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Comment by arkadiytehgraet | Hacker News Reader

If there is at least one song that I like in Discover Weekly, then I consider it to be a good mix. However, this happens once a month at best. After reading the article and all three methods for recommendations, I cannot understand how on Earth it comes up with its suggestions. Do I feed it bad data? Does it not take into account the relative "weight" of a particular track, i.e. my preference to listen to it multiple times, skip others and so on? It looks like by considering these simple points it can be improved by a large margin.

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Yeah, I was surprised when I read the start of the article. On Mondays, I will start the day by playing my discover weekly playlist and I'll usually have it running throughout the day, saving 1-4 songs from it to my library. Sometimes none.

I just checked and this week I didn't even save a single song for example.

I guess it doesn't help that I do listen to really different types of music depending on what I'm doing. If I'm at home, I'm not listening to the same thing as if I'm at work (developer). When I'm reading, I'll also be listening to something different from normally. I wonder if that makes my discovery much more "basic", since it's a mix of pretty much everything.

This is why they have Daily Mixes, which are clustered by genre.

Discover Weekly seems to have figured out that one of my most listened-to Daily Mixes is post-rock, so it only gives me that. I'm fine with that. I wish they would push the Daily Mixes and Discover Weekly more prominently in the app interface rather than giving me TOP 10 BRAZIL playlists when I open the app.

I think that one reason Spotify Discovery works so well for me is that I really only use Spotify to listen to one genre of music (however you want to describe it, but it ranges from trap to alternative R&B). Otherwise I'm listening to EDM on Soundcloud. So I end up with a pretty "pure" Discover Weekly playlist.

Listening to sufficiently different types of music destroys discovery functionality for me. My weekly discovery is almost always filled with music that spans from 'boring and unoriginal' to 'heard this before'. I want some novelty damnit.

I don't really use Spotify. But this is why I like Google Play Music, because the playlist suggestions are categorized by what you're doing (rockout at the gym, christmas, working-chillout, working-fun).

But honestly you can't beat just going to youtube for a live stream if you want some chillout-ambient music while you're programming. There's so many talented dj's out there culling new music.

Spotify has playlists for the same things you listed (minus maybe christmas, but I'm sure they do). I've seen the others though listed.

You can follow and listen to other people's Discover Weekly mixes. I listen to Tobias Van Schneider's Discover Weekly more than my own.

I have at least one song I like in every Discover Weekly edition, sometimes several. However, interestingly, the overall quality and interest match varies heavily from week to week. Some weeks are fantastic, others rather lame.

I have the same experience. Although certainly it seems that my mood affects the kind of music that I enjoy. There were times when I listened to my discover weekly playlist on Monday, didn't like any of the songs, then listened again 6 days later and liked the vast majority.

This is difficult to measure of course, and is purely anecdotal. I am also wondering whether there is simply no more music out there that I enjoy, my music taste seems very obscure.

Something to add to this: it's also incredibly common for Discover Weekly to suggest songs which I have already listened to hundreds of times, does anyone else have this experience? I don't understand why this would be unless their algorithm simply cannot find anything else. I'd rather they just be honest instead of selecting songs I already know.

I don't know, I have friends who listen to some music I like, but lots of music I don't. If it's trying to recommend by that, it's going to miss a lot. And even within my own listening, there's plenty of bands where I like one song, but hate the rest of the album. There's bands where I'm massive fans of certain albums, but only like one song on others.

Music's a weird one. And taste changes. Last night I was listening to Jazz, I usually hate Jazz. Should it start recommending that to me now?

I can imagine what works brilliantly for some people will be abysmal for others (but I guess a decently advanced ML system should detect that and try different approaches for different people).

That's why I'm skeptical in machines recommending music. Deezer focuses more in Editors curated playlists (lots of them) and users playlists recommendation (instead of single songs). I've switched to Spotify last year because UX is better, but I feel I discovered less music I actually enjoy.

Mine is pretty good except for it thinks I want to listen to like ten Scandinavian language songs in a row.

Although now that I think about it, one thing that seems to lead to wacky recommendations is sparse data. If I check out Japanese enka albums the "similar to this album" information has stuff like Justin Bieber, which mostly tells me they have so little data on what kind of listeners enjoy the music that it's pure noise.

This is my experience as well. However, the first song I ever saw on Discover Weekly was this amazing gem, so now I kind of give Discover Weekly a pass for the rest of its behaviour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2cGxy-ZHIs

The algorithm doesn't seem to work at all for me as well. There's usually just a single song that I actually like in the discover weekly list every other week.

Same experience on my end. I mean, the recommendation system is better than nothing, but I very rarely find something I really like based on it.

Completely agree with this and related posts.

I think curation is massively underrated - importantly, curation allows a filter on quality. Lots of popular music is popular for reasons other than its quality, and Spotify is unable to detect that. Critics can.

My friend likes and uses the Discover Weekly and to get good recommendations he uses different Spotify account when he plays something for his kids or plays some generic background music at home.

He can use the "private session" option for that instead.

I wish that option were more easily accessible instead of being hidden away behind multiple menus.

It's right there in the dropdown beside your name in the desktop app.

I have this problem also, I know of private session and afaik it is not supposed to be used to hide the kids music from algorithms, rather the other way around: hide explicit music you listen to from your kids and coworkers etc...

I don't always keep forever tracks found on discover weekly, but I usually enjoy most songs that are on it when I am in the mood for new things.

Same. After I read this article I wondered if I'm doing something wrong to generate the playlist.

It works wonders for me, to be honest. At least 50% is on spot, almost every week.

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