Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/09/dislike-button-would-improve-spotifys-recommendations

by aww_dang • 5 years ago

881 590 5 years ago

news.cornell.edu

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

I work in this industry and actually we’ve found from online experimentation customers generally don’t want to tell you they dislike something. The expectation is customers get what they like (relevant) and sometimes they want to express stronger affinity for specific things. The converse hasn’t shown to be true.

Generally customers don’t have a clear picture of how their explicit signals impact recommendations. Though some customers have shown desire to want to manage these signals.

Edit: one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.

marginalia_nu6• 5 years ago

I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, or at least a "forget everything you think you know about me"-button.

Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of this and other frustrations.

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

Without specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that most customer's have no use for and won't use.

In general, you had to be doing something to be getting recommendations so there is some action that when most customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will like some genre and it just so happens you don't.

the_only_law• 5 years ago

Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations.

Similarly any app or website that pulls “top artists” from Spotify tends to include stuff I listens to a bit several years ago, but never stuff I’ve listened to nonstop for months.

0134340• 5 years ago

Yes that's very frustrating. I'm scared to even listen to new music on it because I'd try to use it for discovery but it would mistake what I listen to for what I like. Besides that it hardly recommends me any new music anyway. I now just use youtube for discovery.

1_player4• 5 years ago

I keep hearing from people how good is Spotify "Discovery" playlist. I've been a paid customer for 5+ years and their recommendations have a hit rate of 2%. I listen to a lot of different genres, artists, mostly dictated by my mood. Today it was some easy Dire Straits song, yesterday QOTSA, the other day some psytrance. So Spotify recommends all genres in the same playlist, creating an awful cacophony of songs that don't flow into one another.

Spotify recommendation system is very bad in cases like mine apparently. It's so bad I keep listening to the same old songs instead of discovering something new, which is why I'm no longer a customer until they improve their AI.

user-the-name• 5 years ago

one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.

This is nonsense. The fact that I skip a song does not mean I don't like it in general, it means I don't want to hear it right now. Music taste changes with mood and situation. If you treat a skip as "I don't ever want to hear this again" you will collect absolute garbage data, and if I know you are doing this, it will make your app unusable because I can't do normal everyday actions without ruining my recommendations.

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

It depends right. If you skip a song everytime its played in a sequence is a stronger indication of dislike compared to skip it once but listening to it a few times. The point is there is more to context and recommenders than a adding a dislike button and having a magically awesome recommender.

rednalexa• 5 years ago

Is this within a global context or a local one? Liking a song in Spotify is global - Spotify then adds it to a list of liked songs.

But from my experience with Pandora, radio stations were localized. Liking a song did add it to a list somewhere, yes, but disliking a song just meant that a particular radio station on Pandora wouldn't have a song in that particular style, and other stations did not seem to be affected by this.

In other words, what you want to listen to, for me, seemed to be very contextual. And since I felt my dislikes were captured in a context (radio station), I didn't have any qualms disliking frequently using Pandora.

And my experience with Pandora for song discovery has always been much better.

ics• 5 years ago

A problem I have with the inferred dislike is that when I skip a song it's only something I dislike half the time. The other half I'm simply not in the mood to hear it, maybe for another 10 minutes or another 10 months. The result has been that I've become more willing to listen to certain genres on another platform (say Youtube) because it won't contaminate the prevailing mood which I want the main service to recommend.

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

That's a good point and the next evolution recommenders try to do is to become contextual. There may be songs you like at dinner or on weekends but not vice versa. These types of things like time of day, device and other types of data points can make a recommender more precise.

ozzythecat• 5 years ago

Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.

How do you know I dislike the song? Instead, maybe I just heard it (or a similar song) on your platform or elsewhere outside of your app and don’t want to listen to it again right now?

I guess you could try to build a more complex model that determines what songs or music I like at what times of the day or what day of the week, or based on what I just listened to.

IMO this is rampant in FAANG companies. We create complex solutions to problems that didn’t really exist and pat ourselves on the back when our experiment show positive results.

The experiment might show you some metric (total time in app, play time at whatever percentile, etc) increased. Great! Now we launch the model in production for all customers and pat ourselves on the back. Meanwhile, the actual experience became shittier. A few promotions come out of this, and we continue living in the bubble.

Alright, end of rant.

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

The paper is making an obvious claim. If I have data showing positive and negative affinity, that will perform better than a model which just has positive day. I don't find this very surprising but my point is in practice exposing dislike buttons to customers are a CX that is hardly ever used. So the point that a model will perform better with data that customer's rarely offer up to your platform makes their claim moot in my opinion.

somebodythere2• 5 years ago

I know that these implicit signals affect how I use the app. I might force myself to listen to a song I like, but would rather listen to something else at the time because I don't want my choice to skip to impact my recommendations in opaque ways.

Groxx2• 5 years ago

Skipping doesn't imply dislike, though it does correlate (because the reverse is generally true, people skip songs they dislike). But I routinely see skip mentioned as non-downvote sources of dislike information.

Easily half of the times I skip it's because I don't want it right now. Some of my favorite songs reproduce absolutely horribly in a car on a highway for example, because the surrounding noise utterly destroys subtleties. So maybe you add "but it's not a downvote if it's hearted or otherwise positively ranked"... but many other times I'm just not in the mood for [a song I had never encountered until now].

anticensor• 5 years ago

Correlation does not imply causation, and neither does causation imply correlation.

soylentnewsorg5• 5 years ago

You are exhibiting google's mistake, caused by over educated people with zero real experience thinking they know better. Or, I should correct that - some code they wrote knows better than the complex brain of the actual person. This results in "AI" (big if/then loop) trying to figure it out, and completely blocking any input from the customer.

Here's the issue with "inferred from other activity." You know how you can find out? Give the customer a way to tell you. And no - you cannot "infer from other activity."

Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model...

..to be wrong. You know when I usually skip a song after 20 seconds? When I've heard it too much, or just heard it on youtube on my laptop an hour ago. In a couple of days I'll want to hear it again. The reason I heard it too much, is I like the song. Your AI though - if I skip this favorite song of mine a couple of times, will now block it and all other songs like it. The literal opposite of what I want.

What this results in, is you have an inferior product, your customers leave, then you leave and go screw up another company's product without ever learning your lesson.

djhn• 5 years ago

I don't disagree with you but that last bit was quite unnecessary.

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

What this results in, is you have an inferior product, your customers leave, then you leave and go screw up another company's product without ever learning your lesson.

I'm not sure what you're suggesting and I don't need to qualify my experience in the software industry or within the domain of recommenders and personalization.

laserlight2• 5 years ago

we’ve found from online experimentation customers generally don’t want to tell you they dislike something.

I'm curious. Can you tell what kind of experiments you ran and what results you got?

solarkraft• 5 years ago

Though some customers have shown desire to want to manage these signals

Let me be one of those. I want to be able to control the algorithm in all of its parameters, but even the ability to control the values for new/familiar and how far to stray from the current genre would be very welcome.

syshum• 5 years ago

>>one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model

GOD NOOOOOO

that would be terrible, there are all kinds of time where I will skip a song because I do not want to Listen to it RIGHT NOW, not because I do not like it or never want to listen to it ever again...

Music is very emotional, some times you just do not want to listen to X at the moment, 30 mins later you might.

newsbinator2• 5 years ago

Yesterday I tried to book a plane ticket on eDreams and no matter which card/bank I used I got a bank authorization error.

So I tried to contact eDreams, which requires a trip reference number.

Since I couldn't pay them for a plane ticket, I didn't have a trip reference number. So all their ticketing and phone tree systems would hang up on me.

eDreams customers, evidently, don't want to contact them without having a trip reference number. And they know this for sure because they've never had a customer contact them without one.

marcinzm• 5 years ago

The dislike button is if nothing else a sanity check for someone to have control if your model goes haywire. Realistically it will go haywire in a non-trivial number of cases. If every month your model goes haywire for 1% of users then you may see dislike used 1% of the time. That's tiny, right? However without it those users may leave and then next month another 1% will be hit and so on. Users remember the bad things a lot more than the good things so they will remember your AI f-ups and the lack of a way to fix it.

The problem with data driven UX is that the data is often short term (ab tests are expensive) and doesn't cover long term complex user impact.

Edit: For example, I’ve seen a lot of Etsy users complain about their front page being filled with NSFW recommendations and no way to get rid of them. I doubt they’ll be using Etsy much in the future.

greggman33• 5 years ago

This and your responses below remind can be applied to handicapped parking or handicapped ramps (ie, they aren't used by most users therefore we shouldn't have them).

I prefer and use the dislike button when it exists. I don't care that 51% or 99% of users don't use it. Further, I want to send a concrete signal. Skipping a song doesn't mean I don't like it. It might just be that I didn't want to hear that particular song right now. Even if I skip it 10 times in a row that doesn't mean I don't like it.

yuliyp• 5 years ago

It's honestly really stressful using systems which do this. I have to worry about the signals I'm sending to the system all the time. Did I hover over that clickbait too long? Did I alt-tab while a song I liked was playing? Did I accidentally click like on something? Did I misclick onto the wrong song?

Sure I might enjoy some clickbaity content every once in a while, but that doesn't mean I want the system to show me more of it, even if that will lead to me watching more things.

oriolid7• 5 years ago

Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.

So, basically if I dislike a song but want to give it a chance and then decide that you want to never hear it again, your industry thinks that I liked it. That explains a lot.

somebodythere2• 5 years ago

Disliking something is scary; if I press the dislike button am I going to be cut off from that whole artist/genre/etc?

kortex4• 5 years ago

I work in this industry and actually we’ve found from online experimentation customers generally don’t want to tell you they dislike something.
Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.

Really? Cause I constantly wish for granularity in my ability to dislike something. Insta-skip might mean I'm just not in the mood. Or it might be "never play goddamn clownstep in my neurofunk mix". Or it might be "I actually love that song but I reserve it for special occasions to get into a specific headspace and if I listen to it too much it loses spark". Same signal, three radically different valences.

I just wish services didn't treat all their customers like simps. I'd easily pay double for the ability to like, specify "Tuesday is flying microtonal banana day" or "start switching to prog house around 16:00 because that's when I start to get really deep into code but also easily frazzled." I'd pay gobs of money for Pandora's ability to discover new music with the library of Youtube+Spotify.

simlevesque• 5 years ago

I'll never use Spotify again. My account was hacked by a latino and now my recommendations is 100% latin music. They told me there is nothing they can do to fix this. My recommendations are broken and my only option is to create another account, cancel my subscription, buy it again... Not gonna happen.

smoldesu• 5 years ago

When this happened to me, I just changed my password. Seems to have worked so far, though it doesn't filter out Latin music.

mikeywazowski• 5 years ago

Yeah me too, a couple of years ago. Initially I was in denial that my account might have been compromised, but eventually I changed my password and haven't had that issue since.

jcastro• 5 years ago

I found out you can break your recommendations without losing control of your account.

I listened to one podcast episode and it's been stuck on my home screen for two months. I've tried listening to it, ignoring it, unsubscribing, deleting (you can't!). It's just there forever now.

And of course, that means it's always recommending related podcasts all the time so most of my homepage is now filled with this stuff and I have no way to remove it.

vanilla_nut4• 5 years ago

I’ve never listened to a podcast ever on Spotify. Refuse to, given their approach of trying to wall off podcasts in their own app.

I’ve had an entire top-level list of podcasts recommended to me for over a YEAR now. I will never use it, but I have to constantly scroll past it and dodge podcast recommendations in new podcast + music playlists (that aren’t clearly marked) as well.

I used to love Spotify. I got so many friends to sign up, I discovered so much music in my Discover Weekly, I convinced friends to switch from all kinds of other platforms, I built collaborative playlists with friends…

but the recommendations seem stuck in a rut for me, probably because they can’t handle the size of my library (hundreds of artists and thousands of albums that I listen to regularly). The product doesn’t respect me. I’m actively researching ways to host my own music library and use something else for discovery. Recommendations welcome so this frog can escape this slowly boiling pot.

lethologica2• 5 years ago

Argh, I’ve been having this exact issue too. Worse still, it’s a thumbnail and title I would really rather not be plastered front and centre of my home screen all the time! Absolutely frustrating.

jzb• 5 years ago

I imagine they’re pushing podcasts because they aren’t paying royalties on most or any of them.

bdcp• 5 years ago

I keep getting recommended German music. I'm not German.

gs173• 5 years ago

Listening to metal gets a lot of recommendations for me in languages I don't understand much of. You would think Spotify would have a way to not change languages between songs at least.

Oddskar6• 5 years ago

The algorithm clearly says that you're German. Maybe you should just embrace it.

emerged2• 5 years ago

Look I’m sorry but you love German music. The sooner you accept that the sooner we can all move on.

detaro• 5 years ago

... is it really that odd that you get suggestions for music from other places in other languages?

eachro• 5 years ago

Hmm, I had a similar situation with an ex-partner contaminating my recommendations. I emailed support and it was pretty easy to reset my recs to a blank slate.

soneca• 5 years ago

It happened to me with someone that loves Simple Plan. I only noticed in those end-of-the-year lists that Spotify prepares. A bunch of Simple Plan stuff on most played tracks.

