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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

To the request to name a single brand based on personalization, music brands like Pandora and Spotify are built on personalization:

Similarly, clothing brands like stitch-fix and trunk club are personalization specific.

Regarding Disney, we just signed up for Disney+ and the first step was to decide if you wanted mature content and the second was to decide on your avatar. I think Disney+ will allow the company to cater to personal tastes more than they ever could through theaters and we will see that in the future.

Finally, for the longest time marketers have looked at demographic groups to target with their products, this is a weaker form of personalization. Obviously that won’t be abandoned, so I wonder why the author thinks companies should only target mass markets?

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The post is about marketing and ad targeting. For Spotify to satisfy their question of a "brand built through personalization", Spotify would have had to do something like sign up for google/facebook ads, target the demographic of "music listeners" and convert enough users to end up with a successful business. That's not how spotify built their business.

You're talking about their recommendation engine for users they already have, which is completely different.

Exactly this.

We also have to take into account that there's a lot of "misses" in those recommendation engines - which is normal. But when they nail it, people have positive emotions towards it, so it's a good feedback loop.

Personalization would be to have Spotify recommend you only songs about expensive watches after you've searched for a Rolex on Google, with ads in the middle about Rolex ahaha.

Personalization would be to have Spotify give you ads for a Rolex right after you purchased a Rolex. At least the way that kind of thing usually works for me is that I always get the recommendations after the purchase (definitely not a Rolex for me).

Spotify is exactly adtech, they have extremely targeted advertising for their free tier that even takes into account playlist names.

>To the request to name a single brand based on personalization, music brands like Pandora and Spotify are built on personalization:

You mean the recommendation engine? Hardly ever it worked for me.

What Spotify is built on is "play albums/songs you select or follow playlists on genres you like". The recommendations are tacked on, and bad.

You would be the first person I've heard say that. Everyone I ever spoken to about this loves Spotify's recommendations. And I'm talking about non-technical people. They are excellent recommendations. No, they are NOT successful for the reasons you state. Apple Music does that. Now, that's a recommendation that is indeed bad.

You can add a second to your list. Spotify doesn't have a lot of my favorite music, and the recommendations have always been bland and boring or downright bad to me.

Add a 3rd. Stopped using Spotify because the recs downright annoying.

I prefer to use YT Music s it seems thoroughly confused by having each person in family use from my service account to the point the suggestions are general in nature. They still do not get played though. I refuse to click on suggestions in any product as that reinforces their data on me/us. I’m quite ok if any music engine thinks I’m a polyglot toddler with penchant for death metal, Thai ballads, and ancient Chinese orchestral Music. Such a profile makes me soooo much less likely to get other music or junk marketed to me ;-)

Fourth, I've never found a recommendation engine I like. Maybe I have weird taste in music, but Spotify only ever recommended one song that I ended up loving (oddly, the very first one it ever did).

Fifth, Spotify recommendations have only ever given me 1 song that I liked over the 3 years I used spotify.

At this point adding numbers to the people agreeing seems pointless, but I'm also in this cat3egory.

Sure, I've had some good recommendations, but I'd expect any recommendation engine to do that just by chance.

What I can say is that Spotify has never proposed something truly new and interesting to me. If I listen to a lot of metal, it'll recommend me the most bland stuff in the same genre. What's even worse is that it keeps playing the same songs over and over again. It's like the recommendation engine just gives up and starts repeating its suggestions again.

Your last paragraph is why I got rid of Spotify. I like music to move me. It was amazing how I could start a run of upbeat, pumping, specifically chosen songs and then have the recommendation engine suggest 30 minutes of cruisy blandness..

I simply gave up on it. Why have access to everything when I only got the crap. Going back to my personal collection increased my good/bad song ratio considerably.

That's fine. It doesn't change my opinion, nor my sentiment. If Spotify's recommendation engine wasn't as good as it was, it would not have the users it has, and would probably have been eaten up by now. Nothing anyone has said has shaken that belief, nor offered up anything worthwhile.

>It doesn't change my opinion, nor my sentiment

"It" being reality?

>If Spotify's recommendation engine wasn't as good as it was, it would not have the users it has

Now that's just confirmation bias + circular logic.

A streaming service can have users regardless of how good its recommendation engine is. YouTube has crappy recommendation (and has had worse for most of the time it existed) but tons of users.

For Pandora and Spotify, merely offering a convenient way to stream music, a free tier, and a big catalog, was enough.

You seem convinced of some bizarro idea that a media/streaming service can only succeed based on its recommendation engine.

Where did you get that from?

