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Comment by Asdfbla | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wish Spotify added a bit more 'noise' to their recommendations, so to speak. If I don't listen to much music except Discover Weekly for a few weeks, I (subjectively) find that what's recommended to me more or less sounds the same after a while. Either they are afraid to insert new things that stray too far from an optimal recommendation or they forget too much of my listening history.

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I used to listen exclusively to Discover Weekly for a while. One week a finish rap song made it to the list, and I skipped past it every time it came on. Next week there was 2 finish rap songs. Then 5. Eventually half of my discovery list was finish rap, something I have no interest of. Canceled my subscription shortly after. Their algorithms are feeding themselves. I wish they had a dislike button so I could at least give them some sense of direction.

They do have a dislike button though, the thumbs down icon next to the play controls (on the desktop version of Spotify).

It's there only if you listen to a radio, not to a playlist.

There's a way to consume Discover Weekly as a station instead of a playlist. ;)

How exactly? — Ah, figured it out:

- Go to the DW playlist

- Click the "..." options button

- Then to "Go to Playlist Radio"

- "Follow" the DW playlist radio

- You can now up/downvote songs

Wow, what a great user experience.

If you had it all on screen you would talk of button fatigue. Users are the worst.

Did you know Spotify also has a its approve and disapprove buttons in the desktop app on opposite sides depending on what particular radio-like feature you're using?

DW playlist radio != DW playlist

Sometime within last month it appeared for discover weekly too, at least on mac client - https://imgur.com/a/QJluP

Not for Discover Weekly they don't. Only your Daily Mixes and other radio stations.

I have the exact same thing with Dutch rap music. I'm not Dutch, don't speak Dutch and have never listened to Dutch music. But Spotify consistently puts 2-4 Dutch songs on my Discover Weekly.

This is hilarious to me. On the other side, I have been getting super into French rap music, and Spotify refuses to notice.

EXACT SAME THING, happened to me I considered to create new account just because of this....

You should branch out from only listening to "Discover Weekly". Use the daily mixes, make your own playlists.

I think this might be a huge problem for them and I’m pretty sure that they’re aware of it. The lack of variety seems to span all genres and radio stations. I’m really into Texas Country, Americana, and Red Dirt music. These are distinct sub-genres under “alt-Country” music but from the Spotify perspective, they’re all basically the same 40-50 songs. I can’t tell the difference between the Reckless Kelly, Robert Earl Keen, and James McMurtry radio stations because they all play the same set of songs that I got sick of months ago.

I don’t know if it’s a licensing issue—do they save money by keeping song variety down?—or is it an algorithm problem? I wish they would fix it because I’m about to bail for some other service if they can’t.

Pandora is the gold standard for good variety and new artist discovery as far as I’m concerned.

Pandora? Really? I've found Spotify to be orders of magnitude better than Pandora for both variety and discovery. Pandora was the first to have competent discovery functionality, and it was impressive for its time, but I'm wondering if this is "good old days" syndrome speaking.

With Pandora I can give it one song, and get a playlist out that won't repeat for a couple of hours (I really wish it was longer!)

With Spotify, I enter in a song, and get lots of stuff from that same artist (something Pandora can't do!) and then after that's done, a bunch of repeats.

Then again my problem may be that I'm trying to use Spotify the same way I use Pandora.

I have had significantly worse luck with Pandora even, but haven't used it in ages. Rdio, before it went bankrupt, worked the best for me.

Go discover some new artists by yourself, use the related artists function, branch out.

I'm pretty sure that'll shake up the recommendations a bit.

I’ve noticed that there are certain seemingly-esoteric songs that many people are assigned, and subsequently feel let down upon realizing that they’re (currently) common assignations. It wasn’t because the algorithms recognized their excellent personal taste.

“Didn’t I” by Darondo seems to be a good example of this. A fantastic, forgotten soul song (and from the Bay Area!) that was assumed to be a recognition of my friend’s unique taste in his car... until the other four people inside revealed they’d all had it in the last two weeks, too.

It makes me wonder about the motivations. Did the IP for this song recently change hands?

(I still get the shivers recalling the month when people kept gleefully playing me “Temporary Secretary” by Paul McCartney; a new discovery from their Discover Playlists. I could have marched to Stockholm to strangle a data scientist.)

>“Didn’t I” by Darondo seems to be a good example of this. A fantastic, forgotten soul song (and from the Bay Area!) that was assumed to be a recognition of my friend’s unique taste in his car... until the other four people inside revealed they’d all had it in the last two weeks, too.

