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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your history

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we...

Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recommending music, ever

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It hardly matters now, but before you do anything with a guest, you can start a private session to make sure their history is ignored. Still a very weird feature to omit; I'd reckon that most people would use history deletion at some point

I use this a lot when playing music for my kid, but unfortunately the feature is clunky: weird path to find it, self-auto-disable much later but with the song still loaded. Hopefully this changes someday.

I'm in a similar situation at the moment. Somehow Spotify has decided that I listened to a bunch of Hindu music a couple of months ago and now over 50% of my recommended playlists and podcasts are in that genre.

Their refusal to let you delete history is just puzzling.

Sounds like your account was stolen and sold for premium status, possibly.

I think more likely is I searched for something, hit the wrong result, then got distracted while it was autoplaying through related artists for a few hours.

You mean Hindu religious/fusion music or Indian music?

It seems to be a bit of a mix. Some is definitely religious Hindu music, other bits seem to be more broadly Indian/Bollywood.

As is the curse of modern technology I don't want to interact with it at all in case the algorithm decides I'm into it and undoes my work retraining my preferences.

I just checked in to an airbnb and someone left their google account signed in to the youtube app on the TV. The temptation to spike the recommender with something is very strong. :)

I have a similar problem where I play Disney music/movie music in the car when I drive my kid to school. Every time I have to go find "private mode" deep in the settings. Typically I just forget. I am primarily a discover weekly and release radar user, so it's definitely frustrating. They have basically done almost nothing positive for users in years in terms of UX. They tried to git rid of dislike, but brought it back because it ruins those suggestion playlists, when you can't hide awful songs.

> I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account.

There should be an Incognito mode on every music streaming service for this reason.

Yeah I made the mistake of letting my daughter watch nursery rhymes on YouTube a few times. Guess what happened to my YouTube Music....

FYI, Google gives you some decent tools for managing your YouTube watch history. You can search by date or title, and you can also turn on auto-delete.

Spotify has an incognito mode.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/

If you contact their support, they can probably help you. My account got hacked a while back and I started getting all sorts of weird recommendations. I contacted their support and they were basically able to reset it to an arbitrary date in the past, thus restoring it. In UI would obviously be better, but FYI, this is an option...

> Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recommending music, ever.

Last.fm has always been great for recommendations.

My account got hacked for a few weeks while I was on holiday, and it took literally years for my recommendations to recover.

Spotify used to have a private listening feature for people to play their music, but I've also deleted it so IDK

Private listening is still there.

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