I changed my password and it took me almost an year of listening to my songs to Spotify stop recommending me Simple Plan and similars.

ikt• 5 years ago

the fix is to listen to other music...

ascorbic4• 5 years ago

I once didn't properly unlink Spotify when I returned my car to the leasing company. The driver taking it back played bhangra for about half an hour using my account before I noticed. Changing the password, unlinking devices nothing worked. I eventually got him to stop by constantly switching it to the Barbie Girl by Aqua and then finally Spotify support was able to unlink it. I was then recommended bhangra for months. Four consecutive Discover Weeklies were 100% bhangra. Now I like the odd track every now and then, but playing less than an hour of a genre should not be enough to do that.

ggrelet• 5 years ago

Sorry it happened to you, but that's hilarious.

splintercell• 5 years ago

I think the main issue is that sometimes you just don’t want the song but other songs like that are fine, and other times you don’t want that song or any song like it. - Don’t play this song again but others like this are fine

- Don’t play songs like this again

blondin2• 5 years ago

i am actually impressed to see this come out cornell. i tend to see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic. they greatly reduce why a user would dislike something.

i am annoyed at youtube only allowing me to choose from "i didn't like it" or "i have already watched it" for example. i have thousands of other reasons.

that's why i don't use dislike buttons.

1_player4• 5 years ago

A dislike button is too simplistic, but having no way to dislike something is extremely bad user experience. How do you train a recommendation engine without a negative signal?

Sometimes I dislike something and I don't want it around anymore. Which is the reason I've migrated to Youtube Music, which is an inferior product, but has a dislike button.

Bluecobra• 5 years ago

i tend to see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic.

Same here. I’m still a big fan of star ratings in iTunes, though I’m not sure if they do anything or influence playback. I have a pretty eclectic taste in music and only want to hear certain songs once in a while and I give those songs get three stars. (Sorry Donnie Iris if you are reading this.)

unstatedAnswers• 5 years ago

Sure, it would be useful… if users used it.

My guess is they don’t. Did you use the like/dislike buttons they tested on Spotify radio? I didn’t, too much effort.

They probably get more signal from the skip button

short12• 5 years ago

I've used it extensively on Pandora for probably a decade now and it makes a station go from great to spectacular

mey2• 5 years ago

It blows my mind that some of my Pandora stations are more than a decade old and still listened to regularly.

MaxikCZ• 5 years ago

I would use it, and dont understand why its only avaiable in Spotify Radio and not everywhere. I think my dislike of a song in an album can still be utilized to refine my suggestions.

Whats worse, there was a song that was constantly playing after my playlist ended. No matter how many times I marked the song as Dislike, it was always in first of 5 songs that play when playlist finished. Made sure the song appeared nowhere in my playlists (had to manually search in each), and neither did the artist. After contacting support and jumping trough few "restart app" styled suggestion, I was suggested to mark the artist as "never play this artist". This surprised me, as I never seen that option before. And then I understood why: its only in mobile version. You cant solve it on PC.

Bleh

dmitriid• 5 years ago

You know what would improve any recommendation system?

A button that says (and does) "wipe my recommendation profile clean, and start learning recommendations from scratch".

jorgesborges• 5 years ago

So basically they’re developing a product marketed to streaming platforms to identify what’s “more attractive” to consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user).

That’s exactly why I’m unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I’m being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what’s currently in vogue, and not just artistically but politically, with playlists like this-gender-race supporting this-cause. I actually just want to listen to music.

I still use it but stumble my way through looking at related artists while avoiding playlists and recommendations.

wara23arish• 5 years ago

100%

I remember seeing a promoted playlist about empowering women voices (this is music)

I was so confused. In literally most of the world, this isn’t even a point of contention.

snthd2• 5 years ago

They're probably trying to offset the guilt they feel from payola[0].

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...

rhcom2• 5 years ago

"In honor of the revolution, it's half-off at the Gap"

schmorptron• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is the exact reason I switched to Apple Music even though I'm on Android, since their playlists (for the most part) seem to actually be made based on what they think will be interesting for the listeners, not what they got paid to promote. I might be wrong though and just getting played.

j56no• 5 years ago

similar experience here, after 12 years with spotify I had enough of the confusing UI and poor recommendations. They literally know all the music I like and still I don’t discover enough new music as I did just listening to the car radio. Bought into Apple One and will see how that goes, I just need to migrate some playlists.

jdavis703• 5 years ago

I use Apple Music because it works well with the rest of the ecosystem. But the official playlists just seem to resurface what’s already popular, at least for dance, electronic and hip-hop. Whereas Spotify introduced me to new music. Maybe it depends on what genres you listen to?

onion2k2• 5 years ago

It's possible that the recommendations are both good for users and good for corporate interests. They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work. People listen to them a lot.

I listen to my recommended "Discover" playlists occasionally. They're decent. They include things I haven't heard and quite like. Maybe record labels are paying to be on them. Oh well.

Hokusai2• 5 years ago

They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work.

That is the most reasonable explanation. HN users are not the average user of Spotify.

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

That’s just the appeal to the majority fallacy. People may just use Spotify because it’s free with ads and they have the hook of personal libraries to keep you stuck on the service as a paying member.

loudtieblahblah6• 5 years ago

Crap like this is why, to this day, my collection is digital files, cds, vinyl and streaming only for radio - like pandora

echelon• 5 years ago

I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc.

I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists that interpolate between these.

I want to be able to pay a fee to subscribe to music discovery, then be able to mix these with my own library. If I really like a track, I'd like to buy it and add it to my collection.

I want an open API so desktop apps can be written to use it. Also, let me export my annotations and music library on demand.

Music for power users. Don't give me a single button. Give me hundreds of them.

I'd pay $30/mo or more for this.

mdoms• 5 years ago

The fact that Spotify doesn't optimise for discovery and recommendations is why you use physical media which has absolutely no mechanism for discovery and recommendation?

psKama• 5 years ago

That's the exact reason I switched to YouTube Music. I remember even about 10 years ago, last.fm's algorithm on bringing songs I would enjoy basing on previously listened/liked songs was far more accurate than Spotify's today.

aeyes• 5 years ago

Does the algorithm of YouTube Music behave similar to standard YouTube? YouTube (not Music) basically always recommends the same tracks in the same order and within the same genre bubble. It is hard to discover anything new which makes me not want to try YouTube Music.

ldjkfkdsjnv3• 5 years ago

I just switched to youtube music, its leagues better than spotify. YouTube music seems to have a pretty solid recommendation algorithm, and I frequently find music more in tune with my tastes there than on spotify. Honestly, I would not mind seeing spotify disappear.

sillysaurusx• 5 years ago

Fwiw, I was shocked how much better YouTube music was than Spotify. I turned on the trial on a whim, and now I actually miss it (it expired a few days ago).

It was so nice that I’m seriously considering just turning off Spotify. It’s sort of interesting to analyze why we don’t —- for me, it’s become unconscious habit to reach for Spotify and not anything else. Plus a lot of other stuff integrates well with it.

(What if… what if we can use both? Mind asplode, it’s not a decision.)

AcerbicZero• 5 years ago

Weird, I switched to Spotify once Google Play Music (or whatever silly name it had when Google ate songza) became YouTube Music because I found it such a poor experience.

Perhaps I was missing something but the change def did not improve the recommendations - it made them drastically worse.

T00TH3M00N• 5 years ago

Haha same. I couldn't believe how much better YT Music was. There's no going back

LegitShady2• 5 years ago

I think Youtube Music does a decent job on recommendations but its android app is annoying. How does it still not have a horizontal screen mode?

taurath• 5 years ago

YouTube makes recommendations around engagement metrics only (1 political video gets you Fox News recommendations for years), spotify still gives me plenty of small bands - I think if you’re listening to very popular music you’re screwed either ways

intricatedetail2• 5 years ago

It's only a matter of time comment like this will decrease your social score...

ipaddr3• 5 years ago

Do you want a high social score? A good citizen badge?

rumblerock3• 5 years ago

On top of that, if you listen to a wide range of genres the attempt to shoehorn your history into 6 Daily Mixes yields some comical results. Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana.

Give me a home screen with 12 or more Daily Mixes that segment my listening behavior at a finer resolution, and I'd be a lot happier with the service.

I understand why all the other playlists exist, but I generally have an idea of exactly what I'm trying to listen to, so these low effort curated playlists are pretty useless for my listening style.

leppr2• 5 years ago

Then you can simply find a song that matches what you're exactly wanting to listen to and start the "song radio" from there. For me the problem is exactly the contrary, I can't find enough diversity in the daily mixes, it's mostly all songs I've either explicitly "liked" or heard a couple times before.

ufo• 5 years ago

And for those that are actually into the sort of thing, I recommend Doobie Brothers + Linkin Park: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cXjcKTRWcg

stevewillows2• 5 years ago

I've considered getting a spotify family account, using separate accounts for major genres and one for browsing. I have a browsing profile for Netflix so I can freely explore without messing up the suggestions.

For me, I listen to a lot of 40s, 50 - 60s lounge / exotica, early to mid 90s hip hop, 80s metal, and the standard indie stuff... then I have a bunch of chillwave and synthwave stuff that throws another wrench in the mix. The daily mixes I get are a total mess, much like yours.

The genre-specific mixes they make are pretty decent, but discovery is low.

nkozyra• 5 years ago

Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana.

What's inherently comical about this?

One of my least favorite experiences is having a radio station based on a song and getting nothing but songs that sound just like it.

Unless you have only played 90s grunge or 70s soft rock I'm not sure why this juxtaposition is not considered a feature.

emodendroket6• 5 years ago

I like the variety of them so I'm happy to have them mix genres like that, except they're too repetitive.

raffraffraff8• 5 years ago

I've never used Spotify or any other recommendation service. Music is like food: it's far too important too substitute with junk. I won't eat Subway, I won't listen to auto-generated recommendations. I browse (and support) rateyourmusic.com, I use the last.fm API (to find out what my neighbors are listening to) and I listen to music for free on YouTube before I buy it. I also heavily use tags on my purchased music so I can easily put together a playlist matching my mood.

amelius2• 5 years ago

The problem: you don't want to be DJ-ing at work, where your time is better spent on more important things than what music you will listen to.

krono• 5 years ago

Anything that can be exploited by the user for self-exploration and discovery is being removed - for the purpose of serving content that generates more revenue, I assume.. At first it was subtle, but the gloves came off with the recent UI overhaul.

Playlist search result page is just an endless grid of images and truncated names. For the playlist duration, description, number of songs, follower count, etc. you have to actually open each individual playlist. Good luck finding what you were looking for.

More and more Spotify-fabricated content is being pushed. Most of which contains the same limited selection of songs that Spotify keeps feeding you over and over anyway.

Podcasts aren't my thing, Spotify wants me to listen to them really badly though. Majority of the ones they're suggesting I'm not at all interested in, and sometimes some of the podcasts they're advertising seem to contain some pretty disturbing content. On a sidenote: I don't know who he is, or what he does, but I hate Joe Rogan and Spotify is to blame for it.

There is a setting hidden under advanced that is supposed to make Spotify stop messing with the shuffle functionality. It is labeled "Allow smooth transitions between songs in a playlist" vague huh, it's also placed directly underneath the song crossfade slider. I'm fully convinced that this was done on purpose. Also this setting seems to do precisely nothing at all, so I'm not sure why they even went through all the effort.

Shuffle is not random. If this is so on purpose, that purpose does not involve happy users. Else perhaps their devs are afraid of touching some jank script that might be holding it together.

Edit:

Almost forgot about the new artist's pages! They used to consist of a long list of all songs grouped by album. This was far too convenient for us users, so with the redesign they simply removed the lists of songs leaving only a grid of albums, forcing you to go into each individual album to find a specific song and play it play it.

After many complaints they implemented something vaguely resembling what we had before, but with such odd UX that it must be sabotaged on purpose again. But of course, adding this overview back to the artist page was out of the question. Instead what they implemented as the only way to access this, and I kid you not, is a plain text link in the most random place ever.

No one is going to use this feature if they don't know it exists. All this just to get a reason for removing it that is spinnable. Machiavelli would have been proud.

wincy• 5 years ago

What’s funny is that I used to love listening to the Joe Rogan podcast and hate Spotify just as much, because I tried to listen to his podcast and somehow ended up listening to about TEN MINUTES of ads and the podcast NEVER started playing. I finally uninstalled Spotify and haven’t listened to his podcast since, sorry. It’s mind boggling that Spotify could drop the ball so hard, as ostensibly they were trying to funnel people like me into their platform, and whiffed in an absolutely astounding manner while also alienating people like you who already use Spotify.

blacktriangle• 5 years ago

Get a CD player. It's what I did when I got fed up with Spotify.

matheusmoreira• 5 years ago

I feel I’m being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what’s currently in vogue, and not just artistically but politically, with playlists like this-gender-race supporting this-cause.

I feel the same way. It's not just music either. I get this feeling every time I try to consume anything. Everything is just so fake. Like it was made just to push some silly agenda.

"Recommendations" are ads in disguise. I already block them on YouTube. Wish I could block them everywhere.

Waterluvian• 5 years ago

It’s fascinating to hear this feedback on Spotify because I’ve never used it this way. I don’t let it guide anything. I just use it as a music repository and I pick the albums and make my own playlists.

Do others generally find that auto play (or whatever it’s called) works well? Or does it just feel like payola radio?

ChildOfChaos• 5 years ago

Yeah it's odd to me to see comments like this.

Why would you let a streaming service choose what you want to listen too or a premade playlist by someone else? Then you might as well just listen to the radio. All these on any service are always rubbish. I make my own playlists and I only listen to them, sometimes I search others for some inspiration to see what songs I forgot etc, but most of them include a lot of trash so I make my own.

