishn• 6 years ago

Hi, I am collecting data for my own purposes, and in exchange for your data I'll give you some snarky comments.

Sincerely, AI

Dumblydorr• 6 years ago

Spotify mobile has weird issues for me. I'll be playing podcast A, then when I switch to podcast B, the display on the bottom gets stuck on A. I can still use buttons, but unless I restart the app, it will always keep podcast A on display. It'll even keep the timestamp I was on for A, even if I start a new podcast fresh. Mildly annoying...

In terms of recs, it does ok. There are weeks when every discover Weekly track is bizarre ambient music or very quiet music, like I'm supposed to be a spa owner. Then sometimes it has delivered great tracks. But as a musician, it's very rare for me to find new gems, I've heard of so many via friends, class, YT, etc.

Overall, spotify is great, but the app and algorithm could use improvement.

ausbah• 6 years ago

I know the bot is spewing nonsense when it starts insulting Queen, Van Halen, and Electric Light Orchestra

very funny to get roasted by a machine though!

Jaxan2• 6 years ago

The insults don’t really work on me. It is also contradicting itself

Your spotify was jazz-everyones-heard-of-jazz-snob-never-turn-down-a-microphone bad.
You're too trendy for your own good. You know there's good music from before 2019, right?

andybp854• 6 years ago

You are 1% basic. Jimkata and The Disco Biscuits? Where do you even find this shit?.

That might be the highest compliment I've ever received!

stemlord• 6 years ago

Clearly this is flawed solely based on the fact that its "objective" taste in allegedly non-basic music culture is learned from a corpus of Pitchfork reviews and subreddits. I guess that's part of the joke

fireattack2• 6 years ago

This is pretty funny, that "fuck marry kill" one throws me off a little bit though.

rurban2• 6 years ago

That's where it didn't respond anymore, and I had to kill it.

The comments before were not enlightening enough, as I was music editor and dj on a local indie radio station, so it should be the other way round. The general taste sucks. Spotify's release radar only recommends shit, but nevertheless it's still the best to find the hidden gems. You won't find them on radio shows, other than KTRU or WFMU.

bleeding• 6 years ago

First time I've ever seen KTRU mentioned on the internet!

boh• 6 years ago

Honestly it's not too bad. I've pretty much tried every platform, including the ones no longer with us (RIP Rdio) and no Spotify isn't perfect, but it's pretty good in relative terms. Every platform, after some time, gets stuck in a recommend loop. If I listen to enough recommended tracks, it gives me more recommendations of similar tracks, but if I keep listening, the recommendations eventually just become the songs they've already recommended and they get recommended over and over. Spotify does that but their tree of recommendations has far more branches and playlists from users adds randomness to the recommend algorithm. The other platforms aren't as good with that (haven't tried Apple Music in a while though).

ryneandal• 6 years ago

It really dragged me through the mud about all the German hip hop in my history when my Spotify was hacked checks calendar 4 years ago.

jonplackett• 6 years ago

You are 25% basic. Yeah, you've got some obscure artists like Mojave 3, but your real top ones are ultra-mainstream like Taylor Swift.. You're stuck in the early 2010s. For you, music's been all downhill since Auli'i Cravalho made How Far I'll Go.

Connecting my Spotify account to the Alexa my 3 year old has figured out how to use was a definite mistake.

joshgel• 6 years ago

Right, I'm not sure I should get dinged for letting my daughter listen to Baby Shark or Taylor Swift on repeat, but I guess that's life...

young_unixer2• 6 years ago

It says the same things that someone from 4chan's /mu/ would say about my music taste.

mgh2• 6 years ago

I have been logged out and the recovery process through email does not work. Basic error caused me to never use it again.

I can start over with a new account, but I will lose all my bookmarked songs.

QA did not bother to check this simple on boarding process for long time users.

hans1729• 6 years ago

Love how polarizing this is on HN. Half the comments are afraid of their precious data being leeched, other half is divided into "eww" and "this is amazing" :-)

I'm stuck in "Loading your music library...Spotify limiting how many people can use this app at once [...] I'll try again in n seconds" limbo :(

RiXeN• 6 years ago

If it doesn't work it might be because your privacy related browser plugins are blocking the Spotify requests. My privacy badger was blocking the request by default.

blhack2• 6 years ago

Huh, I wonder if this is just a mad lib that is being used to gather information about people?

It's sayin stuff like "You know music existed before 2019, right?", but also criticizing me for liking Stan Rogers, who died in 1983, Jay Z, and Trevor Hall, who seemed to peak in the early 2000s.

Maybe I just haven't finished my coffee yet, but I was kindof hoping that this would actually use AI to figure out the musical variety of my listening history and suggest more people to listen to or something like that. Seems like it was just a bunch of mad libbed insults though.

Agentlien2• 6 years ago

I had the same feeling. It made a spot on joke about how much AC/DC I listen to followed by a funny and relevant comment about too much Slipknot. But then it followed it up by calling me obsessed with two bands I can't even remember listening to in recent years. One of which I never really listened much to.

semi-extrinsic• 6 years ago

For me also, the big punchline revolved around a song from the Dirty Dancing movie that I had to actually look up to find out if I've ever heard before. Now I'm a sucker for 80s synth-pop, don't get me wrong, but that specific song I'm 99.9% sure I've never actually played on Spotify. So it kinda seems like they've hard coded some insults with pop culture cross-references. The "AI" be like

  select case (person%likes)
    case ('80s-synth-pop')
    print *, 80s_pop_insult_char
    case ('single-specific-artist')
    print *, person%likes_artist//'-stan'
    ! (...)
  end select

Talanes2• 6 years ago

Yeah, it called out Todd Barry as one of the most listened to things, and I haven't listened to comedy on Spotify since I started listening to a weekly stable of podcasts like six years ago.

nwsm• 6 years ago

Yeah some of it seemed tailored and accurate, specifically the insults at the end (They pegged my music perfectly with "stoner-frat-bro bad"), but most of it was just pulling most played artists and songs and making vague jokes.

mot0rola• 6 years ago

i did not understand the need for the hostile language.

i regret letting this access my account. i would recommend others to not give this tool access, it is not worth it.

jbreckmckye• 6 years ago

Same. I gave it access to my data, it spat out a bunch of vague insults that just... didn’t mean anything.

It called me a “manic pixie dream girl” - I’m male.

It said I was “local-talk-radio-bumper-sticker-bitch“, which isn’t even an adjective.

I revoked access afterwards but like you I felt a bit conned.

nilram• 6 years ago

You know music existed before 2019, right?

It gave me the line about being stuck in 2010. Just an insult machine. It would actually be useful if it gave me songs it thought were more "cool" based on my current lists. Still, I'm getting a perspective by reading other people's amusement with the comments here on HN.

martin_a4• 6 years ago

This obviously isn't a real AI.

My results and text pieces are pretty much the same as everyone else's here in the comments.

It just fetches some playlists, fills the blanks in its text pieces and that's it.

Strom• 6 years ago

Sounds like any other AI. Surely you weren't expecting some sort of scientific breakthrough with this gag site?

martin_a4• 6 years ago

Well, I'd have at least hoped for some "big data" foo and statistics to see how "unique" or niche my playlists are.

sinemetu11• 6 years ago

AI means a chat bot in this case or? I don't see anything that would imply more interesting computation is going on under the surface here.

anarbadalov• 6 years ago

i cannot wait to try this, but currently my wife is using Spotify to listen to the Lion King soundtrack with my 3-yr-old for the 50th time this week. The kid has for sure ruined the algorithm. But even before that happened, Spotify was bad when it came to discoverability. Reading the other comments here, it sounds like it hasn't improved.

jariel• 6 years ago

"4% basic, manic-pixie-dream-girl-jazz-flex-boomer bad."

Too much beebop and nothing past 2015.

A lot of people here revelling in their 'not basic' results, the thing is, that's maybe something interesting, but the vast majority of arcane music is straight up bad. Just because it's 'different' doesn't make it good. Most artists who are actually 'pretty good' have some kind of following - they get picked up, at least marginally. Of course there's nothing wrong with 'liking that band with 2K views'. One reason this happens if if they are 'genre' meaning, a newer band, playing into a past sound or genre, people may not pick up. A local band here in Montreal is really good, but they play a kind of specific Cajun country/rock, so their appeal is 'respectable' but 'quaint'.

mromanuk• 6 years ago

I love it, really funny. It's great how the AI make a coherent critic, feels real.

chadlavi• 6 years ago

To whom does my listening history get sold if I hook my Spotify up to this?

balozi• 6 years ago

This contraption is the digital equivalence of the proverbial white van that kids are told to never climb into. Don't do it, even if the man said he has puppies or snarky retorts inside.

