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Comment by midasz | Hacker News Reader

As a father of a young child, Spotify's algo's are completely useless to me. If their ML is so smart it should be able to determine that Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax. Wish I'd be able to toggle 'don't recommend kids music' somewhere.

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I used Spotify to play music at a children's party. I am still getting recommendations for "Happy Birthday" months later. According to Spotify, it goes very well with Sheryl Crow and R.E.M.

Can be helpful to turn off watch history during such sessions, or to remove the videos from your history afterwards. Agreed that there should be an automated solution, but you can avoid it today will a small amount of work.

Are we talking about the same Spotify? Because the only reference I found to removing songs from my recommendations is a thread from 2020 that says it is not possible.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/How-do-I-delete-my...

You can start a private session next time you have a birthday party, to prevent even more birthday songs being recommended.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/What-is-Private-Sessio...

It sounds like a nightmare. Much like my YouTube suggestions, which now are mostly my kids' planet videos, and my wife's workout ones.

I set up the browser session we use as a TV with profiles entirely to prevent any more of my spouse's yoga videos from leaking into my carefully curated feed of machine shop footage and construction videos.

Almost every monday when the "discover weekly" is rebuilt i get new songs which are not in english.

I have no non-english songs in any of my playlists and when they show up on discover weekly i flag them.

I would think that recommending me Spanish/Russian music when my entire collection is english should flag a problem with the system?

Yet week after week at least one song on discover weekly is in some foreign language.

Why would you only listen to English songs?

i would think it would be obvious, but here goes - because i only speak/understand English?

For me the lyrics of songs are mostly irrelevant and it doesn't matter if I understand it or not. I usually don't pay attention to to it anyway.

That's exactly why I enjoy listening to foreign pop music: I cannot hear how vapid the lyrics are.

But besides that, great music does not need to spell it out to convey meaning and emotion.

If the appreciation of a foreign song keeps growing, I will eventually look up a few translations. Their mixed interpretation usually only enhances an already enjoyable experience.

I would argue for the vast majority of people language is not the primary indicator of what they consider good or bad music. I would assume it doesn't go into the algorithm at all and I certainly would not want it too. I have discovered some really cool music that I'm not even sure what language they are in this way.

I would wish you great success trying to frame an argument that the "vast majority" of people are not primary concerned with language.

It is a bit hard to listen to/enjoy music when you cant understand a single word.

Sure they had "gangnam style" but that was really a more a "one off".

> I certainly would not want it too.

I'd love to know if the majority feel this way.

given there are countless articles such as this: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/How-to-get-...

i would think most find this annoying?

Are you American by chance? Feel free not to answer, but living in the US I was surprised to learn friends in other countries commonly listen to music they can’t understand (most commonly English, sometimes German).

Put things in perspective for me - we really live in a bubble here. I guess Spotify could help reinforce that if that’s what the market wants.

Well i think the statistics are very strongly in my favour because English pop music is very popular all over the world and there are plenty of countries where the majority of people don't speak English (and still listen to English music).

When I was young we (in all the kids my age) listened to plenty of of English music even though we didn't understand anything. And let's not even talk about the plenty of examples of songs in English where even native speakers don't understand the majority of the lyrics.

I think it's likely you're right, although I haven't looked for any hard numbers.

But anecdotally, I only speak English and I listen to lots of Finnish, Swedish, German, and Norwegian music.

I don't know if Spotify just started recommending this stuff based on the few metal bands I knew from those places, but it started recommending other genres too and I really like lots of it. Not sure how I'd find this music otherwise, actually.

Spotify does have an incognito mode to prevent this, but you have to carefully enable it beforehand. Why you can't just delete stuff from your history is baffling.

I agree. There are some playlists and songs I only listen to in the gym, and similar songs constantly float to the top of Spotify's recommendations for me due to gym being 3x week.

I did consider creating another "gym-only" user on our Family plan, but Spotify should really have a way to create named contexts for the one user. e.g. commute, gym, run, working from home, on a plane, etc.

Pandora does this with 'stations'.