The only 'auto' feature I use, is my release radar playlist which I check every Friday to find new songs from Artists I like and then add those to my playlist titled for the current year.

Teknoman117• 5 years ago

I use it for both.

"Discover Weekly" tends to be one of my primary sources of new content discovery. I tend to listen to a significant amount of Death Metal, Doom Metal, Folk Metal, German metal and rock, random music in languages I don't understand because the sound is cool to me, and various other never-been-pop subgenres. Discover Weekly has been pretty on point for me to find new and interesting stuff in a way that hasn't felt like them pushing a message or some corporate catalog.

I don't tend to listen to the genres that are full of artists who are trying to push politics through their music (at least that I've consciously recognized) (except maybe System of a Down). Not because I'm necessarily against their messages, it just the sets haven't overlapped much for me at this point. It could also be that music isn't much about lyrics for me, it's about if it's something that sounds good to me.

I have a bunch of playlists and saved albums, but I do listen to discover weekly in the first few days of the week. Sometimes it's meh and I just go choose what I want to listen to, sometimes it's really good and it's on loop through the week.

Their "Daily Mix" playlists seem to be 90% stuff I've clicked "like" on in the past, so I listen to those as well.

ravenstine• 5 years ago

Tidal is a pretty good alternative and also has lossless.

dr_dshiv• 5 years ago

I think it is sad that there isn’t a way to recognize the development of competence in music listening— with an achievement motivation. Like, mastering genres with a music collection. Aesthetic pleasure in pleasant recommendations without any principles makes me feel vacant after a time.

qq4• 5 years ago

I went back to my iPod. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, they all suck compared to good ol' mp3s at my leisure.

batiudrami• 5 years ago

I just wish I could turn off fucking podcasts. I am a paying customer, I have been for years!

I podcast elsewhere, and am never going to switch to Spotify for it, just let me turn it off!

lugged• 5 years ago

Check out Tom McDonald, will fix up your recommendations real quick.

blondin2• 5 years ago

oh and for streaming platforms. sometimes, it's just because that song you recommended (and started playing) should not be played after the one that just finished because it ruins the mood. this has nothing to do with the song itself.

so again, reducing it to like/dislike buttons is missing a great deal.

Groxx2• 5 years ago

I have really been hoping for a spotify-API-driven recommendation engine to improve this kind of thing. Which is why I've been scrobbling to last.fm for over a decade.

One algorithm will never work for everyone. Even if it's one of the best in aggregate, that doesn't mean it's not awful for me. It's not feasible (nor does it make business sense) for Spotify to identify and build the best system for each individual user, so I really don't expect them to do more than optimize for the majority.

mjmsmith• 5 years ago

Me too. I still find more interesting stuff by following last.fm recommendations than anywhere else. Apple Music knows the 10k songs that are in my library and its suggestions are still meh.

dagi3d• 5 years ago

I just wish they fixed the problem with the bands disambiguation. I just hate everytime I get a recommendation in the release radar for a band that happens to have the same name as the one I like but stylewise they have nothing to do with the music I usually listen.

gs173• 5 years ago

I'm still stuck wondering if one artist I found recently had a very different style originally, or if it lumped two unrelated acts together.

oriolid7• 5 years ago

They do lump unrelated acts together. It's somewhat obvious when one of them is a current young musician and other had their career in 60s.

BLKNSLVR• 5 years ago

Gaylord!

One is a progressive blend of funk, hard rock, jazz, psychedelic from New York, active in the mid 90s to 2010[0], and the other is an anti-fascist (anti)black-metal band from London formed in 2018[1].

Both are interesting, but I only like the music of the first one. Google Play Music used to mix them together.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_(band)

[1] https://genius.com/albums/Gaylord-band/The-black-metal-scene...

loudtieblahblah6• 5 years ago

I actually wish most networks had a rating system than up/down.

Including social media.

Yuioup• 5 years ago

Yeah if I could dislike Coldplay a million times I would.

HKH2• 5 years ago

A 'don't play any of [artist]' feature would be very effective, so they will never implement it.

spywaregorilla9• 5 years ago

You can do this if a song is on release radar or discover weekly

greggman33• 5 years ago

I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your history

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we...

Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recommending music, ever

krn• 5 years ago

I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account.

There should be an Incognito mode on every music streaming service for this reason.

IshKebab• 5 years ago

Yeah I made the mistake of letting my daughter watch nursery rhymes on YouTube a few times. Guess what happened to my YouTube Music....

gnfargbl• 5 years ago

Spotify has an incognito mode.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/

onkoe• 5 years ago

It hardly matters now, but before you do anything with a guest, you can start a private session to make sure their history is ignored. Still a very weird feature to omit; I'd reckon that most people would use history deletion at some point

vgrafe• 5 years ago

I use this a lot when playing music for my kid, but unfortunately the feature is clunky: weird path to find it, self-auto-disable much later but with the song still loaded. Hopefully this changes someday.

MKTSPCLST• 5 years ago

Spotify used to have a private listening feature for people to play their music, but I've also deleted it so IDK

dehrmann• 5 years ago

Private listening is still there.

milofeynman• 5 years ago

I have a similar problem where I play Disney music/movie music in the car when I drive my kid to school. Every time I have to go find "private mode" deep in the settings. Typically I just forget. I am primarily a discover weekly and release radar user, so it's definitely frustrating. They have basically done almost nothing positive for users in years in terms of UX. They tried to git rid of dislike, but brought it back because it ruins those suggestion playlists, when you can't hide awful songs.

sam_bristow3• 5 years ago

I'm in a similar situation at the moment. Somehow Spotify has decided that I listened to a bunch of Hindu music a couple of months ago and now over 50% of my recommended playlists and podcasts are in that genre.

Their refusal to let you delete history is just puzzling.

sodality2• 5 years ago

Sounds like your account was stolen and sold for premium status, possibly.

blackoil• 5 years ago

You mean Hindu religious/fusion music or Indian music?

jcims2• 5 years ago

I just checked in to an airbnb and someone left their google account signed in to the youtube app on the TV. The temptation to spike the recommender with something is very strong. :)

andai• 5 years ago

My account got hacked for a few weeks while I was on holiday, and it took literally years for my recommendations to recover.

justinc8687• 5 years ago

If you contact their support, they can probably help you. My account got hacked a while back and I started getting all sorts of weird recommendations. I contacted their support and they were basically able to reset it to an arbitrary date in the past, thus restoring it. In UI would obviously be better, but FYI, this is an option...

heavyset_go• 5 years ago

Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recommending music, ever.

Last.fm has always been great for recommendations.

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

YouTube music has both like and dislike buttons. I don't use them as much as I should, but I'd be interested in the results.

judge2020• 5 years ago

YT Music works pretty well for me, using the dislike/like buttons for when I know what I think about the song and just skipping when i'm just not in the mood for that song.

mey2• 5 years ago

The time invested in my Pandora stations keep me on that platform. I actually really hate that they recently removed the downvote buttons in the Android auto interface.

wly_cdgr• 5 years ago

This is the #2 feature I most want in every music streaming app

(The feature I most want is an interface for tweaking the rec algo to my liking - at minimum, for being able to crank up its adventurousness. Rec algos are depressingly conservative as a rule, I guess because most customers are the kind of people who eat at McDonald's when they travel abroad, stay at package resorts, and complain movies have gone to shit because they can't find anything they like on Netflix or Hulu)

kortex4• 5 years ago

at minimum, for being able to crank up its adventurousness.

Absolutely. At times, it makes me wanna blast it with cosmic rays, induce a burst of mutations, mix things up. Just give me a knob. Sometimes I want to stick on one specific sound. Other times I need to explore.

klyrs4• 5 years ago

An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them.

Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I only like listening to one at a time. I don't want a rap mix to be invaded by a Bach sonata. And yet...

bkraz• 5 years ago

I agree. Spotify acknowledged the request to remove podcasts from the home screen in June of this year: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po... Keep adding votes and pressuring them.

klyrs4• 5 years ago

Awesome! Thanks for sharing that.

lokar• 5 years ago

No, keep starting chats with support asking how to disable podcasts. Draw it out. That costs them $.

fpgaminer• 5 years ago

Seriously. I listen to podcasts, but I'm not going to do it through Spotify, who's working to build a walled garden around a traditionally open media. I'm also not interested in Joe Rogan, which they _constantly_ plaster my front page with.

I did try a Spotify podcast once. It was on my recommended list and was called daily dad jokes or something. Figured it was worth a quick laugh. Well it turned out to be a bot podcast. They set up a bot to rip jokes from Reddit, push them through TTS, and dump it into a Spotify podcast.

No thanks.

Meanwhile, Apple Podcasts, my go to, works great, doesn't spam me, and even added a feature where you can pay for a no-ads version of a podcast. Worked seemlessly.

rsyring• 5 years ago

I rarely listen to podcasts but was going to try and listen to a specific one Joe Rogan did recently. After listening for a few minutes, an ad came on. I pay for spotify, why am I listening to an ad?

Anyway, I waited like 90 seconds and he came back on. Withing about 15 minutes, I had two more ads come on and they were 90 & 120 seconds each. After the second ad played, the podcast didn't start. Fiddling with it caused the podcast to start over from the beginning. When I tried to seek to the last place I was, it played an ad immediately. Seriously unbelievable.

I gave up and will never attempt to listen to an ad supported podcast on Spotify again.

oriolid7• 5 years ago

I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify and I still have them on my home screen, so I think that it's hardcoded, not a generated recommendation.

The probably autogenerated daily mixes have been surprisingly non-bad for me. Nothing like rap mix invaded by Bach, but the "classic rock" mix sometimes has Ghost that doesn't really sound that out of place.

slig2• 5 years ago

My guess is that they don't have to pay rights for the podcasts, so for them it's a win/win if you spend your attention on their app listening to free content.

klyrs4• 5 years ago

I mean, I have a paid account... the biggest win for them is when I forget to turn the tunes on when I sit down to my desk.

underwater• 5 years ago

It's probably that they can get exclusive podcasts, but not exclusive music. They want podcasts to be something that locks you into Spotify.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

An option to hide all podcasts would significantly...

An option have a personal search expression with a variety of tags include and excluded and other stuff neutral is what I want for everything.

It's twenty years since Alt-Vista allowed search with logic expressions and "recommendation" has gotten more and more railroad-y since then.

The "don't give options, make it moron proof" paradigm literally forces us all to be morons.

gundmc2• 5 years ago

I listened to one episode of "Call Her Daddy" because I saw it ranked as one of the most-listened podcasts out there and Spotify will not let go putting it front and center on my home screen every day.

hugocbp• 5 years ago

Agreed.

I love podcasts, on my podcast app.

I'm really disappointed how Spotify is buying several big podcasts and moving to their platform exclusively.

I tried to listen to a Science Vs episode the other day, and now my Spotify is almost completely filled with podcasts recommendation. Plus, the experience is still far from specialized podcast apps.

The result: I'll probably stop following Science Vs (and any other podcast that moves exclusively to Spotify).

They could, at least, have a separate Spotify Podcast app so things wouldn't be mixed (kind of like Wealthsimple has separate apps for Investing and Trading).

I'm still sad Spotify bought Gimlet and apparently will do (if not already) this to all their podcasts.

elamje2• 5 years ago

Why Spotify plasters your home page with Podcasts:

Short answer is $$$$.

Longer answer is: Spotify must pay royalties for each song played. Imagine if there was a completely free (for Spotify) form of content that filled users ears for hours, thus removing the need for Spotify to pay royalties. Ahem podcasts. Now imagine if Spotify started injecting ads into said media form to grow their revenue beyond subscriptions. Again, podcasts. So now, you have a very long-form content that both saves you royalty $ and drives new revenue. QED. Podcasts will continue to be plastered all over your recommendations, be top search results, etc, until the above stops being true.

Wrote about this in detail recently: https://www.towardssoftware.com/spotify.txt

bombcar4• 5 years ago

Welcome to McDonalds, home of the Mcadoyble.

Now given that burgers cost us money to produce, wouldn’t you rather have a podcast?

Does this whole thing not seem insane to anyone else?

moneywoes• 5 years ago

Does Spotify inject ads in free podcasts? Don’t all commodities not do that

shoto_io• 5 years ago

You’re probably right. But then again: who cares about Spotify making money? I want to listen to music and not optimize the bottom line of the Company.

Gigachad• 5 years ago

I think the more likely answer is that podcasts can be produced with exclusivity deals while songs can not.

Spotify is large because they were first and because apple/google music suck. But eventually apple and google will stop sucking and users will drain from Spotify rapidly unless Spotify can create content to keep users in.

Spotify is in the position of Firefox 15 years ago right now. Eventually the built in apps will take over.

tomjen32• 5 years ago

You aren't wrong, but you would think they would then create an excellent podcast player, yet they can't even get simple things like the order of the episodes correctly, and I still haven't figured out how to setup a next queue.

Not to mention that I might listen to podcasts at home and one the way to work, but at work I won't want to listen to anything spoken, but half the time I end up accidentally starting the podcast anyway. That now means I am not using Spotify for podcasts.

vintermann3• 5 years ago

I'm sure it boils down to money ultimately, but it can't be the way you suggest here.

The thing is that Spotify does not pay per play! The royalties lobby love to give the impression that they do, because it makes it look like Spotify is fleecing them.

Spotify pays percentages of what it itself collects in subscription fees. If a record company owned 10% of everything that was listened to on Spotify this month, they would make _the same_, regardless of how many absolute seconds their stuff was listened to.

