Hacker News Reader

Comment by madbkarim | Hacker News Reader

Playing devil’s advocate here. But, I think it can be bad for Spotify if the user copies the playlist that’s being curated by Spotify to another streaming service. It’s good for them if they could add some friction to it by, you know—manually copy it and doesn’t let it update automatically every time they make a change to the playlist—by shutting down the API for this kind of request altogether.

It’s not about “allows user to quickly find the same songs elsewhere”, because if you’re not ready for that then you shouldn’t probably be in this business in the first place.

View on HN

This is exactly what I use SongShift for :D

Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst.

Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months.

BUT I do love how Apple Music integrates with my iOS devices and I think the sound quality is better. So I just use Songshift to sync the discovery playlists to AM (semi)automatically.

Btw, I wish Spotify would expand further on Discover Weekly/Release Radar:

- a builtin weekly personal archive of DW/RR

- a "get me more more interesting music in this style based on other peoples recommendations" button

etc.

It's not exactly what you're asking for, but a few years ago I started creating a new playlist at the start of each month, naming it "<Month> <Year>", and I add any songs I'm enjoying that month.. Most of them come from Discover Weekly or Release Radar, but sometimes for other sources.

It's an easy and interesting way to go back in time and see what I was listening to etc..

I have a "house rule" where I never remove any songs from them after the fact. If I added it, then it stays.

At the end of the year, I try to pick 2 songs from each month to make a curated "Best of <Year>" and then compare that to the algorithmic one that Spotify sends me.

Anyways, it's been a really fun thing and a reasonable substitute for DW/RR archives.

Although this probably doesn't work for me (see entire post) I really like this idea.

I still got my Starred playlist from back when you couldn't like. Been using dual like and Starred ever since they added like list. Since Starred playlist still contains dates, I could retroactively do what you did. However there would be some months with a lot and some with (almost) none and I have a tendency to hyperfocus on certain genres/artists for a while which might split but not on exact start of month.

I think you just gave me a new project idea!

I’ve used IFTT successfully to run a weekly sync from the current Discover Weekly into a special DW Archive playlist so I don’t lose each weeks suggestions. It’s gotten the job done well.

Yeah, Spotify has even contributed offical IFTTT triggers:

https://ifttt.com/spotify

I think this functionality belongs in the core experience.

Tidal auto makes a “most listened” playlist for your all time, for each month, and for the year. It’s a neat feature.

Apple Music is shit. Period. I rage quit the 6 month free trial the other day after “Siri, play the US top charts” resulted in “Sure, here’s the top charts in Serbia”. I’m not in Serbia. Their discovery is crap, YouTube has better music recommendations, most EDM is missing. No value in it at all.

Yeah. I thought everyone knew Apple Music is shit wrt their recommendations.

I quit the trial because the web app was totally broken. Not only was it super slow, it was buggy. Clicking a song would often play a different one in the list and it would regularly get stuck trying to play a song.

> “Sure, here’s the top charts in Serbia”. I’m not in Serbia. Their discovery is crap

That's exactly the sort of unexpected "music discovery" I'd be looking for. ;-)

This is actually a fine thing for Spotify since you’re still paying for both.

Now that they’ve threatened songshift they’re forcing you to make a choice (or manually sync).

Hopefully you won’t choose Spotify.

Couldn't you do this on the Spotify free tier?

I don't understand how many people seem to praise Spotify for their "Discover Weekly", it's been consistently shit for me for the past 2 years if not more. there's about 10 german songs in one of my playlists and I consistently get german tunes I don't care for and it doesn't seem to stop. On the other hand, I have a fair bit of French songs in about 3 or 4 playlists and yet have never gotten a recommendation of French stuff...

I've tried to understand how the algo somewhat works to suggest stuff but with no luck... I keep hitting the don't like this song or artist and yest somehow I still manage to get dreadful recommendations each week :(

>Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst.

Can I ask you how many songs are in your Liked playlist? It's a lucky week if I find 3 songs that I like in my Discover Weekly. The rest are forgettable at best, often terrible. I think I am not using Spotify the way I'm supposed to, because i find it really hard to discover new music I like.

My Discover Weekly was really garbage awhile back until I made an effort to listen to a bunch of music of different genres that I'm into for a week or two. Also make a point to favorite stuff you'd actually like to listen to again.

It really improved after that and it's typically pretty great (with some weeks being exceptions). For reference, I've got 1,272 tracks in "Liked".

There’s a simple solution to this, and that is to only allow playlist-level API access where the playlist author matches the account making the request. Users can transfer out any playlists they created, while Spotify keeps Rap Caviar or whatever exclusive to the service.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com