There's a lot I like about Pandora and a lot I don't. The "stations" you mention can be pretty good. The problem I have is with the app itself. It's buggy and learning to use it well can be frustrating. A simple example would be when using the back arrow to return to where I was in the app. If I try to go back to a previous screen, it shrinks the app and when I resize it, Pandora restarts from scratch. This seems to take forever and it happens just about every time I use it. The only reason I haven't deleted it and switched to another app, is that I can't be bothered with all that while I'm working or driving (the only time I use it). Of course, there's other, more common issues like searching for a favourite song and only finding live sessions or worse, finding out they've stopped carrying a certain artist on my playlist.

Hell, Spotify should use GPS tagging on your plays and determine "oh look, these songs are only played here, and always skipped elsewhere, hmmmm."

But that is too complicated!

I actually watched someone give a presentation at spotify on exactly this when I worked there. This was probably about 5 years or so ago. I have no idea what happened to that project. Probably the biggest issue would be getting people to give you location permissions but they also talked about working around that. It's a big org though they kill off ideas all the time.

It seems easy enough to "sell" it to people listening. Location, speed based track selection.

Seems to be an unsolved problem to train the algorithms for recognizing different situations. One recommendation for all roles the user has. Though, thinking about, it's probably unsolvable as long as the interfaces remain simple and focused on satisfying only the one user, not the different roles, which would complicated the interfaces.

Spotify is missing user profiles, in the Netflix fashion.

spotify is usually on people's personal device like a phone not on communal device at home like a TV.

Speak for yourself. I use Spotify on my TV at home. Multiple people use it.

rude response.

i said 'usually' .

It should be noted that in a Tesla, changing the Driver Profile (stores settings like seat and mirror positions) also changes the logged in Spotify account.

I would consider Alexa a communal device. Spotify is heavily used there in households. Source: worked on Alexa.

People use it to play white noise for their babies which makes all the future song recommendations useless

For young kids with no personal devices of their own, they would only get Spotify from their parents' devices.

From a technical point yes, but profiles are too rough and hard to use for this. What I mean is more some way to automatically maintain a kind of sub-profile, for each different aspect of a user, but exposed user-friendly and effortless. Most people won't maintain a separate user profile just for recommendations, as it's too much work for too little benefit.

I think this is fairly well solved from a mathematics point of view (high-school level k-means clustering). The unsolved bit is simply how we get the Spotify et al. product managers to care.

All they need to do is filter out content with genre=kids from recs. They could create a separate kids recommendation item if people actually want that.

This wont happen whilst they have family and kids’ account types. Charge parents more for the premium option of not filling their carefully curated genre recommendations with nursery rhymes and Ed Sheeran.

It's fairly trivial to keep the recommendations consistent depending on the latest request, not just the logged user. Pandora does a good job at this. We have it on our Alexa and at dinner, we take turns with the kids requesting songs. If we stop requesting, it keeps playing an internally consistent series based on the latest song we asked for. So if it's the kids' choice, it's a never ending row of Kids Learning Tube :-)

Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about music mood vs time of the day vs activity. Like late evening before sleep being perhaps not a good moment for heavy metal. And running not a right time for slow classical music.

Which is weird in case of Apple Music because Apple knows exactly if I am sleeping, running or driving a car - just from reading my watch.

What that really means is that they either:

1) aren't doing the sensor fusion we all think they are, out of inability to access the data.

2) the models (and therefore modelers) aren't good enough to use the data they have correctly.

Or 3) they run loads of A/B experiments to optimize engagement or some target metric and they've reached a local minima and are unable to escape it without a lot of political will or Product Managers willing to stick their necks out.

>Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about music mood vs time of the day vs activity.

You say that, but I attended a conference with Spotify- they are specifically working on that problem now.

If they're working on it then the point still stands that they don't currently have it as part of their product.

Time of day aware recommendations is something YouTube seems to have had for years. It always knows what to give me up top based on if I'm sitting down for dinner or lunch or if I'm looking for an audiobook for bed etc

Isn't that more just you thing though?

Why isn't late evening before sleep good for heavy metal? I listen to the same music I listen to all day before sleep if I had music on.

The music I listen too doesn't change no matter where I am or the time of the day.

Google Play music had that feature. I really miss it.

THIS! People have been asking for different listening profiles for ages. But they keep ignoring those feature requests in their community websites.