So, more listening to podcasts does not mean Spotify has to pay out less. How much they have to pay out in total is fixed as a share of their subscription (and ad) revenue anyway, in multi-year, industry wide contracts with copyright owners.

There are ways Spotify could circumvent this, such as promoting content they covertly owned themselves, or content whose owners gave them kickbacks of some sort. There's some indication they do such shady things. But podcasts don't change this equation much.

I think Spotify's promotion of podcasts is simply good old fashioned loss-leading monopoly building. They're hoping that Spotify will become where listeners go for podcasts since that's where all the podcasts are, and also the place podcasters go because that's where all the listeners are.

jonathankoren2• 5 years ago

I was using Spotify for podcasts because they were there, but then my home feed got dominated by them, and they occasionally get queued up and giving me a mix of podcasts and music, which I don’t want.

I started migrating to Apple Podcasts so I can context switch more easily.

a5aAqU2• 5 years ago

Pandora's music recommendations are amazing, and the stations stay within their genre. I've discovered a huge amount of new music that way.

I've never used Spotify, so I can't compare. I don't like podcasts either. I get more out of audiobooks.

Broken_Hippo3• 5 years ago

It has been years since I've tried Pandora: Back when I tried it, they only let you skip a number of songs in a short time and often played things I didn't care for. Lots of slightly obscure songs weren't available. It might be better for more popular music or have improved in the last decade, I don't know. I started using Spotify.

And still now as then: It is only available in the US. I no longer live in the US.

hn_go_brrrrr• 5 years ago

If only the audio quality weren't crap. I switched away from them to get better audio, and would gladly switch back if they provided better than 192.

015a• 5 years ago

I don't usually overreact too strongly to big tech making dumb decisions like these, but Spotify's podcast pushing actually did drive me away from the platform.

I beg Spotify to think Logically about it. There is a limited amount of screen real estate available on any display, but especially phones. Q.e.d: pushing podcast-related content actually hurts the music listening experience. Conversely, pushing music content hurts the podcast listening experience. This is (mostly) inarguable; any pixel dedicated to an interface element related to podcast content is a pixel which cannot display music content; its a zero sum game.

I say "mostly" because; there are people who I'm sure love Spotify Podcasts, and having both avenues within one app is a net win. I'd be willing to accept a toggle in settings which could "focus" the app Between Music <> Music + Podcasts <> Podcasts. I don't think that's unreasonable, and I also don't feel it would be unreasonable for it to default to Music + Podcasts.

Though it brings up an interesting point: Imagine the experience of someone who does primarily come to Spotify for podcasts. Its among the worst podcast apps in the history of podcast apps! Its littered with music! That's a horrible experience!

The ironic part is, Spotify is probably happy to lose me as a customer. I'm a "Music power user" if there were such a thing. They may end up paying more in royalties for the music I listen to than I pay them, and I can't say I've listened to more than a half-dozen podcasts. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes": Spotify is not incentivized to build an app that benefits people who listen to a lot of music. Their bread and butter is people who listen to a bit of music and podcasts; just enough to keep them paying each month. So, I don't lose too much sleep over their slow decent into mediocrity; I'm far more concerned about the unfortunate reality that there are no longer any great options in this space, for people like me.

zippergz• 5 years ago

You’re probably right but I have yet to meet anyone who loves podcasts in Spotify. The two groups I have encountered who use it are those who never listened to podcasts at all before so don’t know any other way, and people who begrudgingly use it because some podcast they like went exclusive there. Which I guess are both good for Spotify but it puts them in a weaker position than if people actually did truly like the experience.

ardit33• 5 years ago

Spotify had both thumbs up and thumbs down button a while ago. It even asked why do you thumb down something:

Wrong Rec Do not like the artist/show less Do not like this song Heard it too many times/pause for a bit

etc...

It got removed... as the whole functionality (Radio) got phased out, and the new stuff didn't incorporate it.

Employees changed, and moved on to other companies, and the new that came didn't think it will improve things. etc... and the feature got forgoten.

I think a lot of people in here are asking a 'reset my recommendations' feature. And that did exist as well at some point. Not sure why it got removed/it is not in production.

notyourwork18• 5 years ago

You might be on to something with the idea that it was there it was removed. I might presume it was removed because data showed that customers don't use it. The rest of this thread seems to think otherwise.

The idea of resetting recommendations is a minority feature ask from customers as well and I wish companies (including my own) handled that better. Sadly its a pretty expensive project for such a minority stake.

lethologica2• 5 years ago

Radio functionality is still there but it’s a shell of what it used to be. I find it absolutely useless now actually because all it ever seems to do is play music I’ve already added to my library.

Oddskar6• 5 years ago

Of course they can't add this: they're too busy rebuilding the UI so the (I assume) new Art Director can climb the corporate ladder.

californical• 5 years ago

Yup - cancelled my Spotify account a year ago, after they changed the UI for the 15th time, making features that I wanted to use harder, and pushing things on me that I don't want (podcasts). And introducing bugs constantly in some of the non-default features that I used a lot (eg. changing playlist sort order was broken at one point). Add to that their shuffle playing the same ~20% of songs in my playlists, and never hearing the other 80%, for some unknown reason. Then being gaslit when I tried to report "bugs".

It was just constantly frustrating to battle them, so I switched to Tidal, and it's been amazing. The UI is just simple and lets me play music, and nothing has broken in the last year. The only changes have been minor improvements that make it even easier to do the one thing that I want: to play music.

ant6n• 5 years ago

I find Spotify is riddled with small annoying bugs and antagonistic UI, I'm really really sick of it.

Instead of having a discussion about how it could be improved, maybe we can have one about which alternatives exist and how good they are (tidal, is it?)

EDIT: I tried Tidal, that app has a confusing mess of an interface just like Spotify. Plus they have a "convenient" bug during sign up that may sign up students with more expensive non student accounts.

switch007• 5 years ago

My Spotify Weekly is infested with Swedish songs. I don´t know if this is because I once listened to a Swedish song or because Spotify is Swedish. Their support told me me there is nothing they can do

endorphine• 5 years ago

I'm deliberate about any new music I hear, that I never use Spotify's recommendations. I prefer doing my own research and digging for stuff that I might like.

VBprogrammer• 5 years ago

Oh, what I'd give for a dislike button. I tend to use Spotify to listen to nursery rhymes in the car while traveling with our toddler. This doesn't mean I need to have a daily mix full of nursery rhymes and there is no way to tell Spotify that.

jhoechtl• 5 years ago

It would improve any social network. Leaving dislike out is like voting without a Ney button

dfdz3• 5 years ago

I have seen this article before. The author are so close to understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button

To dislike a song is easy – to like one, you have to actually invest time in it.

Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the dislike button.

In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a song and the user not paying attention (in that case the user will provide no input whether they like the song or not.)

oriolid7• 5 years ago

Skip could also mean "I like this song, but I want to hear something different at the moment".

Talanes• 5 years ago

Sometimes it even means "I love this song, but I'm trying to listen to something new."

verve_rat• 5 years ago

But there is a difference between "I don't feel like this now" and "I hate this" that skipping a track doesn't capture.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 5 years ago

Surely they have some context as to what "now" means?

I read that YouTube Music recommends different music depending on time of day, whether I'm at work / home / in the car, and even takes the weather into account. I'd be surprised if Spotify didn't have some context awareness as well.

PeterisP2• 5 years ago

That difference is easily captured by the cases where you don't skip that track. If you have listened to a track two times and on the third case skip it, then that's "I don't feel like this now"; if you have been offered that track twice and skipped it both times immediately, then you probably hate this.

jdsully• 5 years ago

Sometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or genre. A skip doesn’t imply I’d never want to hear a song again.

charcircuit3• 5 years ago

A song you always want to listen to is better than one you only want to listen to sometimes.

dfdz3• 5 years ago

I suspect that this same effect is close to the reason so many services removed the dislike button: humans are emotional and were, in some cases, disliking songs which they were not in the mood for, but would like at another time.

As a result, the signal coming from the dislike button was not very useful, and just added unnecessary complexity. Instead, the algorithm can present the user a fixed song in different settings to see if they continue to skip it. A nice result is that the user doesn’t have the negative reaction “hey I disliked this song why are you presenting it to me again”

crucialfelix• 5 years ago

It can also just mean that I've heard it too many times. Give me something fresh, a hit of dopamine please

Socketier• 5 years ago

It would be nice if when you skipped a song it would do a soft pop up or something to ask why you skipped it. You could ignore it most of the time but if you felt strongly about the recommendation then you could at least vent your frustration on the "I don't like this song" button.

I think the main issue here is, is that users feel a bit powerless to influence the algorithm with thier dislikes as much as thier likes. Even though a song skip may be functionally similar to the dislike button, the user has no "haptic feedback", for lack of better term, when they really feel the need to have their negative opinion on the song heard by the algorithm.

I think most people's gripes with the nature of these recommendation algorithms deciding things, centre around the feeling that the algorithm doesn't listen to them and their opinion as much as it obeys other overriding trends. Giving them tangible and tactile options to deliver their opinions in hard and fast way gives them some more peace of mind that the algorithm is working for them, and not for some other entity.

didibus3• 5 years ago

No, I often have fear of skipping because I think it might teach the algos I don't like it, when it's just not what I want to listen to now.

Ideally, they should let me like, dislike, skip, hate, completely block artists, and allow me to like multiple times, to teach them the ones I like over and over from the ones I like a little.

dfdz3• 5 years ago

I often have fear of skipping because I think it might teach the algos I don't like it

So basically Spotify is performing reinforcement learning on you— beautiful!

cplusplusfellow• 5 years ago

There are 3 artists that Spotify continually play to me and I preemptively will fast forward them even during the crossover play because I dislike them so much. I’ve submitted requests before to have a “don’t play me this artist” feature. I don’t know why this is so hard for them.

prepend• 5 years ago

Probably because Spotify takes payment from artists to play their songs. Promoting before a new album, etc.

If they let you block artists then this is less money for them.

oceanghost2• 5 years ago

Youtube for me, fixates on a couple of videos-- as in it recommends them every single time I use it-- one is a Marques Brown retrospective on the Gameboy, and one is the TYT (news outlet), story about a woman who had her face bitten off by an ape and is at least 8 years old.

I don't know why these show up in my recommendations every single day. I will never watch them.

petre4• 5 years ago

Shouldn't they have at least have a report as inapropriate content button? So my mom could then report Cradle of Filth.

Ageodene• 5 years ago

Deezer have that option. When you're listening to something you don't like you can click on a little frowny face, then they will ask you if you want to never hear this song again or the artist. It's neat.

sethgecko• 5 years ago

there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a song and the user not paying attention

There is a way to do this, the signal is adding the song to your favourites or a playlist

homami• 5 years ago

Deezer has added a "don't recommend this song again" button. I used a couple of times only but I feel that my recommendations have been indeed improved.

Before, I had to skip the songs that I did not like, and Deezer was keep putting them back in my 'Flow' a few days later. That was pretty annoying.

nvr219• 5 years ago

I feel like I'm the only one that doesn't really care about recommendation engines because I still don't use them. I get music recommendations from friends or music journalism the way I did pre-Pandora and it still works for me. Maybe I'm missing out on some sick bands though.

refracture• 5 years ago

I feel you. I haven't paid heed to a single recommendation Spotify has ever given me; Most of the bands I've discovered in the last several years were by way of Reddit or word of mouth.

dgellow• 5 years ago

I expect to be an outlier here, I also never use recommendation because I listen to the same stuff since 15+ years, and I couldn’t be happier :)

Elder Scrolls and Castlevania OSTs (Symphony of the Night and Super Castlevania mostly) represent at least 90% of what I listened to during the past decade. The other 10% is Shpongle and other soundtrack from games I enjoyed.

vanilla_nut4• 5 years ago

At the risk of wildly upheaving your music listening habits — give the Starbound soundtrack a try. I like the soundtracks you enjoy a lot and Starbound definitely makes my heavy rotation.

And Stardew Valley, but that has the addedcool factor of being made entirely by one guy.

snthd2• 5 years ago

Listenbrainz[0] looks like an interesting project for building better (or at least more open) recommendation systems[1].

[0] https://listenbrainz.org

[1] https://blog.metabrainz.org/2020/12/24/playlists-and-persona...

thepasswordis• 5 years ago

Has pandora licensed their music DNA engine to anybody?

Pandora recommendations have always been 1000x better than anybody else. It’s not even a comparison.

zz865• 5 years ago

Yeah I was wondering if Pandora had a patent on channels based on likes/dislikes.

spywaregorilla9• 5 years ago

I find pandora recommendations to be absolute garbage and HEAVILY weighted to certain local maxima, typically favoring mainstream songs. A few that invariably came up for me that I remember and didn't block:

This must be it by Royksopp Headstrong by Trapt Outside by Staind

lifeisstillgood• 5 years ago

I wrote a blog post some twenty years ago (good luck finding it) but the basic point was I went and Googled "Martin Luther King" and the third item was hosted on Stormfront (neo Nazi hosting site - IIRR cos no one else would host the sort of stuff on it).

I surmised that some academic papers were linking to this and Google chose that as a positive recommendation.

I remember realising then that what we needed was not just a link but a standrdised way of conveying attributes on the link (including not recommended).

