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Comment by midasuni | Hacker News Reader

This suddenly all makes sense. I’ve been listening to a “mamma Mia 1+2” playlist as I couldn’t see the albums immediately.

The all of a sudden some awful explicit song starts playing, nothing to do with ABBA, not even in the same genre.

Reported the playlist for being deceptive. I note today it has a different song in there now.

Spotify need a setting to avoid this stuff otherwise they’ll start losing passive customers like myself who pay £15pcm to listen to music that we want to listen to without thinking about it.

Give me a setting to avoid all “social” things like public playlists or watch as your revenue goes to Apple or amazon.

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Just don't use public playlists. You can already disable explicit. Disable "autoplay similar songs when your music ends". This is Spotify itself selling playlist placement though, not public playlists being manipulated for payola. No one can stop payola on a public list, just don't use public lists.

Unfortunately there's a long history of Spotify re-toggling this setting. It's quite frustrating.

I've been a paying user of Spotify for years and I think that happened maybe once. It is not a pervasive problem.

I believe this option is controlled at the app level, not the account level, and is enabled by default in the app. So you have to disable it when you first install the app but after that it isn't re-enabled.

Without public playlists I have no reason to use Spotify haha, literally any other service would do.

That's interesting, I thought public playlist listeners would just use YouTube. If not to have access to your own musical choices, what is the point of Spotify?

It plays in the background and is a couple quid cheaper than YouTube's play in background "feature" that totally worked before but was nerfed when they introduced YouTube Premium

Integration with Alexa etc is useful too now that I'm already in the system but I could easily use Amazon's thing there, or Apple's if I fancied swapping Alexa out for Siri

From my brief experience with YouTube Music, the problem seemed to be even worse there. It wasn't just poorly curated public playlists, it seemed that much of the time it was playing poorly edited unauthorised YouTube uploads of songs.

In the past I’ve copied playlists, but the UI on the iPhone doesn’t seem to make it obvious. Search favours playlists over albums too.

It means I have to use my decision making part of my brain, which is not what I want to do when listening to music, and as that’s the part of my brain which will decide to cancel, it’s not something Spotify want me to do either.

If I find a playlist I like (curated by someone else) I copy it to my own playlist where no one can mess with it.

This is the way to deal with it. As always, if you find anything on the internet that you like and don't want it to change underneath you, you need to make a copy into a space where it cannot change. In the case of Spotify, you need to duplicate the playlist or if you really want it to be permanent, pull down the mp3s from somewhere and have locally, as it can still be pulled from Spotify once their agreements run out.

I thought we all learned this when people started to have 50% of the bookmarks from the 2000s dead by now, but seems we still have generations that need to learn from the precariousness of content on the internet.

Spotify doesn't have something as basic as a "clone playlist" feature, so not really an option for any non-trivial playlists.

I've noticed this with playlists on Youtube, an entire album I wanted to hear + some unrelated tune or advert for a pack of samples (for music production) stuck on the end.

I have long ago stopped using Spotify for similar reasons. Apple Music is the best service IMO on iOS, though the way Apple favors it in its ecosystem leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

The weird thing is that some people really love those playlists. I moved to apple music and my partner gets annoyed because he misses exactly that. He likes that they change regularly - it's a feature rather than a bug.

I listen to albums and don't as much care, but that really is their product differentiation.

You can also block explicit songs on Spotify in your settings. It is about 75% effective.

Irritatingly, there's no opposite setting. Why does no music service offer a "prefer album version" or similar setting? Shuffle any hip-hop artist, get jarred by periodic bleeps even if you don't have "block explicit" set.

I don’t want to block explicit songs - if I want to listen to Eminem or something I don’t want a radio edit of Stan. I just don’t want it popping up in the middle of an easy listening playlist on a Sunday afternoon.

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