YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.
Also, the soothing crackle makes transmissions from my home planet more distinctive, so I never miss any of the crucial orders relating to my mission:
I feel ya. I usually fall asleep at night to some kind of "10 hour loop of blizzard and crackling fire noises" playing on Youtube... and now my YT recommendations are full of "10 hours of crackling fire", "10 hours of thunderstorm noises", etc. suggestions. Sadly YT is incapable of understanding that I only listen to that stuff when I'm trying to fall asleep and I have zero need of those videos any other time. groan
I mean, sure, I can go in and hand edit my watch history to remove that stuff (and I do occasionally) but doing that constantly is a huge PITA. I wish they could figure out a way to fix this.
I'm an ancient relic from the nether times who still manages his own locally stored audio files and playlists, so I simply can't relate to this beyond that if you play lazy games you will win lazy prizes.
Nothing wrong with being lazy, of course. But if you want the power to have a satisfactory playlist you kind of need to own up to the responsibility for one.
There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.
There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).
The fact people pay money for something already being beamed to their house for free sometimes astounds me.
As another old fogey, at least old enough to have been active in the filesharing scene, that filesharing has got me so much music stored on disk that it would take nearly a year to listen to every recording if they were played back-to-back 24/7. With such an embarrassment of riches, what need is there for continual recommendations for new music? Sure, I occasionally add new music if I come across some interesting mention of an artist in a book or article, but I have a hard time understanding why some other old fogeys feel that a discovery algorithm is essential.
You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music. Music and culture change, so you can't just find everything you might want in a historical catalog.
I never said otherwise. I just believe that most old-fogey listeners are going to divide their time between exploring new music and dealing with the backlog they quickly accumulate from that exploration, and therefore an algorithm that pumps out recommendations nonstop is not essential.
you may legimatey not need them based on your goals for the medium. For books, I tend to only read technical textbooks these days, so sure. I'm not looking for any fiction or biographies.
Likewise, I really haven't bothered curating a playlist since Google Play Music shut down, I was barely adding new songs to my playlist by then anyway.
>You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.
Sounds rough with the current landscape, especially if they feel stuck to Spotify. But if there's one thing I learned from exploring new and recent adult media, it's that the truly great stuff isn't found on Pornhub. You gotta search deep and discover your kinks through "word of mouth". Really teaches you to properly "research" when billion dollar corporations are too scared to touch your medium to begin with, and most forums forbid even talking about such stuff.
and how to rummage through spam. My god, is there so much spam when you hit a niche adult theme and you just end up with weird russsian websites. Corporate propaganda shilling can't even phase me anymore
After they killed Napster, my discovery ended up on BitTorrent, which often optimized for the complete discography of artists. This could leave quite a backlog but it was interesting nonetheless.
Now I use Apple music, primarily for the albums and the depth of the catalog. I was an early Spotify user but they lost me when they were serving other people music through my connection in the early days, I didn't appreciate that.
When they started monetizing, I also didn't like the way that they took in tons of money from people who liked exclusively small artists and paid it out to mostly the top acts from big labels. Sure, they all do that now, but Spotify started it. At the time, iTunes still had you paying by the song.
It's hard to stay into new music as I get older. A lot of times I already know what I want to hear, and I'm not a constant soundtrack type. But I do make an effort to prowl around the catalog a little and also listen to college radio. Those experiences haven't failed me yet.
how many forms of white noise do you really need? It's not really a "genre" people listen to for leisure. It's either for sleep or study. You're not intensely listening for lyrics nor rhythm nor anything other genres argue about, you don't care how the "artist" got the sounds.
Then when I pop up awake at 3am cause of noises youtube's sent me to WW2/Hitler/Nazi videos. It never, ever fails. Sometimes I get sent to this one physics teachers video who I've never once clicked on, watched, or selected myself, but he has an INSANE amount of views like tens of millions. Like, youtube purposely sends videos to him. I forget who it is but it's a dude with long grey/white hair and a beard talking about physics I think from MIT but I dont remember it's been awhile.
Why can't you keep me watching stuff related to what I'm watching?? How do I get from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler?? It's ALWAYS Hitler.
Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.
Godwin's law
And then I'd say about 30% of the time it'll grab some documentary/video I've already watched, which is also annoying.
In a more serious note YouTube has a similar problem, "Oh I looked recommendations for a drawing tablet to buy my friend", now till to the ends of time I get recommendations for drawing tablets, and if I had used the "Incognito mode" they show me ads despite me being a premium user, I want it incognito but not THAT much of incognito you geniuses at Google.
With white noise it is so easy to generate for free that likely 1000s of people are generating hordes of static content and uploading it to try to get a payout.
And it’s probably not that easy to identify every track that is intended to be listened to as ambient noise. Ambient noise itself is a music genre.
I use the VLC app on ios and transfer music using its wifi web interface, since my computers all run linux and can't easily transfer MP3s to the phone any other way.
There’s the Decoupled app which is pretty neat for playing audio on iOS. You can transfer audio files using Wi-Fi.