Spotify has supported this for many years - it's called Spotify Premium Family[0]. You get 6 separate accounts for $16/mth. It is worth the price of admission just to keep my listening history / algo feed clean.

[0]: https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

You can turn off monitoring what you listen to for recommendations by launching a "Private session" in the app

That's a good tip though I'm not sure that there is an option for it in the car when I most often get a request for nursery rhymes, or more recently Disney songs.

  > Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax

I'm not so sure about that. Have you heard Koяn's Shoots and Ladders?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU2k-U2Ze0o

I'm trying to avoid this outcome by playing as many different genres other than "kids music" as possible to my baby. Probably won't know whether it worked for a few years but in the mean time I get to listen to real music.

That sounds like a great argument for easy profile switching, along with an option in your play history for "move this play history item to this other profile".

I keep hearing this, but it hasn't happened to me yet. I wonder if it's because my Spotify history without kids is ~10 years vs ~2 years with?

We listen to a lot of Disney music, etc in the living room on my account, but I've never had that type of thing show up in my Discover Weekly or any of the Daily Mix playlists.

I will be very displeased if/when it does happen though.... Discover Weekly is a major reason I've paid Spotify for so long.

Ha, my life exactly. Ever since my kids used my Spotify account to listen to music my discover weekly list has unbearable amounts of paw patrol, baby shark and others mixed in. Now to be fair it still puts in music that fits my taste as well (and often my kids also like that music too), and considering that this is one profile I don't know what it could do better.

A lot of the time it's not an algorithm in charge. Most of the time now recommendations are based on who paid to promote their song or podcast.

Algorithms cannot be left running totally when sponsored ads can be purchased on the fly by content creators and musicians unless a site is lying to ad buyers about ad effectiveness.

I abandoned my account, partly for this reason. Too much kids music damaged it.

The easiest thing for them to do is simply exclude Kids music from their recs. Kids music doesn't benefit much from it anyway. Apple Music does this as do most video services.

Don't these end up in separate mixes, though? My 13 year old makes a lot of grime requests on road trips etc. and now I have a separate grime mix under my top mixes.

It does it relatively OK with the daily mixes, but daily drive and top of the year don't. That's why I don't really get it, they already know fairly well what kids music is so let me just toggle it off?

driving to grime sounds like hell, that's parental dedication right there

Can't be much worse than "Jenny" on loop for hours on end, heh.

My brother who has young kids did the thing where you can make a combined playlist with me. He has indeed kids music littered all over in the shared playlist but moreover he also listened to a 100 track audio book on Spotify (which was not a great experience since it was published as an album and did not have bookmark support). The algorithm thought: oh he must REALLY like that album because he keeps on playing tracks from it, and so chapters from this book were also in our combined playlist

They do, but recently my weekly discover is infused with kids songs. And it’s taken a few weeks ok ignoring those tracks to get them out.

I feel like this could be easily solved by adding an "incognito mode" to the Spotify app.

Using the Spotify kids app is a solution to this problem.

dunno, "Indians" could probably be made to work with "row, row, row your boat" lyrics.

Can't really complain if they offer Spotify Family which gives you 6 separate premium accounts, I think it's only double the cost of a normal Spotify account.

That unfortunately doesn't solve it. There will always be moments where kids will want to ask for songs on your Spotify, like you're renting a car and have your phone hooked up.

Click on your account dropdown in the top header, choose Private Session. Now nothing you listen to will affect your recommendations.

Come on, guys, I'd expect better from HN than complaining about features which already exist.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/What-is-Private-Sessio...

So the solution is paying double so I can log out of my own account and into an account I created for my 2 year old so we can listen to a disney song? And when I want to listen to my own songs again then I have to log out of my kids account and back into my own?

Always those complaining customers ...

(and I am back to caring for my own mp3 collection again and use spotify only for rare and new stuff)

Yes, if you want multiple accounts you pay for multiple accounts. It's a solved problem you just have to pay the $9 a month.

I have two children, myself. I just installed second account on an old phone which has no SIM card in it, it has all the kids playlists and I don't have to worry about them getting recommended any of my 90s thrash metal. :)

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