11thEarlOfMar• 6 years ago

This was fun. I like that the AI had a bit of a personality.

In terms of bad vs. good, though, music is like a lot of things in life, so subjective that you can't judge another person's taste. If for no other reason than people care about music to wildly different degrees. I've met people who say they don't listen to music. As in ever. Others cannot let a minute go by without having something playing in their head. It's akin to judging taste in food or recreational activities or movies. It's not really about what's good, rather, what gets a positive mental response.

That point aside, I'd say that what would be interesting is measuring how broad a person's musical tastes are. I.e., how much have they been exposed to and how much of that have they assimilated into their regular listening rotation. Pandora does a pretty good job suggesting artists I've never heard. When I hear one I like, I'll incorporate some songs into my regular rotation on Spotify.

If you must know, I have Bad Taste. The bad as in Hawaiian shirt-etc.-etc.-etc.... bad.

naravara3• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure it flags everyone as having bad taste and the algorithm is tuned to customize its mockery. The AI is simulating a record store snob.

That said, I thought it was funny because I realize people making fun of me for not being cool doesn't have any effect on me anymore. Is this what middle-age is about?

It also focused on mocking my musical tastes being stuck in the early 2010s, but I haven't actually used Spotify since 2015 so I guess that checks out from its perspective.

slowwriter• 6 years ago

I kind of felt like yelling at it for judging my music taste based on tracks and artists I haven't listened to for years.

hedora3• 6 years ago

Most of the comments here are people that use Spotify complaining about Spotify. I don’t understand what makes it a “sticky” service that people feel they have to put up with.

They have many competitors, and tools to copy your music selections between services exist. For example:

https://www.tunemymusic.com/

Also, Spotify pays musicians less than most other services:

https://www.dittomusic.com/blog/how-much-do-music-streaming-...

Spotify’s pricing is also inline with competitors. I don’t get it.

citrus1330• 6 years ago

Spotify is better than the competitors. HN is just filled with grumps who love to complain about everything.

hedora3• 6 years ago

In what way is it “better”?

I tried three competitors as I moved away from Spotify, and found they were all substantially better than it.

I care about music selection, recommendation quality, and library stability (not deleting stuff from my collection).

indigomm• 6 years ago

Spotify is ubiquitous. There is hardly a device that doesn't support it.

scottbucks• 6 years ago

This algorithm is bloody rude! But I get it, and to be honest it's not my fault I keep listening to the same stuff, Spotify doesn't recommend anything good. And I'm sorry but nobody can convince that Fleetwood Mack isn't one of the best groups of all time!

joshuaheard• 6 years ago

Love this! It needs some way to save your score.

watermelon0• 6 years ago

My problem with Spotify is that it almost exclusively plays music that I listened to in the past, or that's on my playlists. The more times I listen to a song, the more frequently they play it.

You can get around this by closing the account, and opening a new one, but this is too time consuming, since you need to do it frequently.

taneq• 6 years ago

Ah, the old "this guy bought a car, let's show him ads for cars since he's clearly a car-buyer" style of advertising/recommendation.

sabellito• 6 years ago

I have such a different experience. Perhaps we use different bits of the service? I almost always listen to the Discovery Weekly playlist, and very often create radio statations for new tracks, which in turn show me more stuff I haven't listened to before.

nmz• 6 years ago

You can get around this by using the Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists which update and are fine tuned to your likes on music.

miralize• 6 years ago

If you wanted to build this with Apple Music, you'd need a $99 developers account for the privilege

frakt0x90• 6 years ago

I see a lot of comments about how bad spotify recommendations are. I have had great experience but I follow a methodology to keep the recommendations curated. I'll also note that I listen to a wide variety of music ranging from EDM to metal to high enery jpop to classical. What I have found is:

- Adding things to playlists makes a big difference. If you really love a song, hit it with a heart, if you want to hear more but don't love it, add it to a relevant playlist

- skip mildly bad songs

- actively dislike terrible songs (hide it on mobile, hit the no smoking sign on desktop)

I got into a chill beats phase and it took a couple months for me to eradicate it from my discover weekly but now it's pretty on point. Just my 2 cents.

kamaln7• 6 years ago

Honestly all I want is for Spotify to differentiate between music I actually like to actively listen to and music that I like to play in the background 24/7 (e.g. chill hop)

squeaky-clean3• 6 years ago

Same, my spotify thinks I'm very obsessed with Ambient and Classical. I mean I enjoy those genres, but they're not my typical "active listening", I just always want some sort of sound going on in my apartment.

Also whenever I'm DM'ing a D&D game the majority of my daily mixes change to video game music for weeks because I use them as backing music.

renewiltord• 6 years ago

Youtube music distinguishes between them. You can choose one of many supermixes and it clusters the music together.

bmhin• 6 years ago

I've wanted this for video streaming too. After getting rid of cable, I'll often want to put something on in the background while I'm browsing the web or playing switch or something. I feel like almost everyone has a completely different thing they are looking for in active vs passive consumption and being able to tailor it would be very nice. Very straightforward example: I really don't need subtitled shows when I will be half paying attention at best. I also don't want to watch something that is new to me and also "good" when I won't really be paying attention.

freetonik• 6 years ago

If you're on Family plan, you could sign up for a separate account and use it for background music only. Kind of a hassle, but that's what I'm doing with YouTube so that relaxation recommendations aren't mixed with lectures.

tinco• 6 years ago

I feel Spotify makes a half decent jab at identifying moods with their "Daily Mixes" feature. Right now for me it's identified 6 sort of genres that I listen to.

It didn't identify that one of them is hip hop, and the other one is dutch hip hop, which obviously to me are the same genre, but that's alright.

It's got a classical music mix, one for rock, one for soundtracks and one for electronic/lo-fi.

It would've been cool if it knew to group electronic/lo-fi, classical and soundtrack together as my background work music, but I'm not sure how it would've learned that as normally I have to pick one of those genres while working, I have no playlists that mix them.

chadcatlett• 6 years ago

- actively dislike terrible songs (hide it on mobile, hit the no smoking sign on desktop)

I see this suggestion a lot, but for whatever reason I never see an option on desktop to dislike songs. Unless I'm really blind.

Does it show up near the track controls?

shrugthug• 6 years ago

I'm actively looking for it right now and don't see anything. MacOS user.

teddyfrozevelt• 6 years ago

It only works on certain playlists, I think only Discover Weekly and Release Radar. It shows up next to the like button for me.

adam_albrecht• 6 years ago

Another tip: Spotify seems to ignore anything you listen to during a "Private Session".

I listen to a lot of ambient and instrumental music while I work, but I don't want recommendations based on this, so I always start a private session.

brianzelip• 6 years ago

Woah, thanks! My 2020 list was topped by some tracks off kids albums which...are for my toddler!

smichel172• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, "private session" resets every X hours.

lostlogin• 6 years ago

Letting a child use your account ruins it too. Even the AI noticed the horror.

runarberg3• 6 years ago

This seems like a lot of work. I wonder why people tolerate this, it seems to me to be a significantly worse UX over the radio.

rconti• 6 years ago

You think that being able to favorite, skip, and dislike songs is worse UX than the radio, which just plays endlessly, whether you want to listen to that song (or annoying DJ) or commercial or not? I mean, sure, you can change the station, but, best case scenario, you get a song you want, 3/4 of the way through.

TacticalTable2• 6 years ago

A music experience where you listen to music industry's preferences instead? That's a step down, even from not curating your spotify preferences at all.

kifhuwzrsa• 6 years ago

I use the Spotify heart button as a "mark as listened" button since there is no listening history on Spotify mobile and Spotify adds songs I have already listened to my Release Radar. However, this means I can't use it to tailor my recommendations since I heart everything I listen to.

vlunkr• 6 years ago

Here's my 2 cents: don't rely so much on spotify for recommendations. It's first and foremost a streaming service, any recommendation features are secondary. My strategy is to use a variety of recommendation systems. I've found things through spotify, pandora, gnoosic, reviews, forums, even wikipedia pages. Hunting for music is really fun! Music tastes are subjective, I just don't think the algorithms are ever going to be perfect.

saila• 6 years ago

recommendation features are secondary

The recommendation features, albeit imperfect, are a big reason I'm still on Spotify. I don't think they're secondary at all, as I would have gotten bored by now and canceled my subscription. True, I could go through all the effort you mentioned, but realistically I wouldn't.

chipotle_coyote• 6 years ago

I don't know how much Spotify uses human curation, but Apple Music has a lot of human editors behind the scenes to assemble -- and update/maintain -- what I'm pretty sure are tens of thousands of playlists at this point, based on artist and genre and subject and mood and more. And while this is absolutely one of those Totally Subjective YMMV Works For Me May Suck For You deals, for me it's been far more hit than miss.