It could be popularized by DJs who are playing it, e.g. Four Tet, whose personal playlist on Spotify now has close to 39 thousand followers.

At least in that case specifically, I doubt it's due to distribution rights. There are no new releases indicated on Discogs, which seems likely if someone new acquired them.

It was also used in “Breaking Bad”, in the scene where Walter sets “Ken Wins” BMW on fire. Thomas Golubić was the music supervisor for BB and Better Call Saul and these shows’ playlists make superb additions for Spotify listening, in my opinion. They’re chock-full of great discoveries like Darondo.

It doesn’t surprise me that “Didn't I” comes up in many playlists, but it does surprise me that the other great songs on that album don’t get worked into Spotify stations. This is a great example of their algorithmic problems.

Good context, thanks both!

> subsequently feel let down upon realizing that they’re (currently) common assignations

This is a really foreign concept to me. Why would you be let down because other people listen to the same song?

Rdio had an option to address that: Its radio / "play similar stuff"-feature would let you select how far you wanted to stray from the original source of the generated playlist. If I remember correctly it went from "same artist" to "adventurous" in 5 steps.

Yup, I worked on the playlisting service for a little while at Rdio, it was pretty simple but worked well. Based on those presets we would decide how far along the artist similarity graph we would walk from the original playlist "seeds".

Would you please stop reminding me how much better Rdio was :(

Nobody understands when I complain about losing Rdio (which is often), it was sooooo much better and nobody knew/cared.

Tell me about it. A large part of the community we had at rdio used to meet at in a post-rdio slack channel after the service went down. For months we discussed alternatives and how mediocre and barebones they were compared to rdio. Most of them, including me, settled for Spotify, but the community is pretty much gone.

On the other it led me to double down on my purchased offline music collection, which I already maintained long before rdio.

You (and Spotify's team) would like to read this paper; I wish eveyone making recommender systems would.

Recommender Systems for Self-Actualization https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2959189

Readable link: https://sci-hub.cc/https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=295918...

I'm a former Last.FM user. They'd play a mix of past favorites and related recommendations, then adjust based on feedback (e.g. likes). There was a noise slider that would influence the ratio of new songs (and indirectly bring in recommendations from farther away from your core tastes). When I first found out I could be more adventurous, I was very excited, as I (like most people) pride myself on being curious. As it turns out, constantly discovering new songs from unusual genres is exhausting. This turned out to be a feature I very much wanted, but felt unhappy using and disappointed in me not using. Maybe this is common enough that the Spotify PM for Discover Weekly experimented and decided not to ship it.

It sounds like having it as a slider you can enable at-will is the perfect compromise for this particular feature, no?

If you're looking for more noise to get you out of your music comfort zone then check out JQBX (https://www.jqbx.fm). It's a social music app that let's you DJ and listen to music with others in virtual rooms (similar to turntable). It plays all audio through Spotify so you get a huge library, can save tracks for later, and the random plays can seed your new discover weekly playlists (or you can use private mode so it won't).

For some reason every week I get like 2-5 songs with the same beat, but a bit remixed or covered by someone else. It's trying way too hard to recommend similar songs sometimes.

Or even just featured in a single / best-of album from the same artist. I'm fairly sure my "library" now contains a bunch of duplicates due to this.

So the dreaded filter bubble also is an issue for Spotify ;)

I'm afraid it is so extreme that I feel lots of my discover weekly recommendations are based on solely of what I listened on discover weekly last week.

Which would be quite bad, but that is how it often feels.

I get constant metal versions of pop songs. Winterplay's Billie Jean was recommended to me for weeks on end. This week I have Turn down for what meets metal.

Seems like a small tweak to let us tell them we dislike this style of music. According to the article a -1 should be able to be put in that matrix (if that's actually how it works).

Also, I dislike that I lose music after a week. Which means I've lost a few good songs from their churn that I forgot to save.

FWIW I find probably 1/3 of my music through DW, 1/3 through manually browsing related stuff on Spotify (if I discover a new artist and see they were featured on a compilation, I might listen to that compilation) and 1/3 from real life (friends' recommendations, unknown bands from festivals etc). For my pattern of use, DW is varied and absolutely amazing. I only listen to my DW probably 1 week in 4 though.

I have the same problem. And we it every fad machine learning thing. It never works for me but a lot of people are happy. Does anyone want me as a test subject?!

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