As everyone now infers from behaviour (time on page etc) but I still think there must be value in "this resource has this meaning to me and is important enough that i am labelling it"

AtNightWeCode4• 5 years ago

First, Spotify likes have been broken since forever, things you not liked end up as liked tracks. Second, it is obvious that the recommendations are mostly based on what you previously listen to. Hence, all parents are spammed with kids songs. I think they made a fix for that now though.

People does not act according to there believes and I have a hard time thinking that votes would beat history when it comes to mass consumption of music. Down votes are in general also known to cause problems.

For me, Spotify recommendations are by far the best recommendations on any entertaining platform I use. I use them all the time. Compare it with Youtube for instance were music recommendations are repetitive and mostly irrelevant.

xkgt• 5 years ago

I am curious, what was the fix for parent's profile being spammed with kids songs? I hate to pay for a family plan just to maintain individual profiles when I never plan to listen on more than one device concurrently.

AtNightWeCode4• 5 years ago

Backtracked and it was from an ad. The family plan was the solution I am afraid.

saltedonion• 5 years ago

“ Piki selects music from a database of roughly 5 million songs and incentivizes users by giving them $1 for every 25 songs they rate. The Piki interface plays a song, and then gives the listener the ability to rate it after different amounts of time. Specifically, the user can “dislike” the song after 3 seconds, “like” the song after 6 seconds and “superlike” it after 12 seconds.”

These people are training on a completely different set of features than what Spotify is using. For example, listen time is likely to be a important feature where a short time or a skip will be a pretty good proxy for a dislike.

In other words, the authors conclusions are conditioned on only using the features outlined in the article, like, dislike, and super like. And I’m not sure it will generalize for Spotify.

werdnapk• 5 years ago

Deezer has a button to not recommend tracks.

juanitolol• 5 years ago

Spotify does have a dislike button on their recommendation playlists and also, Spotify's recommendations engine is by far the best that have ever been on the market. It managed to discover new artists that I'd have never found unless I lost several dozen hours on Discogs. The important part is to train recommendation playlist accordingly.

spondyl• 5 years ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that Spotify used to have explicit upvote and downvote buttons like 5 years ago?

I assume they decided they could infer the same metrics from users skipping tracks for example

deeblering4• 5 years ago

I think spotify should just hire DJs and run live radio shows.

Its been a long time since the algorithmic playlists provided anything useful for me. I find most new music by listening to different online radio streams these days.

hooande• 5 years ago

I could swear that spotify had a dislike button, at least on the android mobile app. I remember using it on songs that I found annoying. It would continue integrating them into playlists anyway. The thumbs down dislike was removed from the app years (?) ago. I didn't use it very often, which is why I assumed they got rid of it

campground• 5 years ago

I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music. I think you do have to prime the engine a bit. I "like" a lot of albums and songs. Every time I hear something new that I like I press the little heart button. Same when I discover music outside of Spotify (I listen to WFMU a lot). I make a lot of playlists. And I use the radio feature all the time. Click on the ellipses next to any song, artist, or album and you can "Go to radio" and Spotify will spin off a playlist of related music. I'm continually discovering new things that way. My Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists are always full of great stuff.

hk__2• 5 years ago

The radio feature is awesome to discover new music. You can make a short playlist of a few songs you like, and start a radio from that. You can later tweak the playlist to change what you get in the radio while it’s playing.

hkon• 5 years ago

Yes, same, I enjoyed the weekly recommendations for about a year, each week being recommended some songs which remain favorites. But the algorithmic recommendations then got heavily skewed towards Finnish rap music. Which made the recommendations garbage. The convergence towards Finnish rap is not uncommon on Spotify.

oriolid7• 5 years ago

I've never had the problem with Finnish rap, but at one point the discover weekly was full of death metal. Also, for some reason they pushed really hard Ricky's Hand by Fad Gadget (awful, but at the time they had a well hidden ban button), Swamp Thing by Chameleons (kind of OK, but don't they have other songs?) and Love Will Save You by Swans (kind of OK, but do have long discography so why always that one song?)

emerged2• 5 years ago

It’s really good for me. But I had a large catalog of mp3 accumulated over the years and then manually followed a ton of those artists and liked their tracks.

Good recommendations obviously require good data. You sort of get what you put in to an extent.

joe_the_user3• 5 years ago

I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music.

I too have "eclectic, obscure" tastes and I couldn't get anything from the recommendation algorithm and canceled after a month. I don't remember the thing recommending anything that seemed more obscure than what I searched for. And I made playlists.

But seriously, some people's tastes are served by Spotify and some find it frustrating. It would be nice if those who don't get immediate satisfaction had a more sophisticated approach available. My hunch is the company would prefer less customers and more control.

xvector• 5 years ago

It definitely took a couple of months before Spotify honed in on my tastes, but it was definitely worth the wait.

Broken_Hippo3• 5 years ago

To be fair, the recommendations are based on what you listened to lately in addition to what you've listened to in the past. A month probably wasn't long enough - it isn't really an immediate satisfaction thing when you have off-center tastes in music. If 70% of folks like popular music, that's the easiest thing to recommend.

They might want a bit more control, I don't know, but I very highly doubt fewer customers is the goal. If they wanted fewer, they could just pull the free model completely. I'd guess piracy would increase and they'd get blamed, but I don't know.

3np2• 5 years ago

I've been stuck in the same local optimum for years, getting the same songs and artists in the same genres (that I do and did like, but it's gotten old now)

ascorbic4• 5 years ago

I also find it strange. I find the algorithm incredibly good. I did link it with iTunes back in the day, so it started off knowing what I like, and I always Like tracks when I like them. Now I often find myself pressing like on most tracks on Discover Weekly because it's so good at recommending things I'll enjoy, and quite a lot in Daily Mix and Artist Radio too.

darthrupert3• 5 years ago

Agreed. A lot is wrong about Spotify, but the recommendations are superb.

nikanj• 5 years ago

Spotify's recommendation algorithm comes with a healthy pinch of Payola. "Hey you've been listening exclusively to chiptunes and power metal from the 80s. Here's a new single from $local_mumble_rapper you might love!"

And you can't dislike the recommendation, so next week the algorithm is going to go "Oohh last week he played some mumble rap, let's give him a little bit more of it!"

lwkl• 5 years ago

If you go to the artists page you can open a menu right next to to „follow“ button and select an option to not play any song from this artist.

I remember this being easier to find. I guess Spotify might have changed it.

feffe• 5 years ago

I did find it to be extremely poor but once I started liking individual songs, not whole albums it does better. Still, I'm not sure it uses other listening habits to feed the engine such as:

- Early skipping a song from a generated play list (-1). - Repeat playing the same song from a generated play list (+1)

hybridtupel• 5 years ago

The algorithm often is very strange. My mixtapes most often contain single tracks of audiobooks I listened to. Looks like Spotify treats audiobook tracks like any other song which is obviously very silly. Who doesn‘t want to listen to random audiobook snippets.

stuaxo• 5 years ago

Back when lastfm still had a radio it had a ban button and that was essential (think it got removed after getting bought)

zizee• 5 years ago

I'd like something similar for Netflix. Let me click a "never show me this again" button. It would unclutter the interface so quickly.

I suspect the reason we'll never see such a feature is because it would be quite revealing how little content Netflix has that is of interest to any one person, and how much filler they have.

bombcar4• 5 years ago

I also suspect that these companies have tuned the algorithms to emphasize content that is cheaper for them to play.

jerhewet• 5 years ago

A "dislike" button would be helpful, but what I really want is a "I already own this album / track, and your recommendation is completely spot-on" button.

You recommended this to me, and I agree 100% with your recommendation. Now that would be brilliant.

chiefalchemist2• 5 years ago

Oh happy days :) Spotify recommendations - at least for me - are generally useless. It feels like "here are some palatable suggestions. You might not actually like them but we're confident they're inoffensive (in a not at all interesting sort of way)." Mind you my range of musical styles is wide. But I went 2 or 3 weeks listening to Daily Mixes and heard nothing at all worthy of my attention.

I hope Google does similar with YouTube. Why does it keep suggesting things I've scrolled past 5 or 10 times?

hammyhavoc• 5 years ago

Fuck Spotify's recommendations. What counts are recommendations from people instead of algorithms. Intent is everything with making a recommendation. If someone I know recommends me x because y, then I know it'll be at least interesting, if not great.

blackearl• 5 years ago

I never used Spotify but I've been happy with Deezer, which does have a "don't recommend this song" and "don't recommend this artist", plus a "change mood" option which is helpful if I'm feeling more phonk than funk

omega3• 5 years ago

I've deleted my Spotify account after noticing that the recommendations algorithm is useless.I don't understand how there can be regression in that regard from soulseek, what.cd network graphs, last.fm or even radio stations. Seriously, how hard is it for Spotify to hire some music heads to put together playlists for people.

capex• 5 years ago

Won't Spotify be able to tell dislikes by how quickly someone skips to the next song?

cletus• 5 years ago

I wonder if you really need a like or dislike button. I'm increasingly convinced they're both being used wrong. If you're listening to a random stream of songs there are only really two actions by the user that matter:

1. They keep listening. This is about the best "like" signal (IMHO); and

2. They skip to the next song. This is effectively a "dislike".

Both can be situational not absolute too. But what does like/dislike gain you beyond those two signals? Liking something requires the user to do something but users only really do something when they don't like what's happening. Requiring explicit action to keep playing songs like the current one seems somehow backwards.

max68• 5 years ago

That’s not true. I like the beginning of some songs, especially when listening to 20 min+ classical pieces, but not the end. A skip in that case doesn’t mean I don’t like it, but that I don’t want to finish it.

charcircuit3• 5 years ago

Giving a song 6 minutes of watch time is still good compared to other songs.

winddude• 5 years ago

I could swear they used to have a button that allowed you to remove songs from playlists

DigitallyFidget• 5 years ago

https://i.imgur.com/k3doFqL.png

This is my relationship with Spotify.

0898• 5 years ago

Discover Weekly is remarkably good at suggesting new music. But I’m surprised at how few of my friends use it. It doesn’t seem to be promoted prominently now.

It’s a bit like how Steve Jobs proudly demoed Expose in Mac OS X 10.3, but then subsequent versions of the operating system progressively hid it - to the point almost no Mac user knows it exists.

cushychicken• 5 years ago

Maybe if it did Spotify would stop trying to convince me that I like Kurt Vile.

I never, ever want Spotify to play "Pretty Pimpin" for me ever again.

mberning• 5 years ago

I would like to see varying levels of dislike. For me personally there are a wide variety of reasons that I might wish to “dislike” something and with something like Pandora I always have to wonder if the impact of dislinking will be appropriate.

Some levels of dislike off the top of my head

Hate the whole genre

Hate the artist, but not the genre

Hate the song, but not the artist

And so on and so forth, the same applies on the like side of the equation as well.

madisp• 5 years ago

But there is a dislike button in Spotify, specifically in the Discover Weekly playlist where most of the recommendations happen?

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Discover-...

CamperBob22• 5 years ago

The dislike button seems to come and go at random. Sometimes it's available in the desktop app, sometimes not. Sometimes I have the option to dislike songs in CarPlay, sometimes not.

It's as if they hired B. F. Skinner as an engineering consultant.

siva7• 5 years ago

Not only that, sometimes the dislike button doesn’t seem to do anything

coder543• 5 years ago

No... unfortunately, that has been gone for probably close to a year now, replaced with a "Hide Song" button that doesn't seem to influence the algorithm in any way.

ipaddr3• 5 years ago

For us oldtimers what is the best way to create a personalized spotify clone from your mp3s? Something to simulation the spotify experience or something to simulate a pandora clone?

alvarlagerlof• 5 years ago

I don't use the like button. Works for me. I think it picks up on me adding to playlists or skipping.

toomanyrichies2• 5 years ago

I’ve said this in another comment here, but I see a lot of folks debating about the utility of a dislike button in terms of its improvement on recommendations, and I think that misses the point.

If enough users want the button, that seems like a good enough reason to have it, even if they don’t use it. They may enjoy having the ability to express their opinion, which is an entirely separate derived benefit from such a button’s influence on their recommendations.

It might even be a bit like the “Close door” button on an elevator. Sure, it’s rumored not to even do anything in some cases, but it’s widely available anyway because users appreciate feeling like they have agency over their circumstances (even if that feeling is built on a lie).

mimanning2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know if the spotify recommendation algorithm analyzes the actual music in order to group songs? Or does it only do clustering based on users' listening habits? It seems like incorporating the former could help with discovering new and potentially less well known music, which is an area I'd like to see spotify improve on.

MutableLambda2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure it's done via collaborative filtering (other user preferences), and not the actual music features (like Pandora does, or did before).

mimanning2• 5 years ago

That's too bad, I'd love to have the ability to explicitly trade off the recommendation criteria between music features and user preferences. I understand there's no real incentive for spotify to do this though.

brenainn2• 5 years ago

A dislike button would be handy. There is that feature on some of the generated playlists, but I don't think they do anything. My two biggest issues with Spotify right now are: 1. Release Radar filled with re-releases and remixes, often from artists who have long since passed away. I want new music as in released for the first time. 2. Name collisions. I'm surprised this is an issue, but I will often get songs from different artists with the same name. And then I'm unsure if selecting "I don't like this song" or "I don't like this artist" will affect the actually intended artist.

