Spotify and the Art of the Playlist | Hacker News Reader

Spotify and the Art of the Playlist

bloomberg.com

70 pointswalterbell31 comments

I wish there was some way to feedback that discover weekly has gone off at a tangent. Can I 'reset' it?

After Bowie died I listened to quite a lot of his back catalogue over the next month, I then found my discover weekly had been taken over by 70's prog.

I've heard similar things from people who have let friends or family use their account, or made a 'bad' playlist for a one-off event.

Really I want to 'delete my history' for a couple of weeks - private browsing requires foresight. Maybe it's not possible given how the 'musical taste' data gets hashed? In that case I'd take a full reset!

Me too. It was great for the first couple of weeks because there was no history. Now I don't listen to it because it's full of annoying garbage.

I've been there. You can't reset it, but Spotify now has a function in the right-click menu named "Create Similar Playlist"; it replaces the current playlist with one that contains the same number of songs, only different, similar songs. As far as I can tell, it uses the same logic that Discovery Weekly does.

I wish the classical music recommendations were better. Spotify, like most people in general, lump all "classical" music together. If I listen to Mozart or Haydn, I get Romanticism and later types of music as recommendations. I also get recommendations based on the performers and not the composer, though I forgive that because tagging and organizing classical music is an unsolved problem (everyone does it differently).

But yes, I really want a full reset as well.

Just to comment: I wish you could also "reset to playlists" or "reset to saved", and have it rebuild a profile from scratch based on existing playists (and/or saved media) and just the history of those songs in your profile.

That way, you could just clean up any playlists they made (or things you wanted it to forget!) and rebuild, which saves you from having to start "completely fresh" unless you want to. (It would also flush out any listen history for non-saved media.)

I'm a musician, and when I'm studying a certain artist (or decade) for a gig in a given week I'll get some obnoxious Discover playlists. A week or two of "normal" listening for me will reset it, but I agree it'd be nice to reset it more directly.

IIRC other articles have mentioned that the Discover algorithm takes into account skips within 30 seconds; not sure how much impact that has though.

For me the Discover Weeky playlist is probably the biggest innovation in recorded music distribution since the beginning of commercial music distribution. I've found a couple of artist that have become all time favorites that I very well might never have heard of (Anekdoten from Sweden and Motorpsycho from Norway, the Scandinavians seem to be the only non-English cultural family that get rock)

It completely bypasses the music distribution industry's gatekeeper behavior. This is previously unheard of, because the labels have a lot at stake, wherever there is a natural interface where music can be presented, they quickly move in and start to use money to control the playlists. I'm pretty sure Spotify's charts are heavily influenced by music industry shenanigans at this point.

back in the days last.fm had similar functionality, at least I discovered many artists that are my favourites now there.

But I'm struggling with Spotify Discover: - Discover Weekly includes tracks that I have listened to before on Spotify. At first I thought it is a bug, but then I read somewhere else that it is a feature as somebody thought that people like hearing something familiar among new songs. Well, not me, but, OK, let it be. - there is no option to ban tracks or artists for life in Spotify - there are many independent and not so independent artists on Spotify with questionable quality (to my taste)

Combining all 3 above, in my Discovery Weekly I get tracks that I absolutely hate and I have to skip them. And they come up again and again as there is no way to tell Spotify - please stop delivering this track/artist to me. In last.fm I encountered cases where it suggested me artists that I absolutely hated. I could see how it was similar to my other favourites, but apparently the algorithms did not see why I should hate this. At least last.fm allowed to ban those tracks forever. It still did not allow to ban artist so I had to ban all tracks for that artist (as the algorithm still suggested other tracks by the artists whose tracks I had ban before). In addition, it is true that distribution industry is/was gatekeeper to many artists, but at the same time it saved me from all the low quality music that I am exposed to in Spotify. Instead now I have to spend my own time to filter that out (which generally applies to all information in this age).

Overall I would have better experience in Spotify if there was this ban feature. Although there are feature requests about banning songs, Spotify is not rushing implementing this. Then I'm left thinking if Spotify is worth it and should I cancel my subscription.

The way you tune Discover Weekly is by saving the songs you like, and skipping the ones you don't. If you save a track to your library or into a playlist you've made it won't appear in future Discover Weekly playlists.

Hmm, that's weird, I've been struck by the discover weekly' she ability to serve up song after song I've never heard before, maybe two or three out of the thirty are familiar on average.