I've found Spotify's recommendations to be brilliant. Easily the best music-related thing I've been introduced to in 10-20 years. I'll often open Discover Weekly and end up favouriting more than half of the suggestions and only not favouriting the rest because I'm feeling pickier given the success rate. It's helped me discover loads of new artists and tracks.

Maybe it varies dramatically by genre?

Apple Music (well, iTunes at the time) was pretty good. But that was in the era where you bought music, so they had a full profile of what you liked. More importantly, with your iPod, they knew what you actually played, no matter how obscure. Now, with streaming, this is much harder problem because the only signals you get are likes and play time, but this signal is a lot more noisy than music you would spend real money on.

It may vary well work best by genre, or not cater to people who have gone through spaghettification (insist on subdividing genres infinitely) with their music.

For example, take the "Phonk" genre, which I only was introduced to due to the Ukrainian war. To mean these recommendations give me a lot of new music to listen to. But then you have people lamenting that "Phonk" has really been overtaken by "Drift Phonk". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAV7hnCB_ZE&ab_channel=yokai

On the other hand, I personally enjoy albums and songs major artist after they achieve critical success, when they establish their signature sound, like David Bowie(1970-1983), Stevie Wonder (1972-1976), or Peter Gabriel(1986-1992), but if I "like" any of these songs on Spotify, it means I get their entire catalog mixed in my daily mixes, and if they ever release a live album, those tracks show up. This is not what I want.

I find the video you linked awful.

Music genres change, that's nothing new at all. Just look at the type of trance from the early 2000s and compare it to today's trance. It's a completely different sound. Would the author also complain about "progressive trance" taking over "trance"? It's natural that some sub genres might become more popular, while others lose listeners relative to the newcomers. Same happened in techno, rap etc.

While Spotify might accelerate this process through a positive feedback loop, this video is just another form of gatekeeping and saying "I knew XYZ before it was cool".

You're hearing it from me now too. The music they recommend me is awful and only tangentially related to what I like.

>No, they are NOT successful for the reasons you state. Apple Music does that.

Which is neither here nor there. Apple music came later, and Spotify already had a headstart, a good UI, a good selection, and a good free plan.

Spotify, Pandora caught on because they were the first good streaming solutions, at the time bandwidth, mobile phones, etc, were in place and ripe for streaming. Not because of their recommendations...

Nth. Spotify recommendations suck if you have non-mainstream tastes.

> You would be the first person I've heard say that. Everyone I ever spoken to about this loves Spotify's recommendations.

That's not an argument

Last.fm's recommendations were better even 15 years ago. I was spoiled by them, and that's the reason I don't pay for or use Spotify despite wanting to like it. The recommendations are bad compared to other options.

I use Spotify everyday and think it's great but I ignore the garbage recommendation features. Useless.

Spotify would not stop recommending me the same NFT avatar trash even though I did ever negative signal I could do it, reported the artist, whatever, no matter what I had no choice in a third of my playlists containing this ninny.

Canceled and would not consider a recommendation based service that does not let me explicitly remove something from being recommended.

Spotify's recommendations have been my bread-and-butter for music discovery for a long while. The radio feature and the Discovery Weekly playlists are very tailor made for my taste (which is broad and pretty underground in general), which probably has to do with the amount of data I generated by being an user since 2010.

Disclaimer: I work for Spotify nowadays but have been an avid user for more than a decade before joining, my opinion is based on my personal experience with the service and not as an employee.

"To the request to name a single brand based on personalisation, music brands like Pandora and Spotify are built on personalisation."

As I read this article, this meaning of "personalisation" is not the one used by the authors.

Tech companies like Spotify and Pandora are just intermediaries. They may help to "deliver" commercial product, or advertising, however they do not create the product referred to in this article. The article uses the term "personalised creative" to refer to product. Tech companies operate as middlemen and produce no content. They are dependent on others to produce it. This is the bait for computer users. Tech companies sell advertising services to companies that produce content.

Tech companies gather data about individual computer users, e.g., web browsing histories. This is "personal" data. Tech companies allege this makes it especially effective and therefore valuable. The studies cited in the article suggest this is claim is false.

Disney produces content. There is no shortage of personal data being collected and sold by tech companies which is available to Disney. The article highlights that, despite the availability of personal data collected by tech companies, Disney generally does not produce "personalised creative".

In sum, the article is not about what "tech" companies do, it is about what content producers do. More specifically, it is about whether, based on available research, producers of creative should or should not attempt to use personal data about computer users collected by third parties in order to produce "personalised creative".

> Tech companies like Spotify and Pandora are just intermediaries. They may help to "deliver" commercial product, or advertising, however they do not create the product.

They do create a "product", the delivery system. This is a creative product as much as any of the music. A lot of software was written to allow this and all of that is the "product".