I've also reached a tipping point where I no longer find new music through algorithmic recommendations. To be fair it's taken about 5 years to reach this point. Now the good music I find comes from searching for curated playlists. It's come full circle as before streaming I got my music recommendations from blogs and friends.

tehjoker2• 5 years ago

How do you find good music blogs? I've basically given up on the recommendation engines and I don't have a ton of musically tuned in friends.

kfarr• 5 years ago

I still like https://hypem.com as a meta music site aggregator. Also https://www.indieshuffle.com/

tkgally• 5 years ago

A few months ago, I started listening to new-music programs on BBC Music Introducing [1], particularly the London program [2]. As you might guess from how I spell “programs,” I’m not British and have never lived in the U.K. But I’m an older guy who responds most viscerally to the same old songs I liked as a teenager. Listening to music created by young people today helps to get me out of that rut.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/M6hmZj0X5c8nxQQydf...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp

brenainn2• 5 years ago

It was a manual process for me personally, finding them through message boards and forums (I know that's not much help). I'd also use https://www.music-map.com. /r/listentothis on reddit is also a good source of tracks.

What I mainly do now is look for Spotify playlists by record labels that represent artists I like, or look for playlists made by artists I listen to.

Shout out to holyfuckingshit40000 on blogspot, it's long gone now. But that was my favourite music blog, to the point I wanted to meet the person who ran it and buy them a drink or something, because almost everything they recommended I loved. Just now I've found that someone compiled a list of the recommendations, check it out: https://joseph.pallamidessi.fr/2020/05/03/holyfuckingshit400... (it's missing some from memory, but it's a diverse collection of some good music).

philipps• 5 years ago

Sasha Frere-Jones used to be the music critic at the New Yorker and writes a fantastic (although somewhat irregular) substack blog > https://substack.sashafrerejones.com/

VortexDream2• 5 years ago

I've been enjoying the "All Songs Considered" podcast from NPR. Discovered a lot of great music through them.

ryantgtg• 5 years ago

I frequent the bandcamp daily blog, and I follow a few people on bandcamp who tend to actively buy music I’m interested in (I just go through the users who have bought an album I like, then I look at their other purchases). On top of that bandcamp sends me a weekly “you may be interested in” email that often has at least one thing I’m actually interested in.

I read some blogs. But overall I discover a lot on bandcamp - more than I can process.

S0und• 5 years ago

2. "Name collision" unfortunately that's not Spotify's fault but the artist who set the wrong Artists ID. So instead of creating a new one for themself, they just use an already existing one with the same name. What I did in the last i just email the record label ( if they have one ) and ask them. In my case i listen to metal, but every know and then a mediocre rap song shows up in my RR. Usually because the artist is clueless and they just "put they new song" on Spotify.

johnsoft• 5 years ago

Is it really that easy? Can anyone just sign up for Spotify as an artist and upload a Beyonce album?

jonathankoren2• 5 years ago

Entity resolution is a thing though, and the Discover Weekly algorithm actually tries to combine artists (possibly due to collaborations), which is what goes wrong.

For example, I follow Cornelius, the Japanese guitarist. I liked several of his song. So the data indicates I’m a fan. I’ve been recommended a new song by a different Cornelius. This other guy is an African gospel singer. I don’t follow him. Never even played a song.

That shouldn’t happen. The system knows they’re different Corneliuses, because the catalogs aren’t mixed, but yet string match took over.

playpause• 5 years ago

Sounds like Spotify’s fault to me.

vintermann3• 5 years ago

Spotify at least seems to have a few humans employed to take tips about mislabeled releases and fix them. (For instance, they removed the albums of the Salvadorean rapper Spiro from the page of the British folk band Spiro when I mailed them about it.) Most streaming services have nothing of the sort. Music metadata sucks, but Spotify is actually slightly less godawful than the norm.

3np2• 5 years ago

Agree on the above (though are duplicates really that much of a practical issue? I did discover some Russian rap through that). I'd like to add:

3. Discover Weekly stuck recycling through the same songs over and over again (it's also years since the algorithm found anything new for me, apart from name collisions)

4. Geo-language-locking. My CC will apparently only be accepted with its registered address in Spain. I barely speak a word of Spanish and don't have interest in the music popular in Spain. Yet it's what they keep pushing me, especially podcasts (including any episode in generated lists). Long-standing issues on all their community forums for this, eg https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Browse-Allow-to-...

I recall a 100+ page forum thread on 4 but can't seem to find it now.

grvdrm• 5 years ago

Curious: how repetitive is your listening history?

I also notice that my Discover Weekly and Daily 1-5 playlists are recycling much of the same material. But I also frequently listen to my Liked Songs (< 40 songs) on shuffle, so I assume Spotify's algorithm is looking at that data and saying "you do actually just want to listen to these songs over and over again"

Otherwise, a fun experiment I tried last year: deleted all liked songs, all playlists, etc. to refresh my recommendations. I didn't pay close attention to how new suggestions compared to old, but it was one sort of trick to find new stuff rather than heading back to existing playlists. My Liked songs definitely aren't those from last year.

Also, this may seem counterintuitive but I regularly listen to playlists that seem like they are out of my interest pool (e.g. will deliberately check out a country playlist) as another way to move away from my own recommendations.

atombender• 5 years ago

My problem with "Release Radar" are all the singles (and, as you say, remix stuff; sometimes it's an EP with one original track and multiple remixes). If a musician I follow releases a single, I'm not really interested until it's actually released on an album. So the only way to consume "Release Radar" is to click into every release to look at what's inside.

pc862• 5 years ago

Unfortunately the only thing they seem to do is exclude that song from that playlist. I've had things I disliked on one radio station come up on a different station 30 minutes later.

I just recently switch to Spotify from YouTube Music (as a former diehard Google Play fan) maybe 6 weeks ago. Everyone raved about how great the recommendation system was but I'm certainly not seeing it yet after spending several weeks diligently liking/disliking songs, entering in favorite artists, etc.

suction• 5 years ago

As for the "dislike an artist and I'll dislike all artists with the same name", you could theoretically compare the two by artist-ids, which you can see when sharing the artist through the Spotify client or using a browser to show the profile.

Spotify usually doesn't just give the same ID to several artists with the same name, but of course it's not impossible.

IanSanders• 5 years ago

Name collisions. I'm surprised this is an issue, but I will often get songs from different artists with the same name

This is potentially by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Spotify#2016%E2%8...

nhumrich• 5 years ago

The reason I still use Pandora.

kjgkjhfkjf• 5 years ago

It seems extremely unlikely that nobody at Spotify has considered this. It's probably safe to conclude that Spotify are optimizing their UX and algorithms for different metrics than the ones used in this academic study.

cjlovett• 5 years ago

I love my Spotify, especially love I can now use it in my Tesla. I mostly use it for podcast channels, like Joe Rogan and Charles Mizrahi. But I also rarely use their recommender, I mostly know what music I like or I get recommendations from friends I know well. A dislike button sounds like a great idea, even if it is purely for the psychological pleasure pressing it.

can16358p• 5 years ago

I don't think it's worth the additional complexity and having a "negative" element on the user interface. It's not only about the engineering and sucking that last bit of optimization from a technical perspective, it's also about creating a product/service that people love and embrace. Something with a negative-though invoking elements like a dislike button wouldn't be in favor of that.

Spotify is a big company and I'm pretty much sure that they've thought about adding it multiple times throughout years. If they haven't, there must be a reason.

jiahaiqi• 5 years ago

It's a good idea, and when I'm listening to a song, I want to be able to recommend songs to me through my favorites, so that I can hear a lot of songs that not famous but that's nice

MutableLambda2• 5 years ago

I used to use Pandora (even in Canada with VPN), but the sound quality deteriorated for some reason and player options aren't so great. Even with a paid account it sounds worse than Spotify and library is not that huge compared to Spotify.

But back in a day in was an example of a perfect service, where you could just say what music features you like and it would play everything close to it, expanding the boundaries. You could also dislike songs and like them (which made channels really really convenient). I wish Spotify could do something like that.

amotinga• 5 years ago

I'd like a ban button on a song. I like listening to various genres when I work out depending on the mood, but as soon as I hear 'pussy' I want to throw my phone out.

stevesearer• 5 years ago

I’ve kind of been getting back into listening to the radio recently.

Am curious if there are any radio station-style djs one can support through Patreon where there is a mix of banter and music you can listen similarly to a podcast, though more regularly like a morning show.

quadrangle• 5 years ago

when are we gonna have an anti-pandora or anti-spotify that specifically shuffles non-randomly to provide maximum diversity?

jrm4• 5 years ago

By observation; why crowdsourced recommendations for music suck is that there's no "cost" to being a critic/influencer, and therefore no real effective filter.

I realized that this is why current hip-hop is so much worse now; it's not (mostly) the artists; its that the "filter" used to be much more ruthless. Fewer opportunities for deals and "difficulty" in being an influence (e.g. DJ gigs, selling tapes from cars, general violence, general censorship etc etc) weeded out every content that wasn't good and every participant that wasn't dedicated.

userbinator• 5 years ago

For brevity and the same length of text, I think it should be called the Nope button. (I thought of Hate, but it's too strong if the existing one is Like and not Love.)

...but whatever happened to rating instead of binary choices? I have a theory that making people think of things in only binary terms intrinsically causes divisiveness.

011000112• 5 years ago

Things I want from Spotify:

- Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom.

- Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists.

- Hide the damn podcasts. There will never be a situation now or in the future where I want to use spotify to listen to a podcast. Users should be able to hide them.

- Improve your audio quality. I've shamefully returned to bit torrenting flac files because some of what I've heard on spotify is so bad. Part of that is because I want access to a vinyl mix.

- Your interface sucks. One thing I liked about Google Play Music was easier access to an artist's discography. Please give me an option to hide "Popular releases" or put a quick access button to reach either Albums or a full discography at the top of the artist's page so I don't have to scroll down and hunt for an easily missed label to reach the discography when I use the Android App. When I start the app, there should be a search box ready to go. I shouldn't have to click the magnifying glass and then a search box. Either put a search box/icon on the home screen which goes direct to an input dialog, or make the magnifying glass respond accordingly.

I miss Google Play Music. It wasn't perfect but it was, in my experience, a far superior product. It's regrettable that YouTube Music is such a dumpster fire.

alex_young• 5 years ago

- Allow listening from more than one device at the same time on a family plan.

Use case: I listen to something at home and then get in my car. People at home should still be able to listen to what they want, and I should also be able to listen to something else. At the same time.

Scarblac2• 5 years ago

They already have this family plan though?

d21d3q• 5 years ago

Haven't tried it yet, but looks like it can address some points: https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli

whazor• 5 years ago

For the people who argue that you cannot hear the difference lossless and compressed: I agree, however the issue is that the lossless versions of the music also received more editing from audio engineers. That is what makes Tidal more enjoyable.

BoxOfRain• 5 years ago

I think Tidal gets better recommendations for me than Spotify used to as well (lots of smaller acts I'd never have come across on my own), although it's rather irritating how the labels keep yanking things from Tidal. I really like Tidal but I'm genuinely tempted to move away because of this problem.

What never seems to penetrate the skulls of the labels is that it's their shitehawk behaviour that drives piracy, not their customer's desire to freeload. This was as true in the '60s when the only good radio content in Britain came from ships in international waters (hence the name "piracy") as it was for things like Napster and remains true today.

raffraffraff8• 5 years ago

Last.FM would have worked for you 17 years ago because it did most of that, until they mismanaged it into obscurity.

sasha_at_piki2• 5 years ago

I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, it's a more modern version of Last FM, like Tinder for Music https://piki.page.link/Rng5

anakaine4• 5 years ago

Also, how about giving me the ability to not hear songs with certain words in them. I'm not a tea totaller or holier than thou Nancy, but I really don't want to hear any more songs from the hood rapping about their gangsta money hoes and all the other things that are basically domestic violence, gun violence, racism, gang mentality and "I'm so tough" stories all in one.

Spotify keeps recommending them even though I skip nearly every one of them nearly every time. I'm on premium and this annoys me to no end.

distances• 5 years ago

You can disable songs with explicit lyrics in your settings, if that isn't too wide a net.

Broken_Hippo3• 5 years ago

Surely, that has more to do with common themes in the music you frequent than spotify pushing these themes on you. If you don't like the themes that frequent the genre you are listening to most often, the solution seems to be to find alternative genres. I don't tend to get these themes often when listening to electro-swing, for example.

And like the other reply said, you can disable explicit lyrics and I'm pretty sure you can hide artists.

hashhar• 5 years ago

You would love Cigarettes from the Fort Minor album The Rising Tied then.

It talks about exactly what you are saying - why do all raps have to be about guns, violence, drugs and domestic violence etc.

lrem3• 5 years ago

While YouTube Music is still a clear regression from GPM, it's slowly catching up. Any year now it'll be good... But it seems it might already annoy you less than Spotify? Which is interesting, most people seem to believe Spotify is superior.

011000112• 5 years ago

Did it stop mixing YouTube likes with music likes? Destroying my 'liked' music playlist was an unforgivable sin in my book. Fortunately I was able to get my old GPM info with Google Takeout before it went away, so I just scripted up a solution to recreate those likes on Spotify.

avh02• 5 years ago

Flipside opinion: I always thought album art was a feature every player tried to add for the pleasure of a non-existent user who fetishizes album art. Literally the last thing I'd want out of a music player.

cja• 5 years ago

I preferred GPM in every way except that it would silently remove songs from my playlists, probably as a result of the publisher updating or removing them. This lead to me losing songs I had painstakingly worked to discover over many years. I discovered this only after several years of using GPM. Spotify seems to leave removed songs in playlists but disabled, which at least means I don't forget them.

