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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

> might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.

That's just Spotify. The AI did a better job of figuring out what I like (138 and uplifting trance) than Spotify does (EDM). I blame it in Armin van Buuren: he is an extremely popular EDM DJ and he plays a very wide variety of EDM. If you listen to EDM chances are he has at least a few dozen sets you'd enjoy. That's the problem: he's prolific and he connects every genre of EDM to every other genre of EDM. He's a "super-connector" and I could easily see how this wrecks recommendation algorithms, all roads lead to Armin.

Basically: recommending music is not the same as recommending goods, and I think the same approach is being used.

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Good point. I started to notice a lot of the Spotify recommendations sounded like half of an EDM track I might like, mixed with half of something that it should’ve never been mixed with.

Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.

It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!

Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.

I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.

Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.

Wow, a mention of Armin van Buren! I wonder how much discovery of his work is just happenstance. His track is the first thing on Google and Bing that gets thrust into your face when you search for "this is a test".

That's my default browser bar search term for checking that my interwebs are still wired up, and I've often thought that this was either genius or a really happy accident.

I don't think that's a bad thing per se, if the algorithm correctly identifies that you like EDM. We then come to the micro-genre discussion - how specific are you in your tastes, and how precise is the algorithm required to be?

EDM is an extremely diverse genre. Recommending music because it falls under EDM is like recommending music because guitars are used.

Fans of any genre say this. If you don't like metal then it's all loud guitars and screaming. When you do like metal there is fractal complexity of subgenres all the way down.

Except Phish fans. For them there is only Phish.

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