Apple Music launches a Discovery Station to help you find new songs | Hacker News Reader

Apple Music launches a Discovery Station to help you find new songs

theverge.com

17 pointsmikestew18 comments

The effectiveness of these systems in discovering a "new song" appears to be limited to those who match specific demographic patterns. Although I don't utilize Apple's system, I did experiment with Spotify's DJ functionality, which persistently suggested songs I had little interest in, even after numerous downvotes.

These recommendation systems seem to embrace the concept of introducing entirely new music genres to gauge their appeal, but they don't seem to place significant emphasis on user input. As a result, I eventually discontinued their use altogether.

I'm curious about how Apple's implementation differs in this aspect.

Apple surely can see the complete catalog of The Who that I have in my library, including the vinyl albums that I’ve ripped. Not that the Music app could see it, but Apple could also see the eye-watering amounts of money we’ve spent on tickets to watch 75 year old men prance around on stage (via the tickets from the last three tours in Wallet).

So what’s the first song played on this new Discovery station? “Who Are You?” by…wait for it…The Who. Whether you’re a Who fan or not, is there anyone walking this planet over the age of 21 that hasn’t heard that song?

I'm in my 30s and haven't heard that song.

Never watched CSI either I guess?

Nope

> Apple surely can see the complete catalog of The Who that I have in my library, including the vinyl albums that I’ve ripped.

So I like this station, but it will sometimes suggest songs that are already in a playlist but from a different album. That is, it appears to think that "(Don’t Go Back to)" from Reckoning and The Best of R.E.M. are different.

I just want the best version of a song. If the band-approved "best of" remaster is better than the one on the original album, I want the remaster. If the choice is between an Apple Lossless CD rip and a new spatial audio mix, ask me.

I'd imagine it's a continuous process of adjustment, so, unless you liked the song explicitly, or never skipped it, or gave it five stars, it might be wanting to self-calibrate by trying to figure out how much you like it (there are Who songs I don't care much about). It might inject such songs into your stream for tracking changes in your taste - 1991 me would love Enigma and Dead or Alive much more than 2023 me.

So far, the New Music playlist it assembles for me has been pretty good.

Yeah, I'm just kind of ranting a bit after an extremely disappointing OOBE. It's early days, and I expect it to improve. But, man, it's almost like the punchline in some TV sitcom, where the father decides to use this "new music" thing, and the first thing it pulls up is a song that Dad got sick of thirty years ago. <laugh track ensues>

True. It could make these self-calibration tasks more explicit in the UI. It's really asking you to do something for it.

Thanks, it's all I needed to know.

Siri must be in charge.

Just started using AM, it’s a bit of a pain in the butt to love or dislike songs. Also, not sure it actually does anything or not. Online users seem to think it’s mostly just for show and even if you dislike a song it will keep coming back.

I’ve tried a number of the streaming services and my biggest complaint is that I like a song and then it plays that song over and over in every playlist. So far 3 songs in discovery mode, not bad 2/3 new ones and all similar to my wide ranging likes.

Anecdotally, I’ve found most recommendation systems work best when you do not interact with like/dislike but instead simply play songs you like to seed your algorithm.

Google News used to do this constantly. I’d say “show me less” of a topic and then the following day I’d see that same topic with a different category. It was infuriating.

I agree, and to mitigate this weakness I created a “Like Song” shortcut that adds the song to a Liked playlist, very similar to Spotify. The only weakness of AM that I couldn’t mitigate is remote controlling songs - Spotify is superior surprisingly so.

A little bit off topic, but has anyone migrated from Spotify to Apple Music (along with all their artists and playlists etc.)? What’s the move been like.

In college I made a now defunct iOS app [0] for transferring between Spotify and Apple Music.

The bad news is access to the Apple Music APIs requires a paid Apple developer account, so any self-hosted solution will cost you $99.

I’ve heard of previous users of my app having luck with SongShift [1].

[0]: https://github.com/AFRUITPIE/Convertify Note that the code and on-device processing is very much college quality (meaning bad)

[1]: https://songshift.com/

I'm also curious about this. Spotify has refused to add AirPlay2 to their desktop app for years.

I almost moved to Apple Music purely for iTunes Match, but it doesn't work on the Android app. I'm not surprised in the slightest, but boy am I missing Google Play Music by this point.

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