My gut is that I'm looking at two sides arguing past each other.

Most major value creation happens well before Disney+ or Pandora. They just have somewhat broadly defined parameters that will get you more of the same, from what has been created.

As easy examples, there are a lot of good kids shows that adults could enjoy, but my guess is that they are not recommended to most adults. Just as really good folk music is likely to get suggested to someone that hasn't listened to folk music. Or music/movies from another nation.

Which is all too say that the personalization is ultimately a customer fitting themselves to what they want, from what they know. Dropping someone in fresh with no prefit is probably a lost cause. Even though that is how most personalisation talks brand themselves.

TikTok is also famously good at personalization

Shockingly, terrifyingly, good at personalization. I swear they have mics in my house.

There AI is amazing. So I make sure to tell my Douyin (Chinese TikTok)watching other to always also spend time watching totally random things on the platform.

> I swear they have mics in my house.

Just remember that when you think this, the reality is that you are just that predictable based on half a dozen meaningless datapoints.

Yeah anyone who doesn't believe that Disney is doing personalisation should get in contact with me. I have a bridge to sell them in the Nullarbor.

In fact, they're actively building it and selling it to advertisers. Disney+ and similar platforms are the tools that media companies have every intention of using to drive the accuracy numbers much higher.

E: I should note that I work for Snowflake, we're marketing this capability pretty hard. I'm not directly involved though.

The problem is, everybody hates all the ways in which spotify doesn't act sensibly and predictably. Just google for "spotify random broken" to spiral down a depressing rabbithole of a decade of forum posts about a feature so simple and still not implemented, that it's clearly being done on purpose; either to drive engagement or save on money paid out to labels and artists, your guess is as good as mine.

I agree Spotify is definitely built on personalization. The only time I subscribe to premium is when they offer me 3 months for $9.99, and they know enough to offer it to me in May when I start using premium for running or cycling. Then I cancel it in August, and they offer it to me again soon after where I subscribe again from October - December. Then it goes dark again until May hits and I'm offered 3 months for $9.99 again.

While it is true that Spotify does recommendations, I'm sceptical that the majority of users value this part most. I'm happy to be corrected, but I'd guess it is simply the ability to stream music on demand that remains its main selling point. Put another way, the value of Spotify is its expansive collection, not its personalisation.

(Or so it seems to me)

It’s both

I know that some people find value in this, but for me, I wish I could turn off the recommendation engines on Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and wherever else they are in services that I use. Whatever notions of similarity that they use to generate recommendations have nothing to do with how I judge things, and for me this is just noise that makes those services slower to navigate.

I feel Spotify's recommendation engine works kinda OK since music is many small songs rather than long and few movies.

I mean if you are into a movie there might be only three ones like it which you allready have watched and surely are not on Netflix.

However, as soon as you use your Spotify account for kids or parties the engine gets messed up forever. It is a shame since it helped me find alot of artists.

I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that everyone has the same catalog (at least for my fairly boring taste in music) and actively choose Spotify’s personalization over Apple Music’s tighter integration with my phone, car, etc. Just a single data point though.

No, I choose Spotify's UI over Apple Music's.

I also prefer Spotify user-run playlists better, which I pick myself, searching for genres and songs explicitly.

Nothing to do with preferring the personalization.

> No, I choose Spotify's UI over Apple Music's.

"No" seems to suggest that you're disagreeing with your parent's post, but your parent is saying why they chose it, not why you did:

> I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that everyone has the same catalog (at least for my fairly boring taste in music) and actively choose Spotify’s personalization over Apple Music’s tighter integration with my phone, car, etc. Just a single data point though.

>but your parent is saying why they chose it, not why you did:

And I am saying why I chose it. You don't need to read too much into the "no", nor have to find some perfect formal consistency in a quick response. It's just "no" as in, "no, that's not my case".

Anecdotally, I love the personalized station Apple Music generates for me. I have pretty eclectic, cross-genre taste and the quality of the personalized station - the mix of stuff I already love and the new stuff that I don't know yet but that I end up loving - is by far the stickiest part of the service for me. It also seems to be improving over time? I know, anecdotal, but that has been my experience..

> While it is true that Spotify does recommendations, I'm sceptical that the majority of users value this part most

Any time Spotify is brought up (which is really any time music is brought up) it's a good bet the quality of discovery of recommendations are mentioned. The Discovery Weekly and Daily Mixes are loved. My anecdotal evidence is the dozens of people I've talked to about this over the years. This HN thread is the first time I've seen anyone suggest otherwise.

I know for myself, if it wasn't for the discovery that Spotify offers, I wouldn't use it.

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