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Comment by vagabund | Hacker News Reader

It may just be my perception, but I seem to have noticed this steering becoming a lot more heavy handed on Spotify.

If I try to play any music from a historical genre, it's only about 3 or 4 autoplays before it's queued exclusively contemporary artists, usually performing a cheap pastiche of the original style. It's honestly made the algorithm unusable, to the point that I built a CLI tool that lets me get recommendations from Claude conversationally, and adds them to my queue via api. It's limited by Claude's relatively shallow ability to retrieve from the vast library on these streaming services, but it's still better than the alternative.

Hoping someone makes a model specifically for conversational music DJing, it's really pretty magical when it's working well.

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Spotify's recommendations are biased towards what you've listened to recently. Do you share the account with someone else?

No, but it's also biased toward their commercial partners. From this page [0], detailing their recommendation process:

> How do commercial considerations impact recommendations?

> [...] In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active.

So Spotify's incentivized to coerce listening behavior towards contemporary artists that vaguely match your tastes, so they can collect the commission. This explains why it's essentially impossible to keep the algorithm in a historical era or genre -- even if well defined, and seeded with a playlist full of songs that fit the definition. It also explains why the "shuffle" button now defaults to "smart shuffle" so they can insert "recommended" (read: commission-generating) songs into your playlist.

[0]: https://www.spotify.com/ca-en/safetyandprivacy/understanding...

that’s crazy, i am skeptical of the legality here: i believe they are legally required to disclose when content is paid.

(i work in advertising and we would never be allowed to introduce sponsored content into an organic stream like this without labeling)

The link they provided is the disclosure. You'd be surprised to find out this is the business model of the radio for years and why most radio stations that need profits only play recent songs, and usually the same songs over and over until new ones that are pushed by labels come out.

Is there a site that has hand-curated playlists I would love that let's say if I want to listen to Korean pop from the 90s or Minimal Techno from the 00s.

Searching Spotify for user created playlists is still probably your best bet. Youtube has some good results too.

Here are two that might fit what you're looking for:

'90s K-pop: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6mnmq7HC68SVXcW710LsG0?si=...

'00s minimal techno: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6mnmq7HC68SVXcW710LsG0?si=...

There are sites to convert from spotify to another service if you don't have it.

There are a few of them like Filtr or Digster

Usually I find them _by accident_ while browsing public playlists on Spotify

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