(I have some experience with Tidal, which also has apparently human-curated lists but they haven't at all at Apple's level. My experience with Spotify wasn't good, but it was also really limited, because it just didn't offer anything obvious over Apple Music to me -- the reverse is almost certainly true for someone who's already deeply invested in Spotify, though!)

pc86• 6 years ago

Hunting for music is really fun!

I mean, maybe. I only listen to music when I'm a) driving; b) working. Neither are times I'm particularly interested in searching for new bands to listen to, so I'm going to end up relying on my streaming service's recommendation engine.

stingraycharles• 6 years ago

I don’t consider it as much as “relying on Spotify” as I just consider the recommendations a great addition to music discovery. A long time ago I relied heavily on last.fm’s radio for music discovery, and Spotify does a decent job filling that gap.

To each their own, I guess, but I’m naturally a “passive” music discoverer, using a combination of recommendations and similar artist radios and whatnot. It works fairly well.

gimboland• 6 years ago

I agree that some curation effort makes a huge difference.

I have a "Queue" playlist into which I copy my "Discover Weekly" every now and then; then I listen to that Queue playlist, which lets me delete the tracks I don't want, and keep the ones I do (you can't modify your Discover Weekly). Then, every time I refresh the Queue playlist from Discover Weekly, I first move the current Queue contents into a YYYY-MM playlist (e.g. 2020-12 for this month).

I've been doing this for several years and it's been great — I've got a timestamped record of what I was enjoying/discovering during those months, and it does seem to have helped Spotify to keep recommending me things I really do enjoy. (Weirdly some weeks seem _really bad_, like I delete virtually everything — but I guess there's some A/Bing going on there.)

(Also: I'll only like/heart tracks I _particularly_ like, and sometimes I'll just listen to my "Liked Songs" playlist; I think this helps teach Spotify what I really like.)

WA• 6 years ago

Weirdly some weeks seem _really bad_, like I delete virtually everything — but I guess there's some A/Bing going on there.

Noticed the same, but I think this is actually great, because it seems like there is some randomness that gives you different stuff. It’s like breaking your filter bubble.

tomc1985• 6 years ago

I also listen to a wide variety of music, and what I've found works really well is letting playlists run past their end, into the recommended tracks at the bottom. Spotify's usually pretty good about keeping to that theme.

the_arun• 6 years ago

Sorry, I am not going to let an external AI engine sneak into my Playlists :) I would let the AI engines of Spotify do the same job for me - whenever that happens.

madamelic• 6 years ago

I have to give huge applause for the quality of writing. I genuinely can't tell how expansive the responses are, which is huge for AI.

It definitely has the UX feel of being a bit creepy on how well it responds.

corytheboyd2• 6 years ago

My friends and I all did it, the punchlines all seem to be the same. I think it feels “creepy” if you attach emotion to songs (I certainly do!) and then listen to them often, but it’s really not all that hard to pick out your top tracks/artists to do that with. Anyway it’s still fun, I liked it

anupamchugh• 6 years ago

Exactly, I love the wittiness in writing. But wonder if the AI responds similarly to other users.

majinuub• 6 years ago

Your spotify was pretentious-hip-hop-god-rock bad.
Thank your obsessions with Childish Gambino and christian rock for that.
Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
awkward-beatboxing bad

Bruh

bitsoda• 6 years ago

"Your spotify was midwestern-stoner-potty-training-baby-shark-prison bad."

As a 35 y/o with a toddler I'd say they nailed it.

shireboy• 6 years ago

I thought this was going to help me get rid of that annoying ad for a "Charmin fresh booty", but all it did was criticize my listening. Don't care what you say, SkyNet, REM rocks.

shanemlk• 6 years ago

this triggered me

absolutelyrad• 6 years ago

Damn, stop criticizing my taste in Taylor Swift's music!

squeaky-clean3• 6 years ago

This was great, really spot on and snarky. Though there are some ambient playlists I sleep to and so it weighed those far more than it probably should, but I guess how is it supposed to know that. My spotify recap thingie said the same thing about some of the ambient artists.

Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
stoned-itunes-visualizer bad
cling-clang-pots-and-pans-music bad

Gotta say, that's a pretty perfect call out of my average music listening.

wreath• 6 years ago

Everyone is blaming the Spotify algorithm for bad suggestions. I ran this test, it's my OWN TASTE that turns out to be bad according to this :(

Jokes aside, I think this is a really neat toy with a great sense of humor

JakeStone• 6 years ago

My badness made me laugh. I like certain show tunes when I program. Don't judge me, the web site already did. But because I read a news story about The Chicks rebranding and got curious about their new album, it got added to my gestalt.

Thus: Your spotify was like-country-but-smoke-weed-with-your-gay-friends-drama-club-tonys-watch-party bad.

shakow• 6 years ago

Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to Orchestre Lyrique de la RTF?

Thanks, AI.

monksy• 6 years ago

You're stuck in the 2000s. You know there's been good music since Metalocalypse: Dethklok, right?

False. Time to throw this into the death pit.

supuun• 6 years ago

It made fun of me for listening to BTS :(

thankfullyfired• 6 years ago

A lot of people in this thread have no sense of humor and need to seriously lighten up.

edm0nd• 6 years ago

A tale as old as the internet itself.

henry_bone2• 6 years ago

That'd be me. Wasn't in a good mood when I commented. :-) ironically, my comment is funny to me (at least) now.

Agentlien2• 6 years ago

This seems to be just a few canned quips with fields to insert a few of your most listened to artists and tracks. Quite funny though.

What's actually more fun is Spotify's yearly playlists with your most listened to songs. I always get a kick out of analysing those.

