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Comment by bradly | Hacker News Reader

> The only thing Apple Music has going for it over Spotify (in my opinion) is that the recommendations are easily 10x better for discovering new content.

Thank you! I spent the last few years working on improving the quality of those recommendations!

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Your post surprised me: I can't think of any other Apple employees publically talking about their work, other than the early years of the WebKit team.

I’m ex-Apple, so that may help, but I was once told it’s fine to talk about anything that is in a job posting.

People are working on almost everything, so I don’t feel like I’m giving away anything shocking. Apple is a big place, though. My experience may not be the same as others.

How much of the recommendation engine is built around a spatial index that performs a KNN search?

I doubt this bit of trivia would ever be included in a job posting :-)

Nice try, Apple.

Amazing - you should be proud of your team’s work! On Spotify, my experience was that it’s recommendation system would simply recommend songs from the same bands I’ve already told it that I like. But Apple will dig up some obscure band I’d never heard of and - POW! - it would be awesome and a new favourite band.

The recommendation system alone is what keeps me looking past all the errors with the software being unable to play a song on demand on a regular basis.

Congrats again!

Very strange. I would probably pay my Spotify subscription just for the recommendation service. Did you use Discover Weekly actively? Did you share your account with children, at parties, etc.? I'm always puzzled by how Spotify recommendations seem to be so hit and miss for people. I wonder if it could be related to the type of music one listens to.

> Did you share your account with children, at parties, etc.?

I play my son music using my phone. Spotify bury the "Private Session" toggle deep in the settings, and arbitrarily turn it off again after a while. If this damages Spotify's recommendations, then it's entirely their doing.

Thank you again! There is a lot that goes into quality search and recommendations, and I was just a small piece of a great team.

Can you tell me more? Last I tried (a number of years ago), the recommendations were completely mainstream and uninteresting, whereas Discover Weekly routinely dredged up almost-unknown artists that quickly turned into favorites. Can Apple Music do something similar today? Does it use a similar approach to Spotify or is it curated somehow?

Great job on the recommendations, definitely my favorite part.

What is youpinoon in way Music.app is so clunky still? For example when perusing music, if you click on something there is no way to go back to what you were just looking at!

It's such a cool thing to get to work on, and be paid for, and something I imagine everyone working on actually uses. This is not true of a lot of software we all write. So I don't understand why the app is so bad in 100 tiny little ways

Thank you.

I wasn't really involved in the client, so I probably don't have much insight to share in that regard.

It was really special to what I had been working on in a keynote or read articles/comments specifically addressing a feature, but it isn't always gravy. So many news reports/articles/comments are just so far off from what is really happening going on. And many comments are tough to hear, but true as well. Still overall it was a positive and threads like this are really something special. It means a lot to have our work appreciated and think that can be missing from the modern software development experience.

Great work!

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