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Comment by laurencei | Hacker News Reader

> I don't want music recommendations from something that can't appreciate or understand music. Human recommendations will always be better.

I find Spotify's "discover weekly" list to be generally pretty good. Sure, there are some songs I dont like, but there are often 3-4 great songs each week that get added to my regularly playlist.

Its all good an well to say that human recommendations are better, but I'm not paying someone $50 per week to spend 3-4 hours finding me new and good songs. I get something that is maybe 80% as good included, and the reality is that is good enough.

I feel like one of the reason AI is doing well is it doesnt need to be better, it just needs to be "good enough" at a fraction of the price..

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>there are often 3-4 great songs each week that get added to my regularly playlist.

I'm earnestly uncertain that a system with near total access to your listening history producing 3-4 great songs per week from the corpus of all human musical endeavour can be considered a "good" effort. Particularly when the 3-4 recommendations are jammed into a 60 minute playlist of otherwise questionable quality.

It’s better than my effort at finding music, and it makes Mondays a little nicer. My goal isn’t to find the best music ever, but to find new and interesting music more easily.

Have you compared against random sampling?

If it's randomly selected from the entire music library of Spotify, then it won't be good. Most of it would come from a long tail of bad or niche stuff.

For a practical example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random - odds of finding an article that's both interesting and high quality are low.

Spotify (and most other services) actually have a mix of human and algorithimic recommendations in things like discover weekly: https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-...

I wish I had the citation handy but they also put sponsored content in your 'recommendations' even if you're a paying customer. Rubs me the wrong way.

Honestly, I believe Spotify would offer me more accurate recommendations if they relied solely on AI, without human input. Their current DJ features, although supposedly based on my previous listening habits, often suggest popular songs I don't listen to, tracks supposedly reminiscent of my school days that I've never heard before, and genres that I'm not interested in.

I recently signed up for Qobuz, which costs the same or roughly the same as Spotify. They have a significant amount of recommendations, writing, etc written by actual people. It is of vastly higher quality than anything automatically generated by Spotify. I've only occasionally found something I like through Spotify but have already found many things I like through Qobuz.

You don't have to pay someone $50/wk. You allow users to have friends, and then you recommend based on what they've been listening to.

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