WhoCaresLies• 6 years ago

americans really despise when foreign companies are successful

rubyist5eva• 6 years ago

```> Your spotify was moonwalk-BFG bad.

Thank your obsessions with Michael Jackson and Doom (Original Game Soundtrack) for that.
But wait, it gets worse:

You listen to these tracks too much:

Enter the Cipher by Follow The Cipher Afterlife by Metalite Winterfall by Follow The Cipher Valkyria by Follow The Cipher My Soldier by Follow The Cipher You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:

Amaranthe Mick Gordon Nightwish Celldweller Little V. You are 1% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to monomer?.

You're stuck in the early 2010s. For you, music's been all downhill since Amaranthe made Leave Everything Behind.

Well, that was really something.

I need to go recalibrate my taste levels.

Shutting down.```

well shit

the_only_law• 6 years ago

Sororities statistics are weird, all sites like this tend to pull up stuff I haven’t listened to in 3-4 years and don’t have in any playlists. Similar to this, I’ve noticed a lot of sites that pull your top artists, will pull artists I’ve listened to once or twice recently, but not ones that be listened to continuously over time.

adolfoabegg• 6 years ago

Hilarious! Nice work

shoulderfake• 6 years ago

Oh please tell me whats good music two random guys who wrote an algorithm .... Gimme a break

JeanSebTr• 6 years ago

Somehow, the one time we babysitted a friend's kid made a kid song go to the top of my most listened tracks...

I definitely don't use my Spotify account enough for it to do meaningful recommendations. Too much time on the Discover Weekly and it is more and more diverging from tracks I actually like. The algorithm feed itself and lose precision.

I miss the recommendation capabilities of rdio.

dcolkitt• 6 years ago

What's really clever about this bot is that it mostly seems to criticize the good music in your library. Nobody is going to feel insecure about their guilty pleasures. I already know that Mambo Number 5 and Achy-Breaky Heart aren't musical masterpieces.

But when it starts telling us the stuff we think is high-brow stuff is actually crap, that's when people really start feeling insecure and second-guessing our personal taste. You start thinking wait, what's wrong with Nine Inch Nails and Haim? I thought they're supposed to be good...

djmetzle• 6 years ago

That's great!

rahkiin• 6 years ago

You're stuck in the 1970s. Forget about Eagles's One of These Nights (2013 Remaster) and move on.

Hah.

anotheryou• 6 years ago

tries a bit too hard to be negative to really get what it finds.

tonystride• 6 years ago

Wow reading discussion of music consumption on HN is so surreal for me as a working pianist / keyboardist / accordionist / educator. There’s a guilty pleasure I derive from mostly feeling unworthy when reading through HN posts about tech, you all are amazing! At the same time I really appreciate that HN is aware of your minority tech nerd preferences compared to the greater consumer population who are perfectly happy in their walled gardens. I practice tech in the same way some one casually dabbles in piano. I wish I didn’t have to be in a walled in garden but not enough time (for now) to make a website that’s not a godaddy template. The disdain for using gd services must be similar to how I feel about music industry discussion, but I accept that I’m a minority since I can see the ‘source code’ to everything I hear. But yeah pretty funny to be judged by the AI as a consumer for something that I actually use more of as a professional reference tool. I got, 2% basic, jazz-everyones-heard-of-jazz-flex-stuck-in-the-fifties bad. It also made fun of me a lot for listening to every episode of Marion Mcpartland’s ‘Piano Jazz’ that’s available on Spotify...

pjmorris5• 6 years ago

made fun of me a lot for listening to every episode of Marion Mcpartland’s ‘Piano Jazz’ that’s available on Spotify...

That's not you, that's bad AI :)

slmjkdbtl• 6 years ago

  You've been listening to a lot of Yo La Tengo lately.
  u okay?

love some of the jokes, i wonder if they hard coded these in or what

dartharva• 6 years ago

This was fun. Trigger-inducing, but fun.

antidaily• 6 years ago

"OMG. Hold up. Do you really listen to Day of the Diesels by Thomas and Friends?" (sigh)

t0mbstone4• 6 years ago

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success:

I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs.

Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends.

If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great.

Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist.

This has the effect of subtly changing the recommendation algorithm for that playlist over time.

Eventually I end up with a playlist with about 100 songs on it, and recommendations that at least roughly align with the mood.

I tend to get bored of songs pretty quickly though, so when a playlist gets too stale, I will prune the old and tired songs from it.

This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

ckosidows• 6 years ago

I do the same thing now, but the recommended section leaves a lot to be desired on mobile.

There's no way to prevent songs from getting suggested (other than maybe blocking a song entirely?). My recommendeds don't seem to get updated until the playlist has changed dramatically. And repeat songs get added to the section even if I haven't added it the umpteen times it was suggested prior.

Is the experience different on desktop or am I doing something wrong?

johnwyles3• 6 years ago

Anyone here remember turntable.fm? I do. Sad. JQBX.fm isn't the same either. That was a great way to get a higher "hit" ratio though.

MivLives• 6 years ago

I miss it so much. Nothing else has come close. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't added a feature like it.

ugh123• 6 years ago

My "philosophy" with listening to music while programming has been that if I can tell I like the song, then i'm probably focusing too much on it rather than the task at hand.

airstrike• 6 years ago

+1 I do something similar. As a general rule, I prefer to listen to songs I don't already know while working. If I'm humming or singing along, I'm doing it wrong.

jnurmine• 6 years ago

I do this too. It works well.

In addition I have several playlists, as a song might suit the current playlist, and another song might fit playlist B instead. So any playlist might be seeding several other playlists at a time.

Sometimes I go through many, many recommendations, listen to a song in short pieces quickly by skipping most of it. It sounds weird but that way I can pretty accurately tell if the song is shit or not (read: if I end up liking it). If the song passes my filter, I put it to some playlist. I just do this quickly and finally go back and listen to the new ones.

As for "dislike", there isn't one per song but there is a "Don't play this" per artist. I sometimes play children's songs or pop as requested, and after some time the recommendations include music I truly never want to hear again in any recommendations (Marcus & Martinus I'm looking at you).

Also, it feels like only the first songs in a playlist actually matter for the recommendations. I don't know if this is really the case. I'd hope the recommendation engine took a random sampling of the entire playlist and recommended based on those.

Edit: there's a "hide" for a track.

randomstring• 6 years ago

Pandora's suggestion algorithm is much better than Spotify's. What you describe is what I used to do with Pandora. I migrated to Spotify several years ago.

Spotify generates some decent genre based playlists based on my listening history. Not as good as Pandora was.

Lately with the pandemic, I've created a super-chill, ambient play list (I started with Moby's Long Ambients and expanded from there) to relax before bedtime. This has been really helpful for unwinding in these stressful times.

However, an unintended consequence is that Spotify now thinks I listen to soothing ambient more than 50% of the time. My year in music is all ambient and my suggested play lists are all wishy-washy now. Apparently there is no "ignore this playlist when tracking usage." You can only manually disable tracking under "Settings > Social" and it times out after every session.

klmadfejno4• 6 years ago

I haven't used Pandora in a decade, but when I did, it strongly preferred to play mainstream artists, and within artists, only a handful of specific tracks. They weren't bad choices, but I got pretty bored of them.

Spotify takes a lot more risks and I think its highly preferable.

tsukikage• 6 years ago

I loved Pandora back when they were experimenting, but then they stopped providing service where I live and Spotify is the only game in town :(

toyg• 6 years ago

Yeah, I hate this too. I use citypop and synthwave when exercising, and they then “pollute” everything else.

royaltjames• 6 years ago

Thank you for saying this. I've been trying to use Spotify for a year now and it leaves so much to be desired on process. You're doing gods work

Alupis10• 6 years ago

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less.

Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.

The "shuffle" alone on Spotify was enough to send me running. Have a playlist with 200 songs from 80 different artists? Well, we'll just play this one artist - the same album even! - back to back to back until you're annoyed enough to manually select the next song!

I understood people flocking to Spotify back when it was the only game in town that allowed you to play specific songs, make playlists, and "download" songs for offline (airplane) playback. But now Pandora does all this too - and has for the past several years. The two services are even priced about the same...

So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?

m-p-3• 6 years ago

For one, it's US-only. And the recommendations from Spotify so far are good enough for my needs and my whole family is on it so the work required to migrate from one platform to another isn't null so unless there's a major irritant I don't plan on switching.

CuriousSkeptic• 6 years ago

Pandora is only available in the U.S. right now – but we are working on bringing our music service to other parts of the world.

I guess Spotify is still the only game in town :(

smcnally3• 6 years ago

Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior

IIRC, these algos were part of a project called ~Muse which later forked, and there was a schism between the algos and clickstream data or the personal data and anonymized cohort data. Will have to review / re-search.

The trove of our searches, listens, and skips Pandora has / had did a good job informing recommendations and was an effective moat for my use.

