Hacker News Reader

> Thinking this a little further, it provides the perfekt basis for a dating application. Music is a very personally representation of oneself and if you find someone who has the same muscial taste, you already have a common basis for communication.

I don't think a shared taste in music is that important, or at all, in a relationship but this is the premise of aptly named Tastebuds[1], a dating app based around favorite music. You can import your listening data from Last.fm and Spotify.

[1] https://tastebuds.fm/

In isolation, perhaps not, but musical taste plus another characteristic can say a lot about someone. (I might be biased because my future wife caught my attention when I overheard her say she liked a certain band in a group setting where most people hadn't heard of it.)

Spotify doesn't have its claws in real-life gatherings yet, but they might have something with their music (personality) and podcasts (interests, affiliations) data.

What does someone's music say about their personality?

If someone likes a lot of niche stuff and more complex, less accessible music, they are likely to take passion for music more seriously as a hobby than somoene who just listens to chart stuff (not that there's anything wrong with that per-say, but I feel being that level of passive would lead to incompatibility).

Certain genres and scenes are also linked to demographics and lifestyles (e.g. hyperpop being very queer leaning, chiptunes being nerdy, punk being political, bassline and techno being linked to the underground rave scene, etc...)

Also if one of your favourite things is going to gigs and festivals, producing music, or following it, having crossover in taste means being able to share a passion.

A large part of my relationship with my partner is listening to music, either at home on the hi-fi, or at events. If we didn't have a decent amount of crossover, this wouldn't really work.

Having exactly the same taste is probably not so great as I think the differences and gaps are a great space to grow and discover.

Openness to new things? Variety is the spice of life, how spicy are they?

True, there are definitely people who don't place any importance on music but for those that do, musical taste can be very important in a relationship.

So, no music taste isn't ultimate be-all-and-end-all factor but for some it can be very important!

Tastebuds seems only to have a facebook login - hm, not everyone uses FB! Strange that they don't have a Spotify login, probably the same issues that other apps face when they start to store Spotify data.

You can register by email and then import your info from Spotify.

You can base a relationship on plenty of other things, but shared interest in something is pretty important. Music can be a big one for a lot of people. My wife and I met at a KMFDM show, and traveling to music festivals is still the biggest social thing we have going on at all. Doing that without her would be a lot less gratifying than doing it with her.

I feel like there is a difference between sharing a love of music and sharing a love of the same music. I believe I would struggle with someone who loved no music and/or with whom there was zero overlap. But I'd not expect to love the same things

Somewhat agreed. Basically I found most people learn to like the music of their latest romantic partner.

I think partly it's just familiarity. There are plenty of "classics" I didn't really like when they came out but now they bring a feeling of nostalgia so even though they weren't "me" back then, for some reason they now feel like part of me, my history, my experience.

Back in the day we used last.fm (nee audioscrobbler.com) for this. :)

I have a largish group of friends that I met through similar tastes in music and being "neighbours" on last.fm.

It's nowhere near as good as it was in its hayday in 2006, but I wonder if, instead of specifically finding playlists with the song, you could instead grab 5 songs either side of it in scrobble histories. Sure, you'd have to filter out album tracklists, artist shuffles and then dedupe. But because of what last.fm is (99% a tool for listing everything you've ever listened to) it should have far more data to pick from, including all of your inspired ad-hoc mixes that would otherwise be lost.

We had the same idea about reddit years ago. Letting people opt into "dating" and then sending them matches of people who upvote similar articles. We were even building the recommender on the same technology. Not sure why we didn't do it, I guess we just didn't have the time.

Remember last.fm? If I remember correctly, it was able to show other profiles with similar music taste.

It still does - in the Neighbours view.

I still use last.fm, connected to my Spotify account. Before it was connected to the iTunes with their desktop app. I always loved their listening analysis and charts, matching with other people's taste.

Isn't that how Spotify originally did their discover playlists? Seems like I remember they took the songs you listened to most frequently, found playlists other users have made containing that song, then looked for songs you haven't listened to on the platform yet that frequently appeared in playlists with the songs you play frequently.

Interesting idea!

Slightly off-topic, but originally I had planned to organically grow the playlist count by allowing users to login with their Spotify account and reading their playlists. I even made a prototype...but turns out Spotify only allows working with user data once you have your API quota extended, which seemed like quite the undertaking.

Yer their quote system is a bit painful. I built a bunch of background jobs that continually retrieved data ... max'ed out the quote limit constantly.

I even went as far as setting a second developer account to have a larger limit ;)

I also did a writeup[1] on lessons learnt in case someone is interested in rinsing and repeating on this idea.

[1]=https://gregorius.rippenstein.art/works/hamoni

I'll check out the write-up, thanks. As for user-data, the request count limit is not even the limiting factor. If you want to request data with a users token, you can't at all, without getting a quota extension (apart from 25 pre-registered developer users).

https://tunemeet.com/ has kind of similar idea, it matches you to other people who are listening to the same song at the moment. Or to people who have some of the top 5 songs as you

if you think this is a good idea, just go to music shows for your favourite artists. A lot of people go to those solo. If you talk to someone you like, and you spend a music show together dancing and enjoying an artist you both really like you are going to have such a strong start of the relationship it's only going downhill from that momement [0]

[0] true story, multiple times

spotify constantly calls the facebook SDK to tell it everything you’re doing and listening to, so Facebook has the data although they’ve failed to build a dating app.

stats.fm app has a matching service using spotify stats that sound similar to what you are describing