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Comment by nobleach | Hacker News Reader

I find that my music tastes can vary too much for Spotify. While working, I mostly listen to Electronic music. But I can also take a hard right turn and listen to Hall and Oates... or Fleetwood Mac, or Steely Dan. Then some form of 80's throwback. But as far as recommendations go, I really only want to expand in that first genre of Electronic Music. I don't want Jethro Tull to be recommended to me. My feed used to be full of really cool stuff, but I find that now I have several lines of "Because you listened to one song by The Pointer Sisters...."

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Don't you have Daily Mixes? These are smart playlists created by Spotify organized roughly into genres, and you have can up to six - depending on how diverse your listening habits are. Right now I have:

1 Electronic, 2 Pop, 3 R&B, 4 Indie, 5 Rap, 6 Country/Americana

Note they aren't named like this, I did that. Spotify identifies them only by a number and a few of the artists contained within. You can find them in the app on your Home screen or under Your Library > Your Daily Mix.

These solve the problem somewhat, but, in my experience, they only play songs I've already listened to. So listening to songs outside the genres I want recommendations for will still ruin Discover Weekly's usefulness as a discovery system.

I used to love Discover Weekly, and found a lot of great music through it, but it's gotten less useful over time. A few things that would improve it:

• Multiple Discover playlists sorted roughly into genres, like the Daily Mix but only containing never-before-heard music

• Treat Discover Weekly like a radio station, with thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons

• Once I've listened to a track a few times, stop suggesting it. At this point I can usually predict what my Discover Weekly playlist will be: all of the songs that have showed up on it before, but that I didn't like enough to click "+" on.

They intersperse some new songs between my already saved songs.

I prefer them for exactly this reason - I’ve learned that I actually prefer less novelty in my playlists than I previously assumed. Spotify seems to understand this, and incrementally alters my playlists, moving through tracks and doing a good job of removing tracks that I skip continuously. I’ve noticed these playlists actually do a good job at discovering music for me within each genre

I find that my daily mixes only have songs I've already saved to a playlist or my songs.

I prefer how Google Play Music does suggestions and wish Spotify could adopt some elements of the same.

Eg. GPM does suggests things like: 1) Looks like you are at work, here's some music without lyrics for concentration. 2) Looks like you are at home, here's some relaxing music.

.. and so on.

Also Spotify sometimes gets things too right, and it stops me from discovering new music. GPM does a better job introducing noise into the suggestions.

However, the catalog of GPM is smaller than Spotify. Cannot find famous songs like "Hotel California" on GPM for instance.

I have three main criticisms of Spotify, just in case there's a Spotify PM reading.

1. I hear repeat songs in my discover all the time, this isn't ideal. I curate my own playlists for moods and know that i'm getting when I play those playlists, surfacing songs I've manually curated in my discover doesn't add value to my experience.

2. I wish I could more easily surface the discover playlists of my friends or those whom I follow. I know that my friends like similar music but the small differences might provide insightful curation data and help me discover new music, so, it'd be interesting to see the data on discovery curation through social connections.

3. There's some chatter about daily mixes here. I find that my daily mixes don't change enough. I'll try them once, two times, then I'll churn from using that feature.

>1. I hear repeat songs in my discover all the time

Something is wrong. Discover Weekly is supposed to have only songs you have never listened to, even once. That's how it works for me.

The case I most often encounter is "oh, you liked x? I'm sure you'll like every remix of x for the next month of your discovery weekly!". Technically not the same song.

I get repeat songs now and then. Not a lot, but a noticeable number.

Perhaps you've listened to the regular version of a song, but the Discover Playlist has surfaced its "radio edit" or some other very, very similar version?

Most definitely not. Same songs. Not referring to radio edits (though I have seen them too, sometimes).

Just want to reiterate gripe #3. The Daily Mixes were, at first, the Best Thing Ever. But that was like a year ago, and they don't seem to have changed at all since then. I've listened to a lot of different music this past year, but keep hearing the same old songs on all the Daily Mixes. I'd expect them to update in more overt ways as my tastes evolved.

>GPM does suggests things like: 1) Looks like you are at work, here's some music without lyrics for concentration. 2) Looks like you are at home, here's some relaxing music.

Spotify does this too. Under Browse, many of the suggested playlists are context-dependent and will change depending on the time of day.

You could try this tool from hate5six: http://hate5six.com/sage - historically, they've only worked with hardcore / metal music, but this appears to be a new tool which expanded out to 200k artists across all types. I managed to find 3 folk artists which I am loving, and had never heard of from either Google or spotify. Curious if it is broad enough to work for your taste in music.

(not affiliated with them in any way)

He also did a really in depth blog post about how it works. I haven't gotten around to reading the full post yet, but from the little that I've read he goes into a deep dive about how it works. https://medium.com/@hate5six/sage-an-artificially-intelligen...

I'm very similar- look into the Daily Mixes that are created, this solves that issue for me.

Right now I have six different mixes and each one of them seem to be a grouped into a different genre (or sub genre).

This is the problem I have had with it. Last month I decided to check out some Latino music from Columbia after a recommendation, and my Discover Weekly playlist after that started to get populated with almost all Portugeze songs and Brazillian artists. I did find some great songs in them too, but I would have preferred more Latino music. It was disappointing that their model is not able to properly disambiguate between two popular, yet distinct languages/genres.

It's a bit of a nuisance, but you could go into Private Mode[0] when listening to stuff that you don't want to be part of your recommendations.

[0] - https://support.spotify.com/cz/using_spotify/the_basics/how-...

The importance of a good Discover Weekly has caused me to be super 'careful' with what I listen to. I have a separate Spotify account on my family plan where I listen to stuff I don't like. For instance, it's connected to my Sonos so guests at my house can listen to whatever they want.

Something like an "Incognito Mode" would be a good idea for Spotify and similar services.

They actually have one. "Private listening". But you can't assign certain devices to stay in that mode.

and exists: WIN: File/Private Session Android: Your Library/Settings/Social/PrivateSession

This will cause your songs not to be influencing the AI curated playlists (like Discover Weekly and Daily Playlists)

I actually want the opposite - I don't want the stuff I listen to all the time to be recommended to me, I want some of the one off stuff I listen to to appear in the feed at around the same frequency.

Google Music has location-based recommendations. Not sure why Spotify couldn't incorporate something similar.

Does location matter when dealing with music taste? Just because I'm in Nashville doesn't necessarily mean I love country music?

Music you listen to at the park may be different from the music you listen to while programming at work, for example. So yes.

It's more contextual to the user. Music suggestions for when you are at the office. Music suggestions for when you're at home etc...

Yeah, I definitely wish they had filters for genres, or more tools to let users control the weighting of things.

Agreed. I really enjoy the Discover feature, but I wish it could be broken down in sub-categories based on mood.

Spotify does this! Check out the "Made for You" / "Daily Mix" playlists.

I have this exact same problem. Please Spotify, fix this.

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