ricardobeat• 6 years ago

Oh how the world would have been different if Rdio hadn't been acquired and killed by Pandora. It's recommendations were perfect.

mike_d2• 6 years ago

Spotify won the same way Dropbox and Slack did. They didn't invent anything magical, they just had a client for every platform that worked when people tried it. Like web apps? Here you go. Linux nerd? Here is a deb repo. Have a smartphone? Cool, we don't care what kind.

Even now I googled "Pandora windows app", clicked a few times, and ended up on some Microsoft Store page. Interestingly enough if I add "mac" to my search terms I just get a download...

reissbaker• 6 years ago

IME Spotify's recommendations, while not perfect, are way, way better than Pandora's. Spotify is comfortable letting you explore niches; Pandora, when I used it, always seemed to try to hill-climb out of whatever niche you were listening to as fast as it could into whatever music was the most broadly popular at the moment.

colinmhayes2• 6 years ago

Imagine thinking recomendations can be objectively better than others. Personally I don't care for pandora recommendations one bit and love my spotify mixes.

0xbadcafebee2• 6 years ago

Pandora has good algorithms, but as a product is objectively terrible.

It is literally impossible for you to just sort the list of stations you have created. If you have 120 stations, you have to s l o w l y scroll through them in random order until you find the one you want. And even though there are thumbnails next to them (presumably to make them easier to identify), the thumbnails change. There's a hundred different usability problems, and as far as I can tell, all of them minor features that could have been implemented years ago.

If you don't pay for the premium version, it's a nightmare of pop-ups to prompt you to pay, to the point that you develop reflexes to pass the prompts. Then there's the actual ads, which sometimes seem to disappear for a while, only to barrage you intermittently for a half hour.

The whole thing annoyed me so much, and I complained on their support channels so often, that I dropped them and just started buying music. And of course I then had to pirate the same music I purchased because there's no way to just buy some MP3s so you can move the music around.

RogerL• 6 years ago

Speaking for myself? Content. Philip Glass has 27 albums on Pandora, 105 on Spotify. Nico Mulhy? 7 vs 14. Maarja Nuut. Only 1 album on Pandora. For her, Pandora makes no recommendations for others to listen to, Spotify lists 20. Pandora has no bio, Spotify does. Third Coast Percussion? 8 vs 10. I'm just randomly clicking in my library and doing a comparison, they aren't artfully chosen examples.

I recognize this isn't mainstream listening, and for all I know the ratios are reversed for more popular music.

I found the Pandora choices of songs annoying. I love Philip Glass; I don't want to listen to a bunch of other people playing triplets against eighths. It's derivative and boring in comparison. I do want to listen to his contemporaries that compose in different ways. Or let's take Nuut again. I came across her recently while surveying contemporary Estonian composers. Pandora doesn't let me do that so far as I can tell. I'm interested in what is going on there compositionally over the last 2 decades, I am not looking for another person that writes something that is very 'similar" (according to the Pandora algorithms).

Finally, I never use shuffle. So much of what i listen to are

I understand my use case is not the only one, but neither is yours! People select different apps because they provide what the person wants.

kick_in_the_dro2• 6 years ago

Spotify is great, people on HN like to complain.

Aside from having nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free, their recommendations have helped me find a lot of great songs. I don't personally listen to the curated playlists but many of my friends love them.

lvturner• 6 years ago

Pandora restricted access for me when I was living in the UK years a go and I could no longer access it. (I don’t know if this is the case) Spotify won for me by default, as I can actually access it.

damontal• 6 years ago

I bit the bullet and just subscribe to both. Pandora for discovery and radio and Spotify for specific listening.

arp2422• 6 years ago

Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing

That's exactly what I'm not looking for; I'm perfectly fine with making my own music choices. I know what I like, have an extensive "library" on Spotify, and play from just that.

The biggest thing I'm missing from Spotify (or indeed, most players, except the one I wrote myself years ago) is the ability to say "play random album from my collection". Play random track is too biased towards albums with 60 tracks vs. albums with just one track.

stjohnswarts• 6 years ago

I use the "radio station" features on both because I'm not a curator. It does seems like Pandora's version is a bit better but not drastically so. Then again I'm not a music monster, I listen to what the algorithms tell me until they push me too far :)

mastazi• 6 years ago

When I try to open pandora.com from Australia I get an empty page with the sentence "Whoops! You weren't supposed to end up here."[1]

[1] https://ibb.co/YNxhbkH

thaumasiotes• 6 years ago

Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.

Pandora wants to get rid of those features. All their advertising now is "if you pay for a premium account, you can play whatever music you want, on demand".

This reminds me really strongly of how eBay decided that (1) customers prefer to buy things at a fixed price [completely correct]; so that (2) they should try to prevent people from listing ordinary auctions, because customers don't like those. [No!] Instead, the goal was to just be the place where people would go if they wanted to buy something online.

Except of course that that completely undermines the concept of eBay. They were an established auction site that intentionally drove auctions away. And then they complained that people preferred to buy things from Amazon.

In both cases, it looks like a popular company with an established brand sees a rival that's even more popular, and concludes that the only path forward must be to implement features the rival offers while discontinuing or discouraging any features where they're doing better than the rival is. How does this make sense?

antihero3• 6 years ago

Pandora is also US only unless you use a VPN.

danielscrubs• 6 years ago

Pandoras was better but is now much much worse. Spotifys recommendations are the fold standard.

mercer2• 6 years ago

So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?

Aside from amount of content (which wasn't an issue earlier), I suspect the primary reason is that Pandora isn't available in Europe. I loved it so much (>5 years ago?) that I used as VPN, but this didn't quite work on my phone and ended up being too much of a bother.

Spotify's big advantage, like most monopoly-focused 'startups' is their monopoly. Not actually providing the best to their customers.

I can use Spotify without a VPN, it has a lot of stuff Pandora doesn't have, and I can share stuff with friends because everyone else also uses Spotify. It's difficult to compete with that.

rypskar• 6 years ago

I did search for 5 random bands I listen to on Pandora, found a total of 0 albums and 0 songs.

mnd9992• 6 years ago

Pandora decided a few years back to block international users. I don’t know if they’ve changed this - I haven’t bothered to go back.

solarkraft2• 6 years ago

I'm going to check out Pandora, but out of the large ones (Apple Music, Deezer) Spotify has by far the best algorithmic recommendations.

chucky• 6 years ago

Pandora isn't available outside the US, so it doesn't really matter how good it is compared to Spotify I can't use it anyway.

It doesn't matter how good the tech is if business/legal can't keep up with the competition.

amelius• 6 years ago

If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard.

Which button is that?

klmadfejno4• 6 years ago

The secret to my success to spotify is be a free user with adblock. On desktop browsers, there's no forced shuffle / variance. It just plays the album from start to finish, and, of course, no ads. Pick something manually you like. When you're done, pick a an artist from their list of similar artists. Play entire albums at a time. If you're not immediately dissatisfied, you'll probably feel good about the next half hour of music.

everdrive• 6 years ago

here's my secret to success:
effectively, I manually make my own playlist.

t0mbstone4• 6 years ago

yes, but my method at least introduces me to music that I would have otherwise been exposed to.

nijaru• 6 years ago

I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

You can at least for radio playlists. You can specifically say to never play this song or artist again. They used to let you thumb up or down on tracks which I think was a much easier UI.

Skipping songs doesn't seem to do enough for songs in your playlists so you have to go through the whole right click -> never play again workflow. I really wish I could just downvote individual songs as they play and tailor it that way since sometimes I'm just tired of a particular song, but maybe I like the song or the artist and don't want to click on 'never hear this again'. It just seems to repeat certain songs way too much based on your listening history.

CoryAlexMartin• 6 years ago

My solution to me getting tired of tracks in my work playlist was to keep adding more. It's currently at 2885 songs, or 5.2 days of music. It's mostly video game music, since a lot of video game music is written to not be too distracting.

Though maybe I should say the majority of the playlist consists of songs I've imported into iTunes. Apple does a decent job at letting you seamlessly integrate your personal library with stuff from their streaming catalog.

smcnally3• 6 years ago

I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words) ... what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great. ... (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me.

SoundCloud Weekly[0] recommendations have been solid for months specifically with ambient: ~85% Good tracks with ~30% Resonating enough to Favorite. My other contexts / use cases include listening by Album and Artist, Genre, Mood- and Mind-Setting, and Discovery.

Spotify works well for Albums and Artists. HypeMachine is my go-to for Discovery and Genre. SoundCloud and BandCamp work well for diving into artists and labels discovered. Playlists and Favorites across these are best for Mood- and Mind-Setting, as are "special purpose" options like Brain.fm and Ragya.

