Hacker News Reader

Comment by mancerayder | Hacker News Reader

also think they cracked music discovery. Their discovery weekly playlist is stellar.

Love Spotify, disagree strongly with this. My experience is terrible music that doesn't seem to have anything to do with any of the hundreds of songs I have on my playlist. I get this curious Millennial mix of soft rock music with long, boring instrumental guitar strumming, a disco beat and a sleepy, sarcastic-voiced gal (sometimes guy).

It might be because I live in Brooklyn.

And there's no Like or Dislike button like (beloved) Pandora.

edit: Don't think anyone compromised my account.

View on HN

Agreed. Spotify Discovery is hardly as good as many people tout it to be. Usually Indie music junk that isn't really my genre. Also agree that Pandora is far superior when it comes to curating tracks. A trick I've learned from a friend is to never like a song Pandora; only dislike what you don't want to hear. Spotify Radio is terrible as well. There's no good way to reseed a radio station. For example, when I first started using Spotify radio, I was listening to The National a lot. For whatever reason, 3-4 years since, whenever I start my 'Liked From Radio' station, it plays The National every fifth song or so. Ugghhh!!! Finally, Spotify on Android has been kinda buggy for me. Once you have a lot of offline music on your device, the app takes forever to load on startup. It complains if there is no active internet connection, etc. When I wrote to Support, they suggested that I clear the cache and re-install the app (which caused me to lose all my prior downloaded music).

I'm so happy to hear it's not just me.

When I first started listening to Spotify (about a year and a half ago), I found the dicovery really high-quality, but it just seems to have gotten worse and worse. Discover Weekly is particularly bad. I find that the first 5 or so songs are okay, but from there is rapidly decends into madness.

I have the weird habit (though I'm weening off) of keeping all the music I listen to out of curiosity on a big playlist together, whether I liked it or not, as a way of keeping track. I thought that might be throwing Spotify's algorithm off (and it probably still is), but it seems it's definitely not the only reason.

I've decided to just trust that Last.fm is doing it's juob and not add any more to that playlist.

Discover Weekly looks at the music you listened to recently. If you listen to 5 random songs this week because you were very busy, it's going to offer you the same thing next Monday. Then if the only things you listen to next week is the bad offering from Discover, it's going to propose you the same crap the week after.

I assure you the music I listen to is far removed from the Discover Weekly offerings, which I described graphically above.

I can only agree that discovery is so crappy.

I love the daily mixes, though thats mostly just sorting the music I normally listen to into genres. I still find it kinda cool. Especially that I always get a mix with my kids' tastes, since I often play music for them.

I agree with the GP about Discover Weekly; it works great for me but I'm guessing maybe that's because I have a lot of saved playlists I've accreted over the years.

I disagree about the native app, though. PWDs are where it's at now. Native apps are doomed.* I didn't even download it on my new MBP, it was slow and buggy. The web version is good enough for me, combined with web-scrobbler for Chrome so I can still scrobble to Last.fm.

[*] https://medium.com/javascript-scene/native-apps-are-doomed-a...

Discover Weekly works great for me, but I have 10,000 songs in my library. (Exactly 10,000 songs, because that’s the very annoying hard limit Spotify has set.)

Same for me. My Discover weekly started including Dutch rap music (I don't speak Dutch nor did I ever listen to that genre) and the percentage has been increasing ever since. It's now at 30-40% of my playlist. No idea how to get it off there again.

What music are you generally listening to?

There may be some odd connection made internally, between fans of some specific genres and Dutch rap, and you were unlucky enough to be hit by it.

I get why Spotify doesn't want to expose the connections their algorithms make (because that's their biggest competitive advantage), but it would be nice to dig through once in a while, to see the connections they've made.

A very broad mix. I think it's reinforcement. A few songs slipped on their by some connection, which is fine. Because I listen to Discover weekly, it'll then register that I listen to songs of that genre and add more of those.

It appears to me that they include Discover weekly consumption in determining preferences. Any personalised Spotify playlist should be excluded to avoid this kind of reinforcement.

I suspect the same. If you accidentally listen to initial terrible playlist of stuff they want you to discover, the AI will register you as confirming you love that genre for the rest of your life.

Hah, imagine that, AI Cognitive Biases!

Discover Weekly has a like and dislike button in the desktop app. I couldn't figure out how to do it on mobile though.

Ahhh. That's it. I only use it on Android. Maybe I should use that feature on the PC, and thumbs down everything for a few weeks!

You can actually like/dislike stuff from the app. Expand the playback notification and you'll find the buttons there. Of course this only works for currently playing songs.

No idea why they hid it there, and there only.

Spotify app is so terrible, once you like something, it doesn't give you an option to unlike it.

Like Tinder, I really don't understand how these services -- where the magic isn't in the app so much as in the service -- who have big piles of money don't have much much better apps. It really feels like something you should be able to throw money at.

I think Apple users get the bulk of attention with regards to that. I noticed the Apple version of the same companies' apps are tighter and less bug-free. I'm on Android.

I've found more recently that the discovery playlist that I also loved is churning up more and more of the same stuff now. Not even a good mix of songs from artists I definitely like - just a very small set of songs from them.

I do love it though, generally speaking although being a heavy daily user I'm not sure the discovery part is actually as good as it initially appears.

I think it depends a lot on your taste. The more poppy your listening habits are, the worse the recommendations seem to be.

I listen almost exlusively to hard rock and metal, and all of my auto-generated playlists are absolutely stellar in their selection.

It seems that once Spotify lumps you in with a specific segment, it's hard to get out of it again.

I'm more of a Downtempo fan, and I feel nobody does music discovery quite like Spotify. I've had a better than excellent experience in this regard.

I agree with you about discover weekly not being very good.

On the other hand what I do like is the playlist radio that comes on after you finish listening to a playlist. I find that a great way to find new music and new artists.

I think Discovery is good, but only at first, same with the Daily Mix / Radio / autoplay-after-finishing-album features, which for me seem to be a lot of "more of the same" or a lot of "generic blargh". Mind you I've probably already exhausted what I like by now. I should probably cancel my sub for a while and see if Apple Music is any better or at least gives me something fresh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com