The Spotify UI is atrocious. It must be designed for income/royalty maximisation because it certainly isn't designed to help me find and play the music I like.

Agentlien• 5 years ago

It's not just a matter of recommending songs I don't like. While Spotify does this a lot it wouldn't solve two more subtle issues with its daily playlists and random play:

1. Even for artists I really like it tends to always choose the same few songs. It's especially annoying for artists with a huge discography.

2. There seem to be some categories which Spotify uses for its daily mixes which don't make for good playlists. As an example I mostly listen to metal but also a fair bit of softer Swedish music (Lars Winnerbäck, Peter LeMarc, ...). For a few months now the one of my daily mixes based on this type of music has also had a few Swedish hard rock artists that really don't fit. Mainly Mustasch, which is a great band, but I don't want to hear them in this context.

musesum• 5 years ago

Hmmm, there is a dislike (Song | Artist) feature on the Desktop version -- as least for the Discover Weekly channel.

tempestn3• 5 years ago

I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted.

I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could even be optional; they could just treat like and dislike as 4 and 2 or something, and let people who want more precision use them.

lanevorockz2• 5 years ago

The more information the better, thing is platforms want to sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user input was pushed by the business so they could push content regardless of personal interest.

Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?

kettleballroll2• 5 years ago

Do you have any evidence for that claim, or is that pure speculation on your part?

lrem3• 5 years ago

What is Apple selling to have so little settings in MacOS? ;)

NegatioN• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure stars were discontinued because the best proxy for "what you will spend time watching, is what you spent time watching" and not your curated ratings. As in: the datapoint they funneled into their models was "time spent on video X" and not, "rating on video X".

Business of course wants to keep churn low, and they think time spent on the site is the best way to do that.

That (and "people mostly don't use ratings beside 1 and 5") is at least the reasoning I've read every time I've seen this topic mentioned in blogs/talks.

I do also feel Netflix is pushing it's in-house content way more these last few years, to the detriment of their recommendations though.

amir• 5 years ago

One reason to keep on pushing bad content despite knowing the user will not watch them is to hide the fact how small their catalogue is and shift the blame onto user's particular taste.

petre4• 5 years ago

I can't rate using 5 stars, it's either like, dislike or don't care, so 1 star 5 stars or no rating. With Tidal that's either listen to <30 seconds, skip or maybe listen through the full song, maybe fave or go back and replay. So they don't even need a dislike button. They just need to look at user actions if the algorithms are really optimized for tailoring content to the user's preferences, rather than pushing sponsored content in order to make money really fast. I don't even look at their recomendations (they're BS), but I do play artist radio if I happen to like something. That's how I found about Toshiko Akiyoshi a few days ago while listening to some artist's or track's radio.

Mehdi22774• 5 years ago

There are two issues with 5 star ranking. One the more thought required to give feedback the less likely users give feedback. More interactions is very helpful for ml so minimizing the decisions needed by a user helps a lot. Great ui/ux for engagement aims for signals to require as little action from the user as possible. As a side effect short content is very nice as finish/playtime become strong signals that require a user to do almost nothing.

The second issue is a lot of people use it like 1/5 system. While yes some users use more of the intermediates and you can adjust on per user basis for that feature it’s just not as useful as you’d expect.

Of course any decision like this I recommend a company ab test and I’m just summarizing past experience in this area.

I had a similar discussion at a prior job on having creators add content tags to there submission. The main avoidance was while good tags would be nice for recommendation, if tags are required less content would be submitted and that hurts the platform.

cardanome2• 5 years ago

One the more thought required to give feedback the less likely users give feedback.

That is great! This means the people giving feedback would tend to be power users that are able to giver higher quality feedback.

As a side effect short content is very nice as finish/playtime become strong signals that require a user to do almost nothing.

Perfect! It is clear by now that users vastly prefer short content that gets to the point quickly.

So basically 5 stars ranking would vastly increase the quality of the content but that is bad, how?

The only issue I see is (political) vote brigading. Maybe set additional hurdles like minimum account age and the like for voting. Strong content moderation could help. I guess there is no silver bullet for that issue.

tempestn3• 5 years ago

I think these issues are more significant for public rankings. When I'm ranking songs, it's to curate my own listening. So if I only want to use 1 and 5 stars, fine—no worse off than a thumbs up/down system. But for those of us who do want to be more precise, it just gives more flexibility.

jorvi2• 5 years ago

Apple Music still has star ranking, although it’s a bit buried away.

vidarh• 5 years ago

It needs more than that. I often hesitate to rank because my preference often varies by time and mood and setting. I might not dislike a song, but don't want it played when I want something mellow to fall asleep to, or when I'm happy or when I'm sad. Having a given song show up in one context might irritate me because it breaks the mood while I might love it another time.

A good recommendation system for music needs to take into account proximity in play order to other songs you've ranked when you rank it, and their tempo and genre, time of day, etc.

beckman4662• 5 years ago

It’d be better as:

+2 love

+1 like

0 don’t mind it

-1 dislike

-2 never again

ochrist• 5 years ago

It's called a Likert scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likert_scale

HighlandSpring• 5 years ago

I've thought about this in the past and figured something geometric could better capture engagement

-1 -> dislike, +1 -> like, +2 -> favourite, +4 -> heart

Labels are arbitrary. How might this weighting affect learning?

pixl97• 5 years ago

There is something I've never seen in a voting system before, but I'd love for it to take off.

Slice open an orange along its equator. Looking at this slice you have a shape kind of like an *

Each of these wedges can have a different tag. Those wedges facing up would have a positive value, and down a negative.

The site the orange slice voting system is used on can easily decide the number of wedges that make sense and the tags associated.

Instead we get binary or unitary choices that don't really mean much.

Edit: Image for example

https://i.imgur.com/0uVQl3s.jpg

nonfamous2• 5 years ago

Itunes (well I guess it’s Apple Music now) does still support 5-star rankings, it’s just hidden behind a context menu. I still have a Smart Playlist (can you even make those anymore?) of my 4-star and 5-star songs that serves as my daily shuffle rotation.

tempestn3• 5 years ago

Yeah, I still use it for listening to my own music, but I'd love to have the same thing for streaming. (Maybe Apple Music supports that?)

lanevorockz2• 5 years ago

Some smells fishy about the criticism of podcasts on spotify. Stop lobbying against features… it’s regressive and just open doors for competitors.

raffraffraff8• 5 years ago

Last.FM could have been great. Back in 2005 (17 years ago!!) it had a veritable encyclopedia of artists, albums and tracks, a decent recommendations system, "neighborhoods" that matched you with other users who listened to similar artists (and they even told you what you had in common so you other ignore users whose 12 year old also likes the Barbie song). You could add specific users to a 'Friends' section. You could look at their music libraries. Last.FM invented scrobbling (AFAIK)... Once upon a time my wife and I both paid them a monthly subscription for ad-free music. You couldn't play whatever you liked, because of the licensing model - instead you could pick a "radio station" based on your neighborhood, a specific neighbor, your likes, a band, a genre or even your whole library (ie: everything you ever listened to). It was really great for discovering new music, had a great interface, and had built-in love/ban buttons. Right when the world was about to lose its shit over the inferior Spotify, Last.FM absolutely fucked up. Instead of running a stable infrastructure and licensing music for on-demand streaming like Spotify did, they mismanaged their infrastructure, making music borderline unplayable. They had site outages. They broke their API with backward-incompatible changes. Once they proved beyond doubt that they couldn't run the streaming infrastructure, they gave up trying simply added a Spotify play button. And there went the only reason to give Last.FM your money, because now you had to pay Spotify anyway. Pathetic. A wasted opportunity. If I could have the Last.FM from a decade and a half ago with on-demand music and stable infrastructure I'd take it over any other service available right now.

sasha_at_piki2• 5 years ago

I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, it's like a modern version of Last FM https://piki.page.link/Rng5

raffraffraff8• 5 years ago

Ah. Are you spamming the comments here to push your app?

unglaublich2• 5 years ago

I listen to some background noise during the night when sleeping (rain, wind, that kind of stuff)... now, any mix, recommendation and whatnot consists of "soothing noise; relaxing Japanese traditional music; sounds of the beach" etc.

nickstinemates• 5 years ago

The more I use Spotify, the less intuitive it becomes. The left bar is a mess. Playing specific albums, looking up discography for a band is painful. The home screen is less than useful.

darthrupert3• 5 years ago

Spotify going IPO was the number one reason I dropped them on the floor. They now officially care only about profits and since they pretty much have just a single product, this means users are fucked.

I begrudingly went to Apple Music and am missing my cd-ripped/torrented mp3 collections...

Why does the free market have to consistently ruin every service?

spywaregorilla9• 5 years ago

Apple music isn't run by a profit motivated public company?

darthrupert3• 5 years ago

Sure they are but the significant difference for the consumer is that Apple has way more than one product.

hilyen• 5 years ago

Spotify should have an accessibility feature that shows the lyrics for people who are hard of hearing or have APD.

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

No dislike button is why I didn’t use Spotify.

mostelato• 5 years ago

I always thought the skip button would get treated as a dislike

techas• 5 years ago

There is a “don’t play this artist” option. With a coarser granularity they have the “unlike” information.

edejong• 5 years ago

I’d love to dislike all and every autotuned song of the last fifteen years.

mouzogu2• 5 years ago

been using spotify for about 5 years and i swear the recommendations get worse and worse. i can't use the release radar or discover weekly playlist because they're so awful.

maybe thats a reflection of my usage, but would be nice to have a way to reset the recommendations or dislike.

there wasa period when i would keep static noise from spotify on the background for a few hours and now 80% of my recommendations are static noise. annoying

liquid_x• 5 years ago

Biggest issue for me with release radar is that Spotify still doesn't handle the case that multiple artists use the same name while not being close to the same style of music. (Exodus the trash metal band isn't remotely the same as exodus the gospel group)

mouzogu2• 5 years ago

yeah it doesnt seem like a very nuanced system, well at least the end result doesnt.

jstummbillig• 5 years ago

Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they still not let you vote down a song?

They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song.

They also had a dedicated dislike button and removed it years ago. Apparently what they are doing now works better.

Specifically, they demonstrated that a listener is roughly 20 percent more likely to “like” a song if the algorithm is trained on 400,000 likes and dislikes, compared to an algorithm trained only on that amount of likes.

Building a naive recommendation engine and giving it more good data – paid for, and also not factoring in the difference in time spent acquiring it – will obviously yield better results in a direct comparison. Striking a comparison to what Spotify is doing is pretty naive.

jorvi2• 5 years ago

They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song.

This seems very unlikely as some people enjoy listening to just certain parts of a song.

owlmirror2• 5 years ago

Do you know if the algorithm takes that into account? I also became suspect of the behavior of the skip button, I sometimes skip songs of artists I really like and could observe that I did not get them recommended anymore until I explictly played a song of them. Of course this could be just random luck but it made me careful to skip my favorite songs and instead I open the playlist and select the next song.

heed• 5 years ago

When you remove a song from one of the auto-generated playlists (Discover Weekly / Release Radar) the app requires you to specify a reason, “I don’t like this song/artist”. Isn’t this effectively a dislike button? Or is this input not used in playlist generation?

shmerl• 5 years ago

Dislike button will reflect mass market not understanding good music. Bad idea.

another-dave• 5 years ago

Would be great if Spotify had

* "good fit"/"bad fit" button — I like a wide variety of music, but it needs to be appropriate to context. If I start a radio from a song, I'd like to teach it to tailor the suggested songs better but that doesn't mean I dislike the songs it _is_ suggesting.

* Ability to give the social context — a band playing at a music festival will lean more towards hits in their back catalogue. At their own gig they may play some obscure stuff that die hard fans will really like. Similarly, what I'm listening to will be different if I'm having a party, friends over for dinner or on my own. On a family account, you should also be able to say who is listening & it should tailor to music that you might all enjoy.

* I get that they don't want to block artists/songs completely but they _should_ allow limiting how many times they suggest it per day. If I've listened to Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac on one playlist I probably don't want to hear it again an hour later on another playlist

JumpCrisscross• 5 years ago

There is an opening for this. I would switch streaming service for a better shuffle algorithm.

ytjohn• 5 years ago

I haven't used it in a while, but this was a big advantage of Pandora for me. With pandora, you start a 'station' with a few seed songs and as you like/dislike songs, it keeps refining the station.

The downside to Pandora is that you can't choose your music. You can seed a station with a specific song, but that song might not be the first one played.

What I really liked with Pandora was that it was really good at producing endless playlists for me to listen to at work or car rides. I was a paid subscriber when I worked night shifts and drove a lot more. Spotify stations are really hit or miss. Sometimes the Spotify stations dive into foreign music and I can't find a way to specify which language of music I want to hear.

HeavyStorm• 5 years ago

I tried every service available in my region trying to find the best "shuffle" out suggestion service.

Deezer was quite good for a while, but right now I am sticking with yt music.

IMO Spotify is the worst.

jacobobryant2• 5 years ago

I spent the latter half of 2019 trying to build this as a startup. Ultimately I pivoted (now I do newsletter recommendations instead), but if I hadn't made some mistakes I think it could've gotten more traction. Mostly I should've simplified the idea to make it easier to build. If anyone's interested in working on this, here's what I would do:

(But first some background: The way I saw it, you can split music recommendation into two tasks: (1) picking a song you already know that should be played right now, and (2) picking a new song you've never heard of before. (Music recommendation is unique in this way since in most other domains there isn't much value in re-recommending items). I think #1 is more important, and if you nail that, you can do a so-so job of #2 and still have a good system.)