[0]https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] [1]https://www.ragya.com/

lazyant• 6 years ago

This is what I do, except using a general playlist. At ~ 300 songs almost all recommendations I didn't like. At current ~ 400 songs all recommendations I don't like and Spotify gave up with a passive-aggressive message sort of "I give up, add more songs if you want better recommendations". (Note that I have a wide variety of styles in the playlist; too lazy to break up in genres and also I kind of like the "surprise" factor)

artursapek• 6 years ago

I've had trouble with this. It seems no matter what I play, Spotify just wants to recommend three songs by Pavement on repeat.

linux_devil• 6 years ago

Do share your playlist , if its public

t0mbstone4• 6 years ago

Music preferences are subjective, because familiarity is a huge part of appreciation. Sharing my particular fingerprint of music appreciation with other people doesn't do me any good, because they will only criticize my preferences as they are not their own.

sentinel• 6 years ago

I recommend the app Mick Tagger for the drag process. Makes it easier and keeps you in the zone with programming instead of having to fiddle with a song and playlist.

pgt• 6 years ago

Share an electronica playlist and prove it ;).

mercer2• 6 years ago

Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist.

I take a similar approach, but I've found that the recommendation algorithm is pretty bad, so as an extra step I click on the artist and spend a bit of time listening to their other songs (and add those too, in the hopes it'll affect the algorithm).

This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

That's one of my main issues with the 'recommended' algorithm. 90% of it is stuff I already have in other playlists, or stuff I keep skipping. I really wish the algorithm did a bit more with all the data it has, but I imagine they optimize for sales (to us or promoting artists/labels) over our actual desires.

sli• 6 years ago

I mostly use this approach as well but my experience with multiple services is that I eventually (and sooner, rather than later) end up hearing same 100 or so recommended songs. Maybe I'm too picky, but I just don't have great luck with recommendation engines anywhere I go.

voqv• 6 years ago

Love this. Although I haven't listened to Kanye West for like several months and yet I got roasted into oblivion for listening to him.

earwaxauditor• 6 years ago

The dialog was just saying that I listen to x, y, and z in a snide way. The summary was cool.

doiwin• 6 years ago

I'm always curious to broaden my musical taste.

But I would not want to let that site log into my Slotify account.

Gnoosic is a site I love. It creates AI based recommendations without any login:

https://www.gnoosic.com

coffeekitkat• 6 years ago

Didn't expect it will play a music for me haha, had to pick up my earphones. Anyway it was hilarious.

- Your spotify was anime-slow-dance bad,

On "You listen to these tracks too much:" part, well that is because they are on the top of the playlist. I usually start my Spotify day by just playing the playlist (Liked Songs) so it goes just play the music on whats on top and go down to the first song I fav'ed.

- You are 2% basic. Oh wow The Contes and Crown Jewels! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..

This one got me :) I really like "The Contes" and "Crown Jewels"

- You're stuck in the early 2010s.

Hmm... Kinda not accurate. Does it know when the track was originally released to make accurate one? Like there was an album on my list that it was originally released on 1998-2004 but was released on Spotify earlier this year 2020.

"fuck marry kill.. fast" was fun but got off took me a while to figure it out, I quickly clicked "fuck" and "marry" on SCANDAL (why not right? haha) and thought the A.I. is dead, later I figured out that I need to choose on others too.

jsmith99• 6 years ago

The years are even worse for classical. I've just been told "You're stuck in the 1990s. Forget about Johann Sebastian Bach's Bach, JS : Sacred Cantatas BWV Nos 4 - 6 and move on."

richrichardsson• 6 years ago

I got stuck at the "marry fuck kill" question twice and gave up.

szatkus• 6 years ago

Your spotify was pour-over-coffee-too-much-symphonic metal bad.

Thank your obsessions with Of Monsters and Men and symphonic metal (e.g., Luca Turilli and Van Canto) for that.
Here's what else I learned in that hellscape:

You listen to these tracks too much:

[too embarrassing]

You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:

You are 4% basic. Мёртвые Осы and Zabili Mi Żółwia? Where do you even find this shit?.

You're too trendy for your own good. You only listen to music made in the last year like...

It's amazing that it correctly spotted objectievely shitty songs on my playlist.

parliament322• 6 years ago

Calling this AI.. I had a few friends run it and it turns out it's just madlibs. Fun regardless.

medium_burrito• 6 years ago

I miss Rdio- I got a free subscription back in 2013 courtesy of an employer and it had amazing auto-play features- always good new exciting music.

Spotify by comparison is a crime against good taste.

marianov• 6 years ago

You've been listening to a lot of Guns N' Roses lately.

u okay?

Awesome project

blhack2• 6 years ago

Yeah I think this confirms that this is just a madlib.

Mine was:

You've been listening to a lot of Monolink lately.

u okay?

fao_4• 6 years ago

This is good but it didn't seem to pick up on my constant listening to the Native Tongues group or artists like Del the Funky Homosapien and Queen Lahtifah

cgriswald• 6 years ago

I see a lot of comments here (and some in the YouTube recommendation thread currently on the front page) suggesting sometimes a Rube Goldberg-esque series of behaviors to trick the algorithm into performing properly. I see this mentioned as "easy" and "trivial". I consider it "abrasive" and "tedious." The algorithms should work through normal use of the app. I shouldn't have to tell an app "Ignore this one-off piece of content I reached through an external link that is different from all the other content I've enjoyed and especially different than what I've searched." If I get to the point where I have to curate at that level of detail, what's the point?

It's less work to do what I've been doing all along: get recommendations from friends, family, articles, collabs, biographies, etc. (And it's a lot more fun.)

Avamander3• 6 years ago

I shouldn't have to tell an app "Ignore this one-off piece of content I reached through an external link that is different from all the other content I've enjoyed and especially different than what I've searched.

Do you _really_ think they wouldn't've already implemented it already if it were possible in a reasonable way?

farias0• 6 years ago

Actually I'd bet on the opposite: They don't think it makes sense to ignore it. They want to process this data, and they're confident in the weight it's assigned to it.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

It eviscerated me for listening to a lot of soothing piano songs (mostly from one album). For the last year, we learned that was the best thing to play for our foster kid so she'd sleep. My recommendations will probably never recover. Same for netflix.

celestialcheese• 6 years ago

Man that was fun - great project!

betaby• 6 years ago

On the last step - empty screen

abalashov2• 6 years ago

That was funny. However, I'm one of those people with a bona fide, DRM-free MP3 collection[1]

But I only use Spotify a) in the car and b) while riding my bike/bike trainer. I have an actual DRM-free MP3 collection[1] for the important stuff--which has a little overlap with Spotify, but not too much.

[1] Small - only about 20 GB - and has been contiguously curated, over five distinct "generations" in my life, since I was in 7th grade (1998), when I had a 486 DX4/75 that could just about play an MP3, downloaded over dial-up from a shady FTP server, over my SoundBlaster 16 if I wasn't running X or doing anything else.

triangleman2• 6 years ago

What are your feelings about AAC 128kbps?

abalashov2• 6 years ago

Undefined value. :)

corytheboyd2• 6 years ago

That was fun, if not maybe a bit TOO judgmental!

Tangential: I wish one-off applications like this also offered a one-click de-authorization step at the end to remove access to my account. It’s a pain to go figure out how to do it for certain accounts, especially if you’re mobile and there’s a decent chance you’ll just forget to do it later. I do not like leaving access tokens around in other people’s databases unless I have to. I understand this would require the service to provide such functionality to the application developer, which I’m sure isn’t always available..

jagged-chisel• 6 years ago

Where do you even find this shit?

uh ... Spotify?

numbers• 6 years ago

As someone who has a lot of very obscure artists in my library due to a dialect of my native language, this did a bad job of judging that. About half or more of my listening is not English language music and that was also disregarded.

greyhair2• 6 years ago

So I am just supposed to go though a site and give them my spotify credentials? In 2020?

sl1ck731• 6 years ago

No. It uses oauth and scopes for stuff like playlists and activity.

greenie_beans• 6 years ago

One of my top songs is the absolute worst. It always comes on and I always click next and cuss at Spotify about it. It came on twice in one day recently. Somehow that song is the artist’s top song, despite it being a bonus track and not even on the official album. Too bad they took away the “dislike” button.

greyhair2• 6 years ago

Oddly, I signed up for Spotify family so it would be more affordable for three kids. I spend way more time in Pandora (premium) because after several years of use, it has built up a good idea what I want to listen to. I find Spotify repeats far to often, but that is possibly from my lack of use. I listen to my own music collection more than I listen to Pandora.

meowsnow• 6 years ago

It didn't roast me, weighted on my most recent listening, and instead went for analyzing my whole history at once.

markus_zhang• 6 years ago

Once I see how many basic features got cut from the free plan I immediately decided to not use Spotify for my life. Period.

ironmagma• 6 years ago

Kind of annoying that the site is down, but you still have to wait through 30 seconds of non-functional pauses to get that information. And there's no "retry" button.

factsaresacred• 6 years ago

Check uBlock or Privacy Badger if you have them installed - they may block the Spotify API. Took five refreshes before I figured that out.