But it's mainly just a discovery service. Since I tend to like idiosyncratic music, it works well for me in a way that other services never did. Pandora in particular always played the most obvious, well known tracks, based on the starting point.

I love discover weekly too. I have found at least three bands that now are among my all time favorites and i bought all their releases on bandcamp

Rdio had significantly better "play random songs I probably like". And you could select the level of discovery vs. familiarity you wanted. The only reason my Spotify discover weekly is good is because I made sure to save all the songs I had previously saved with rdio.

I'm a huge fan of the Discover Weekly playlist. Most of the time it is so good that you can get in touch at least with 2-3 new songs. Sometimes I also have a lucky day where nearly every single song matches my taste but was unknown to me. This is a really great example of what algorithms can do. But it also proves that more is not better. If I imagine the playlist would be refreshed every day as planned or a list of 100 songs instead of 30- I wouldn't use it anymore. It simply would be to much to progress each week. The current amount is perfect to start a working week and I do so since that playlist started.

Same here! Monday morning and a fresh playlist waiting, that's a good start of a new week. Friends that I know have music taste not too far from mine share their Discover Weekly playlists as well, so I can switch between them throughout the week.

I recently cancelled my streaming service subscription for music and shifted back to my vinyl collection (which I've been digitalizing for office listening) and buying cds. Yes, it takes me more time to get the music I want to listen, but I spend more time and effort listening and exploring what is going on in the music scene. This actually made me more connected to the music I'm currently listening, because every purchase is worth something and before buying I tend to read reviews and articles about the artists who produced the music.

For me, the best playlists are the ones written by the long-standing institutions, like Hardwax[0], Berghain[1] and Resident Advisor[2].

[0] https://hardwax.com/ [1] http://berghain.de/ [2] https://www.residentadvisor.net/

I'm currently thinking about transitioning back to good-old MP3s. I'm not a digital hoarder but I like the idea of small, local collection of music and films I like.

Unfortunately I'm on a laptop with a small amount of storage, so maybe a NAS type of thing?

We have a NAS at home with two big spinning disks in a RAID array and I store all my stuff there in a flac format, which is easily packed to mp3 if needed. Also I'd give a big recommendation for http://stylejukebox.com/ as a cloud backup and a way to stream the music you own.

For some reason Spotify playlists, even those supposedly tailored to my tastes, never quite played music I actually enjoyed. When I tested out the Apple Music trial a whole new world was suddenly opened up, of playlists that actually played stuff I liked. That's the only reason I have stuck with Apple Music and its lack of Linux support and buggy Android app.

Discover Weekly is great. I have a playlist with 800+ songs thanks to it. Unfortunately, though, Spotify fails to shuffle play them correctly. I always get the same 100 songs :(

Same thing happens on all the streaming services I've used. It's infuriating, they always promote certain artists even if you have a playlist with 10k+ songs. I can't think of any other reason (besides saving a few bucks in the distribution, caching side).

While Spotify does a great job in marketing, I think that in reality, YouTube and SoundCloud recommendations are by far superior to 'Discover Weekly'.

Hardly. YouTube always recommends me the same stable of 50 or so videos.

YouTube Music is a separate offering and with its own music recommendation algorithm

At work I listen to a lot of OK music that doesn't bother, but I'm really interested in things too difficult to hear in the background.

Spotify weekly went downhill at some point and I wonder if it just feeds back in to itself when I listen to it at work.

I used to archive each weeks playlist for later listening, and I think that started making weekly feed into itself. Still, even though I've encountered bumps like this along the way, it eventually self corrected and got better

How does this compare to Google Play Music? I'm considering starting a music subscription and Spotify doesn't seem to offer as much for the money.

I don't understand how this would work? Does the algorithm detect similar sounding beats?

> At a certain point, Spotify contacted Perry’s music manager to explain how the service had transformed his client from autoworker to house music luminary in months. It was simple: It had a lot to do with Spotify’s music-recommendation technology. The company keeps track of what you listen to. Then it uses algorithms to see which other playlists contain the same songs—and other songs that are on those lists but not on yours.

Although Release Radar apparently does analyse sounds as it doesn't have the playlist history to access.

There is bunch of info out there about this

The magic that makes Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists so damn good

http://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes-spotifys-discover-...

Spotify acquired a startup called EchoNest[1] a while back. Discover Weekly is probably based off their technology.

[1] http://the.echonest.com/

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