Make a website that imports your Last.fm history. Organize the history into sessions (say, groups of listen events with a >= 30 minute gap in between). Feed those sessions into a collaborative filtering library like Surprise[1], as a CSV of `<session ID>, <song ID>, 1` (1 being a rating--in this case we only have positive ratings). Then make some UI that lets people create and export playlists. e.g. I pick a couple seed songs from my listening history, then the app uses Surprise to suggest more songs. Present a list of 10 songs at a time. Click a song to add it, and have a "skip all" button that gets a new list of songs. Save these interactions as ratings--e.g. if I skip a song, that's a -1 rating for this playlist. For some percentage of the suggestions (20% by default? Make it configurable), use Last.fm's or Spotify's API to pick a new song not in your history, based on the songs in the current playlist. Also sometimes include songs that were added to the playlist previously--if you skip them, they get removed from the playlist. Then you can spend a couple minutes every week refreshing your playlists. Export the playlists to Spotify/Apple Music/whatever.

As you get more users, you can do "regular" collaborative filtering (i.e. with different users) to recommend new songs instead of relying on external APIs. There are probably lots of other things you could do too--e.g. scrape wikipedia to figure out what artists have done collaborations or something. In general I think the right approach is to build a model for artist similarity rather than individual song similarity. At recommendation time, you pick an artist and then suggest their top songs (and sometimes pick an artist already in the user's history, and suggest songs they haven't heard yet--that's even easier).

This is the simplest thing I can think of that would solve my "I love music but I listen to the same old songs everyday because I'm busy and don't want to futz around with curating my music library" problem. You wouldn't have to waste time building a crappy custom music app, and users won't have to use said crappy custom music app (speaking from personal experience...). You wouldn't have to deal with music rights or integrating with Spotify/Apple Music since you're not actually playing any music.

If you want to go further with it, you could get traction first and then launch your own streaming service or something. (Reminds me a bit of Readwise starting with just highlights and then launching their own reader recently). I think it'd be neat to make an indie streaming service--kind of like Bandcamp but with an algorithm to help you find the good stuff. Let users upload and listen to their own MP3s so it can still work with popular music. Of course it'd be nicer for users in the short term if you just made deals with the big record labels, however this would help you not end up in Spotify's position of pivoting to podcasts so you can get out of paying record labels. And then maybe in a few decades all the good music won't be on the big labels anyway :).

Anyway if anyone is remotely interested in building something like this, I'll be your first user. I really need it. Otherwise I'll probably build it myself at some point in the next year or two as a side project.

[1] http://surpriselib.com/

fomine32• 5 years ago

YouTube Music supports using multiple Brand Account by single account. It can be switched easily so seems to suitable for such use case.

eino• 5 years ago

Like some others have said, I've found Deezer's flow (shuffle algorithm) to give the best results. I've been using it for a few years now, so I have no idea how fast it could learn for a newcomer.

They just added a "moods" choice to flow a few days ago: focus, sport, party... I think there are 6 of them. But they added it only to the mobile app and not the webapp which is the one I use the most, so I can't really say how good they are.

spywaregorilla9• 5 years ago

Why is a band playing at a music festival queuing their own tunes from spotify?

gldnspud• 5 years ago

Upon reading the parent comment, I don't think this is what they were suggesting. They were making an analogy between what a band chooses to play live at a show based on context of the show, and what a streaming service could do to suggest songs based on context of the listening environment.

musingsole• 5 years ago

Pandora has filters for it's radios labeled as "deep cuts" or "most popular" that attempts some of this.

On your first thought, it's always been unclear to me which of my music settings in Pandora are global or station specific.

costcofries• 5 years ago

I have found song, artist and playlist radio to be extremely effective at discovering new music. For example, Monday rolls around and I hit my discover weekly, say I like a song, I hit the song radio and go down a discovery rabbit hole, try it.

brewdad• 5 years ago

Good fit/bad fit would be genius. My musical tastes can be all over the map. From 80s pop to jazz and swing. Sprinkle in some Icelandic metal and rap and hip/hop. Don't leave out the occasional polka or Taylor Swift. My moods can change day to day and a more accurate playlist would be a Godsend.

shostack• 5 years ago

I'll add some other asks:

1, Give me a way to mark a period of time or specific songs in my history as not to be used to inform my recommendation model signals. I might want to put on some special themed dinner music or listen to a song a few times for a certain reason but otherwise not want future recommendations informed by this.

2. Give me a a genre or other filter. Sometimes recommendations will be great but are a mix of soothing guitar and hard trance. I don't necessarily want both at once.

3. Give me a way to use one song in my weekly discovery and say "remove all songs in the current list that are like this and don't give me any more ever again." Like, I put on classical once, and for months now most of my discover weekly is stuff I have zero interest in. I can go one by one but really I need a "dislike type/genre" button.

rkuska• 5 years ago

I always understood that when you skip a song the spotify counts that as a dislike.

kuu• 5 years ago

For sure they use more than likes as a metric/feature for classifying the music you like/dislike. Skip most likely is one of them

golergka• 5 years ago

One problem that I have with Spotify is just how often does it repeat songs. Yes, I liked it, I still do, but may be don't play it the times in one week? How do I communicate this and get to discover new music instead?

Noam-grin• 5 years ago

SO Cool

npteljes• 5 years ago

Regarding recommendations, Mixcloud's approach worked for me best. Starting from a genre, label or song, it lists popular mixes that often have been selected by DJs, radio presenters, curators etc. And when I find someone with a similar taste, their suggestions are wonderful. And often I find that songs work better in the context of the mixtape, than standing alone. But of course this depends on the type of music.

ljm• 5 years ago

A small start would be to fix the behaviour on release radar/discover weekly playlists. You can mark a song you don't like and say to stop suggesting music from that artist, but it doesn't do anything.

Yes, Spotify...I played some weird cat music playlist _once_ for my cat. Once! That doesn't mean I'm a lifelong cat music fan.

spywaregorilla9• 5 years ago

I'm very confused at the article and the comments here. Spotify does have a dislike button. It's the minus symbol. You click it, and can choose from "I don't like this song" or "I don't like this artist", and it will block them from recurring.

For some reason, it seems this doesn't appear in music that you've curated yourself, but it does appear in playlists spotify makes for you, like discover weekly. Odd, but in my case that's the only place I'll be seeing new recommendations so it seems to fit my needs well.

I find spotify's recommendation algo to be top tier. I get tons of low visibility artists on my recommendations that I think are awesome.

Pelam• 5 years ago

I mostly use playlists generated by this service https://everynoise.com/ (you can get to them with desktop client by pasting playlist links from the site to the spotify client search box.)

From the site: "Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 5,646 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2021-10-16. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier."

I personally think that an algorithm trying to learn my tastes and recommend music to me is the wrong approach... especially as the algorithm does not actually seem to care anything about the actual waveform content.

I feel I get get this strange "personal echo chamber effect" where I at least think I notice the effect of my past listening habits or the outsized weight of some stuff that was on powerplay some time ago. It gets hard to find new stuff or to learn to like new stuff.

This varies though, sometimes the recommendations are great. Perhaps they work best for me if I don't constantly follow or listen to them, but instead listen to playlists curated by humans or everynoise.com.

beezischillin• 5 years ago

Most platforms should have easily accessible "don't show me this" or "show more of this" buttons on their home page where most of the algorithmically generated results are shown.

On YouTube it's hidden behind menus and on Facebook it's also kind of a chore to try to curate stuff.

jagged-chisel• 5 years ago

I seem to recall Spotify did at one time have a dislike button. They removed it over the course of several UI iterations that renamed it, moved it to a menu, then the option vanished altogether. The closest thing they have now is “don’t play this artist.”

Apple Music still doesn’t compare well with Spotify, but at least there’s a “play less music like this” menu item available.

Edit: after reading more comments here - I definitely want options that include “dislike”, “not in the mood”, “you’re playing this to much”, “this does not belong on this ‘radio station’” -because I like the music, I just want it categorized correctly.

epitactic• 5 years ago

An interesting parallel, Facebook and Twitter also do not allow downvoting, which may also have similar negative effects as Spotify's lack of dislikes:

https://questioner.substack.com/p/our-violent-era

So Twitter artificially removes all the negative feedback (the downvotes) and only shows the positive feedback (the upvotes), leading many of their users to the mistaken impression that their insane ideas are immensely popular.

corobo• 5 years ago

I always assumed skipping a song had the same effect

My only problem with Spotify is that it seems to heavily lean on some songs, to the point I have to block them. I guess this in of itself questions my assumption

I have a theory (read: confirmation bias) that "That's not my name" by the Ting Tings is cheaper for them to play or something the amount shuffle seems to want to play it. No matter how many other songs are in the list, if that ones in there it'll be played within 5 songs haha

jeffe• 5 years ago

As someone who listens to numerous genres but is also selective with what I listen to, I am confident that spotify simply doesn't cater to my demographic. They are really about scaling to the masses, as is evident by their move into podcasts and constants frontpage ads on new releases, as well as aggressive song caching. From a business perspective, I believe its simply not worth the compute/development effort from their side to have a recommendation engine on par with say Pandora.

skrebbel• 5 years ago

At the risk of pointing out the obvious: Google's Spotify clone, "YouTube Music", has such miracles of UX design as:

    - a dislike button
    - a playlist that works like you'd expect
    - a "play album" button

And tons of other similar totally obvious things that Spotify doesn't have¹ for no good reason at all.

If you have no qualms about using a Google product that might end any day, then I think it's simply just Spotify, done properly. I think it's especially impressive since how meh Google tends to be at UX.

As an extra bonus it has a huge catalog since it has both the usual label-provided music and everything that ever got uploaded to YouTube that their AI thinks is likely a music video.

¹ EDIT: I noticed, before rage-quitting Spotify over their terrible UX, that some of these omissions are platform specific. Eg IIRC their web player had a "play album" button but the Android app didn't, you had to either play an album on shuffle or hope that today's playlist state + star alignment would miraculously let you play the entire album when you started the first song.

(YT Music looks and works exactly the same on every platforms I've used it on)

lkbm• 5 years ago

Fun fact: you can downvote a song on YouTube Music and they'll continue to recommend it in your mixes or when you reaches the end of your current playlist.

Since I have YouTube Premium anyway, I use YouTube Music, and before that used Google Music, but it's pretty terrible in a number of ways.

aeturnum• 5 years ago

There are plenty of features on spotify I think could be improved but I have always been pretty happy with their playlists. What are the things that google does better?

rapnie• 5 years ago

I don't know about YouTube Music, but YouTube's recommender is doing such bad job for me, that I stand little chance to become 'engaged' (like eternally recommending the same video that I'm uninterested in but Google thinks I must see). I watch videos found by search queries, mostly via DDG too and not YT search.

fomine32• 5 years ago

YouTube Music UI is horrible. I've get used to but still have some compliants.

Web: It doesn't show +1/-1/volume/whatever unless its window is smaller than 1280px IIRC. Volume control is useless because it's too loud even at minimum+1.

Android: Adding playlist/+1/whatever shows toast at the bottom of screen, it blocks pulling drawer for about 10 secs.

sabujp• 5 years ago

i would hope that spotify has an experiments system that they can canary

jspash• 5 years ago

A "Never recommend Joe Rogan again as long as I live" button would come in handy.

NoPicklez• 5 years ago

As a Spotify user for ages, I can't understand why if I search an artist, I then can't see all of their songs in a list. I need to search their name, then hit the songs tab to then list all the songs under that query.

I swear some time ago I could search for an artist, see their top 5 then scroll down and hit "See all songs".

King-Aaron• 5 years ago

I'm just still dark at Spotify over them adding adverts into podcasts, even though I've got a premium account. Grubs

user_named• 5 years ago

Spotify already has a button for removing a song from the recommended playlist. I would guess they already use that as the same signal as a dislike button. It's really just a difference in naming.

pensatoio• 5 years ago

I’m pretty sure hitting “skip” while listening to a catered playlist tells Spotify way more than a dislike button would.

That said, I would love a dislike button just so certain songs don’t appear again. Not interested in hearing the latest tween pop track.

Doxin• 5 years ago

So am I going mental or does spotify HAVE a dislike button? It's right there next to the like button![0]

[0] https://i.imgur.com/UgUWUSk.png

mdrzn• 5 years ago

I enjoy Spotify's "Weekly Discovery" which promotes new artists and new songs to new listeners, but I REALLY don't like how they don't have "Don't recommend this podcast" button. I listened to 10 minutes of one podcast ONCE in a long car drive, and now my homepage is filled by podcasts which I NEVER listen to. And there's no way to tell Spotify to remove them.

estranhosidade• 5 years ago

I think many services nowadays end up offering a worst user experience in the name of "simplifying their interface" (I imagine this must be the only reason why Spotify wouldn't add this option).

Not only on this case but, for instance, it would be nice if spotify easily allowed someone to import their playlist from other services, or even from some text playlist. But they don't add these options. And I don't understand why.

Like, technically I assume it make sense for them to make as much of a pain in the ass to EXPORT your spotify playlists to other services, but they should make as easy as possible for the user to bring their favorite playlists and yadda yadda to Spotify.

alexfields• 5 years ago

Yes, it would be great as they have weird recommendations just because you listen to one music; they will mess up your playlist recommendations.

Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

Related Stories