rosstex2• 6 years ago

As soon as I saw Tiny Desk Concerts in the list of "objectively good music" at the beginning, I was dying. It knows me too well! I'm gonna check out that list...

Spotify has done an excellent job of recommendations lately. It took several years of liking songs and making playlists, but I've been very impressed with Discover Weekly.

The shuffle function is still broken, however. It only "shuffles" from like the top 50 songs.

UPDATE: It told me JERRY MARTIN is basic?! The composer for Sims and Sim City? Bruh...

chaorace2• 6 years ago

Jerry Martin? No kidding, the Rush Hour OST is legendary! One of my favorite instrumentals to work to, for sure.

rosstex2• 6 years ago

A+!

0xbkt• 6 years ago

You are 0% basic. Elliot Berger and Elènne? Where do you even find this shit?.

This is just awesome, man.

cionescu• 6 years ago

Most of the other comments talk about why Spotify's recommendations are bad, but I think they are great. Discover weekly is my favourite playlist when I feel like listening to something new.

This tool is also awesome -- `Finding a lot of Above & Beyond.` Yes, you are and there should be even more!

kinghajj• 6 years ago

"Your spotify was retiree-softball-league-tommy-bahama-africa-on-touchtunes bad.

Thank your obsessions with Steely Dan, mellow gold, and Africa for that.

Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...

60s-acid-flashback bad

mercury-idolizer bad

parody-song bad

midwest-classic-rock bad

punk-with-grandchildren bad

But wait, it gets worse:

You listen to these tracks too much:

    Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft by Klaatu
    Working Man by Rush
    WEIT WEG by Rammstein
    While My Guitar Gently Weeps - Remastered 2009 by The Beatles
    The Dope Show by Marilyn Manson

You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:

    Ninja Sex Party
    Rammstein
    Led Zeppelin
    Steely Dan
    Rush

You are 15% basic. You're trying to be cool with Klaatu, but your favorites are the same as everybody else's..

You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around Ninja Sex Party's Under the Covers.

That's it. I'm done.

I need to go recalibrate my taste levels.

Shutting down."

Yeah, I'm a 90's kid who listened to their parents' music from the Classic Rock stations they always had on. If anything, I'm more stuck in the 70s; the early 10s is just when I stopped paying much attention to new music, though my wife is trying to change that. You can't shame me, A.I.!

What's funny to me, is that I actually discovered Klaatu via Spotify. I'd never heard them before, but they came up in one of my weekly playlists, and (obviously) I took quite a liking. "Calling Occupants" was my #1 song of 2020.

kraf• 6 years ago

The cynic in me says this is a project to mine some data. I think Cambridge Analytica used IQ tests?

mancerayder2• 6 years ago

It's a shame because "Discover Weekly" is a complete flop for me. It's beyond strange what it's sending me. I tried hitting the "-" / don't like button several weeks on almost everything... but eventually I gave up. I'm not sure how customized it is to me, honestly.

Your Daily Mix # - that works better but it's mostly repetitive stuff I already have in my Library.

They need toggles of some sort, or some dial of some sort rather than put blind trust in these algorithms.

mancerayder2• 6 years ago

In contrast, I continue to pay for Pandora in the U.S. because the artist radios work very well for somehow knowing what stuff-that-others-liked-that's-similar is. Downside is Pandora gets repetitive quickly in its playlists.

Avamander3• 6 years ago

Discover weekly is better if you spend time during the previous week listening to songs you like (and also add them to likes).

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

I can't stand Spotify recommendations. I've been spoiled by Last.fm's recommendations.

utf_8x• 6 years ago

This is funny but for some reason focused on my listening history from like 5 years back and completely ignored anything I've listened to since...

O_H_E• 6 years ago

Off topic: I really suggest you take a look at other stuff on the site. pudding.cool does some seriously awesome interactive visualisations about social/hot topics.

SylvieLorxu• 6 years ago

It just crashes for me when getting my final score (on Firefox). Guess my taste is so bad I broke the AI...

https://pastebin.com/3Q70EiKY

nickthemagicman• 6 years ago

That was fun as hell. I didn't realize how enjoyable hipster AIs would be.

replwoacause• 6 years ago

Your spotify was romcom-trailer-music-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-slow-dance bad.
Thank your obsessions with Ed Sheeran, mellow gold, and Wonderful Tonight for that.
Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
mainstream-country bad
like-country-but-smoke-weed-with-your-gay-friends bad
DMB-die-hard bad
wear-carhartts-to-your-desk-job bad
requests-bohemian-rhapsody-at-weddings bad
Here's what else is going on in your aural trash fire:

You listen to these tracks too much:

    Highwomen by The Highwomen
    WAP by Cardi B
    Classic by Cam
    Forgetting You by Cam
    Bridge Over Troubled Water by Willie Nelson

You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:

    Ed Sheeran
    George Strait
    Sturgill Simpson
    Cam
    Dolly Parton

You are 18% basic. Yeah, you've got some obscure artists like Brooks Dixon, but your real top ones are ultra-mainstream like Taylor Swift..

You're stuck in the early 2010s. You only listen to Obama-era jams like Poison & Wine by The Civil Wars and Emmylou - Spotify Sessions by First Aid Kit.

tomrod2• 6 years ago

Icecast+VLC or Groove.FM work great for my needs. Is Spotify really that useful for folks? What is it that yall like?

savrajsingh• 6 years ago

hangs for me at "f marry kill choose fast" fyi

jedberg• 6 years ago

To everyone complaining about how to trick the Spotify AI: This is why I still listen to the radio/watch DJ streams on Twitch. Because a human still curates the experience. It's just a matter of finding a human you tend to agree with, and then you literally do nothing but listen.

snug• 6 years ago

I wish it only looked at my last year, or two. It seems to look at all of my music from the beginning of my account, which is about 10 years old, when I listed to a lot of shitty rave music. Not saying my score would have been better.

pmlnr• 6 years ago

You are 0% basic. Oh wow Menschdefekt and Culture Kultur! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..

(In Bender's voice) You think you're all high and mighty, just because you're an AI? Well, I guessed so.

EDIT On a real note, how do you feel about doing the same for my last.fm that has data since 2007?

desireco42• 6 years ago

Youtube Music on other hand is fantastic and after it, trying to use Spotify was painful experience. Just giving you a hint.

Borlands• 6 years ago

Wondering what happens to the data they read from each user?

kkdaemas• 6 years ago

Please, please make this work without Spotify (e.g. type in a few favorite albums from Musicbrainz or something)

richardwhiuk• 6 years ago

It's only funny if you don't get to deliberately select the music yourself to make yourself seem more edgy/cool/punk/folk/etc.

d0100• 6 years ago

Your spotify was sinatra-mug-shot-poster-in-your-dorm-room-massage-franchise-bed-bath-and-beyond-christmas soundtrack bad

I resent this comment

circa• 6 years ago

Not sure why the first post didn't catch on - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513886

hurlingfrootmig• 6 years ago

Tried both, Spotify and Pandora. Moved to Pandora. The algorithms work ways better for me on Pandora. On both platforms the rule is to actively rhumba up or down the music.

stuaxo• 6 years ago

Without trying it - my spotify is terrible. I used a website to feed 8 years of lastfm and all my youtube plays, but Spotify just thinks I want versions of all the most annoying songs.

zeristor• 6 years ago

So I need to provide them with my Spotify credentials?

Isn’t this like one of those personality harvesting Apps on Facebook?

Can’t we permission The Pudding to see our place instead of logging in as us?

Miner49er• 6 years ago

It was just permissionig for me. They didn't need my credentials.

torgard2• 6 years ago

This made me laugh a couple of times. Pretty good :)

Really well written. Unique responses to many (I thought) relatively unknown songs and artists.

The final score, a rambling "BAD" rating, was very funny.

Great job!

vijucat• 6 years ago

Wow, that was great. Very engaging UX / text.

By the way, I hated the Spotify ads so much I paid up for YouTube Music + Premium. Even though the Spotify Windows app is VERY usable compared to https://music.youtube.com. Good Lord, I hated those ads. I know the conspiracy theory that they were designed to be irritating so that you pay up, but that only works in a world without much choice; ;now you have YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Deezer. Spotify, I'll readily pay up and switch if you improve those awful ads.

LandR• 6 years ago

I have the same opinion on spotify ads, they are so annoying I refuse to subscribe to spotify. It just feels like if I subscribe to remove the awful ads then Spotify has won. I refuse to subscribe because they've annoyed me so much I pay to make it go away!

I'd rather just not use spotify at all.

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

I've never used Spotify. I'm not sure I want to.

Pandora was OK. The issue I had with it is that "Liking" or "Disliking" a song seemed to poison the playlist.

YouTube is what I use to discover music today. It can take me down a rabbit hole, but going down one never seems to adversely impact song recommendations the next time I go searching for music.

Newer stuff I tend to like usually ends up being on Bandcamp.

prodtorok• 6 years ago

"You listen to a lot of Drake. Like, A LOT. You okay?"

... LMAO. love it.

StratoTako2• 6 years ago

I'm so offended now.

StratoTako2• 6 years ago

You are 0% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to Pryapisme?.

I'm so offended now. I mean, not surprised...

scottmcdot• 6 years ago

Is anyone fed up with seeing a song in their Release Radar, getting excited about your favourite artists releasing a new album, then being disappointed that the artist has decided to only drop one song from the album, which you will likely get sick of before the album releases?

forgetcolor• 6 years ago

This drives me nuts. I want to listen to an album, not a song. But I'm guessing this is an old-school POV that the younger demographic doesn't agree with.

Raphael_Amiard• 6 years ago

I'm not young anymore (35) but I really don't care about albums

emerged2• 6 years ago

I’m tired of having subscribed to one of my favorite artists, then release radar gives me a horrible song by an artist who apparently took their name. Then when I hit dislike every single week and unsubscribe it still keeps giving me their garbage.

I thought it was a fluke at first but it has happened now with about 4-5 artists.

Shacklz2• 6 years ago

The same happened to me; one of my liked bands apparently released an album; it then turns out that it was some other band that just happened to have the same name. Seems they compare band-names instead of some unique-ids; no idea how they thought this would be a good idea.

Kluny• 6 years ago

I've been seen and mocked :D I love it, super funny bot.

wmurmann• 6 years ago

This gave me a good laugh. Shared with all my friends and made my group chat blow up for a while. Great job!

Joshkop• 6 years ago

You are 14% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to Headache Migrane Relief?.<

I envy those people

winrid2• 6 years ago

I was very harshly judged for my interest in KFMDM :p

winrid2• 6 years ago

*KMFDM

kristopolous• 6 years ago

I've worked on various music recommendation systems just for my own private consumption for 15 years.

My current approach at least makes me really happy. The problem is I'm likely radically different.

The general problem is so are many people. But all in different, incompatible ways.

For instance, my (current) approach is fundamentally label based. Things are organized by label and I "rate" releases as I listen to them. This leads to a generalized "label rating" which can be partially extended to (1) a rating of the artists who released on the label along with (2) albums and eps which may see a release under another label. Then there is a similarity index to other labels based on a percentage of artists who release on both labels and this leads to something going into a big "consider" pile which then gets treated randomly. It's not really a "recommendation" as much as it is a "might be related? i dunno" system.

For people who want familiar songs they can sing along with, this is a terrible no-good system. For people who like to listen to the same song multiple times a day, this is equally useless. For those who want steadfast genre uniformity and things to sound more or less the same, this is also useless.

This is designed to be exclusively long-tail and stay firmly within the confines way out at the end of the tail. But that's exactly where I want to be.

In the pareto principle, everyone in the 80% looks more or less the same but everyone in the 20% is strange in a different kind of way.

There is no 1 recommendation system that works for all customers. Users have to be segmented. It's utterly inescapable. That's why these systems try to just service the 80% and just not put any effort to the other 20%.

The problem with this approach is the 80% is no longer 80%. More people are becoming snowflake 20%ers and this trend is likely to continue. The mainstream orientation engines of radio and cable television aren't influencing like they used to and the 'service the 80' approach just won't work any more. It's over.

The single recommendation system approach is being tweaked to try to service this coalition that no longer exists. So what happens?

Everything starts to suck. Google results, youtube recommendations, spotify, they all start to be unfocused, scattered messes that just discard all the signal, amplify the noise and return piles of nearly identical derivative garbage.

Socially we've moved beyond the assumption that simply everyone in society will be in some conventional nuclear family with the wife vacuuming at home and the daughter playing with dolls but technologically we still seem to model humans using utterly conventional and outdated single purpose models that simply do not apply and are increasingly a poor fit for everyone.

The new normal is that there isn't one and it's time for tech to play catch up.

alvarlagerlof• 6 years ago

My biggest issue with spotify is that when a playlist is played to completion, it alternates randomly between a set of 20 or so recommendations. However I usually don't notice right away, and this ends up polluting the recommendation system at large, to the point that my most-played song of 2020 is one that I now absolutely hate, by it keeps on coming back.

dmart• 6 years ago

You can turn this off in settings, under "Autoplay".

hokkos• 6 years ago

You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around Gorillaz's Plastic Beach.

Truth...

klmadfejno4• 6 years ago

I was 4% basic. Feels pretty good to me. The AI had some strong, and frequently stated about me listening to Best Frenz's (Joywave + Sir Sly) first and only EP which came out this year haha.

abeppu• 6 years ago

I think music now serves multiple purposes in a way that makes some judgements a kind of type error.

When we judge whether music is "good" or "bad", we're evaluating it as a work of art. Being novel, smart, well performed etc are all naturally important considerations.

But when you listen to music for hours while working, studying, workout out, either alone or through headphones ... music is no longer art exactly. Music becomes a tool which helps us guide our own moods or quality of attention. Music becomes a cognitive aid.

My desk is bad as sculpture. My documentation is bad as literature. My thinking-music is generally bad as art-music.

henry_bone2• 6 years ago

That AI can fuck right off. 21% basic, my arse. Pretentious cunt of thing. I like pop music of all kinds, and I don't feel even slightly "bad" about that. I'm certainly not going to start listening to random indie garbage (actually, I like Garbage :-) ) that makes my ears hurt, just so my "taste" gets a positive rating on some cock-smoker's AI driven site.

alienspaces• 6 years ago

Music without words for programming

class_struggle• 6 years ago

I don't know I didn't really learn anything new from that AI that Spotify doesn't tell me for their End of the Year stuff.

TheSmoke• 6 years ago

i enjoyed this, really nice. every metal band, every metal album and song decreased my score. :)

Your spotify was music-to-stalk-boys-to-hail-satan-heavy-eyeliner-post-punk bad.
allegations-of-abuse-have-never-been-proven-in-court bad
gallagher-brother bad
instagram-your-tent-at-sunset bad

nbzso• 6 years ago

What is Spotify? Looks with smile at NAS Folder "Music" with .flac collection.

S_A_P• 6 years ago

I just wish the Spotify app would stream properly on my car’s Bluetooth connection.

chrismsimpson• 6 years ago

A troll bot. Cool.

thr0w__4w4y2• 6 years ago

Might have missed the point of the site here (just speculating) -- I got a lot of sarcastic criticism (hey cool, I don't care) but not a single suggestion. Spotify has helped me find lots of music that I like. This site didn't.

Fuck this site.

ubiquitysc• 6 years ago

I think it's pretty clearly only intended to provide snark about your listening habits and not made to give suggestions.

heimidal• 6 years ago

... it’s comedy. Have a sense of humor.

wlonkly2• 6 years ago

Ah, but it didn't promise suggestions, it promised to analyze how bad your Spotify is, and it delivers as promised, regardless of what you listen to!

SoulMan• 6 years ago

My Spottily is filled with children music like Coco-melon etc which I never listen. But kids play this from Alexa and Google home all the time. Spotify should have profiles.

shostack2• 6 years ago

Is there a way to reset the logic for a recommended play list or set it to not factor in songs played for the next hour?

I often find myself playing songs for others I myself wouldn't want to listen to and as a result my Discover Weekly feed is unusable with no apparent fix.

JasonPiao• 6 years ago

hilarious product!

Super curious though.. what data did you use to get the model to write super accurate slang

longnguyen• 6 years ago

Finding a lot of Super Simple Songs.
Like... a LOT.
Your spotify was moms-spaghetti-movie-soundtrack-baby-shark-prison bad.
Thank your obsessions with Eminem, soundtrack (e.g., Hans Zimmer and Two Steps from Hell), and Baby Shark for that.

LOL my kids used my spotify a lot...

chewz3• 6 years ago

I am still missing Rdio..

stubish• 6 years ago

Might have been some viral marketing and publicity for Spotify, but instead will just dribble away here due to rate limiting of the API.

anta40• 6 years ago

Your spotify was retiree-softball-league-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-allegations-of-abuse-have-never-been-proven-in-court bad.

You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:

The Beatles

Cream

Led Zeppelin

Rush

Yes

Whoops sorry, I'm a big prog fan :p

asyrafql• 6 years ago

oh damm, I'm a big fan of Parcel. 90% ACCURATE

threwawaysoff• 6 years ago

< 8% indicates official hipsterdom.

antihero3• 6 years ago

I just wish they put radio back as what it used to be. Now if you create artist/song/playlist radios they seem to be the same few tracks and artists looping, it used to be infinite, ie, the whole point of radio.

If you do radio for a decently sized playlist, it is basically just akin to using shuffle. What is the point in that? Absolutely useless for music discovery.

IndySun2• 6 years ago

Successful auto-playlisting is going to vary on the demands made.

There is no 100% music (or any creative output) recommender because everyone feels differently about what 'energy', 'easy', 'powerful', 'touching', and 'rock' all mean, and to each person individually. These terms are meant to, and always will be, necessarily ambiguous; and that is how these terms work best.

AI currently cannot 100% give you a track without drums even if you check the 'no drums' box (because along the way one track with drums was put in the no drums box).

Incidentally I've used various searchers (now referred to as) AI for years to try and find tracks requested by clients, it remains somewhat helpful though unable to compete with a human first listening to the human making the request.

AI is improving, but it is going to be beyond our lifetime before it replaces communication, human to human, eye to eye.

Until AI knows what it means to be human, so it shall remain.

zmix• 6 years ago

All I get is (after granting access):

    Loading your music library...Spotify limiting how many people 
    can use this app at once, so you'll need to wait or try again 
    later.

sitzkrieg• 6 years ago

been throttled trying it every few hours for me , seems to be hosed by the popularity. checking network requests spotify may have enabled cors and killed it outright?

How bad is your Spotify?

Related Stories