Hacker News Reader

Comment by armSixtyFour | Hacker News Reader

I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.

Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.

There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.

View on HN

> suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music.

However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.

On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.

I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".

> However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit.

cf YouTube when you watch one video on X that's outside of your normal viewing and RIP your homepage for the next few days until you've clicked "do not recommend" on enough videos to stop the flood of X and X-adjacent content.

Spotify « radio » is the best reason to listen to real radios ! [honestly the DJs on most of the radios I listen to are insanely skilled !]

Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?

This! I recently ditched Spotify and rediscovered radio in the past few weeks. There are so many great songs I've come across from bands I enjoy that I had never heard of because, as someone else said, Spotify's algorithm is way overfit.

It's also great sometimes to discover great music from genre you usually don't like, or... just be exposed to songs you don't like. This is what helps building a musical culture.

Please allow me to recommend FIP, as a human (it's a classic here but there's no such thing as recommending too much FIP) : https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip

FIP and NTS are my goto's. The discovery features for shows on NTS and the "in focus" specials are great, so many good opportunities there for serendipitous listening. Will def check out radio paradise

FIP is broadcasting in FM in France, so no big news on that one, for me. But i will investigate NTS. I knew their radios streams, but it seems they also have some pretty niche podcasts !

Radio Paradise is a great alternative to FIP.

https://radioparadise.com

Both are classics. I like SomaFM-GrooveSalad too. Oh and BBC6, or course. [The podcast of Guy Garvey is an absolut must, in my sunday schedule]

France Inter Paris (FIP) it's awesome!

And remember you can always get the audio steam through HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), on its M3U format, or others with better quality. There are many Android apps like Transistor to enjoy the stream, and even VLC can open these, in order to avoid using a web browser.

Likewise, I prefer online radios than big tech algorithms that craft my music experience.

For a certain range of indie pop, KCRW's Eclectic24 is great: https://www.kcrw.com/music/shows/eclectic24

I don't know if its the best at this, but I've been listening to radio from around the world at https://radio.garden/

Have you tried searching other user’s playlists instead? At least for me, that’s how I have been using Spotify’s to discover new music.

100%

No algorithm has been able to be able to be as weird but consistent as a community radio DJ.

The radio can still surprise and delight like little else. All the tech companies have been able to replicate is the disappointment.

Not to say never but people’s great advantage here is that they’re people.

I respectfully disagree. If you're into classic rock those stations are pivoting around here to 90s and 2000s rock since that's "classic" now. Then you're left with ButtRock stations that play mostly the same thing every day at the same times in the same order. The best radio we had in our area was a college station that has an hour or two of stuff I'm interested in or as close to a legal pirate radio you can get (100w tower) that shut down - THAT was amazing. Had a ton of DJs who played things they liked.

Outside of rock you're left with automated pop and country stations who have computerized playlists.

note - I'm in the Midwest US.

Community radio DJ. Community being the important part.

Most of the radio stations here in Columbus, Ohio are what you described, the clearchannel / IHeartMedia stations.

However, there is an independent radio station and it's so great. They play Democracy Now! during the daytime and they have a rotating list of shows for the evening. I've heard some really great music during the evening shows.

https://www.wcrsfm.org/

If you're in Columbus, tune in to 98.3 or 92.7 FM!

Thanks for putting it so well.

Commercial radio is the devil.

Classic rock exists to sell lawn mowers to middle aged men

https://onlineradiobox.com has the data but doesn't search on it it seems.

Disclaimer I make https://www.radio-addict.com but only retrieve the played song data on demand (never tried to probe all 80k+ radio streams at the same time on my small server, could be fun), but searching on it could be a new feature (it's stored in Elixir genservers :D)

"Listen to a random radio" is the summum of serendipity, man ! #kudos

Thanks.

Wasn't TuneIn providing this search feature before?

reminds me that i should donate to somafm again :-)

Good idea.

To those who aren't in the know already, it's this:

https://somafm.com/player/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.rad...

Spotify radio regularly makes me angry, and makes me want to press a "dislike" button really hard. But of course, that button is missing ...

Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.

The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.

Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change things constantly in ways I don’t like, but their music recommendations are fantastic for me.

Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.

Yeah I have no idea why music recommendation algorithms have gotten so bad. Rdio had the pinnacle of music recommendations in 2013. I wonder what happened to that tech after they shut down in 2015, and why no one has been able to reproduce it.

just look at google search in 2015 and now for the answers… :)

I wonder if it's a bit of a vicious cycle. For example, if you only ever listen to new music that Spotify gives you then at a certain point, the algorithm only knows how to output the things that it has already outputted. If you don't give it any new external signal then it doesn't have a good way to find new songs.

> the algorithm only knows how to output the things that it has already outputted

That's a very old problem that people building recommendation systems solved 10 years ago.

Does noone use the Spotify "daylist" playlist, that cycles between genres you have listened to previously?

This regular plays music I have never heard (both old and new).

Not available for everybody.

> As of today, daylist is available to both Free and Premium users across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland at spotify.com/daylist.

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-12/ever-changing-playli...

(note: old post, but still accurate?)

I’m in Southeast Asia, daylist has been around for years in my side of the world.

Do you mean daily mix playlists? From the first 20 songs 17 are something which I added to my library, or listen them regularly. The rest of the 3 songs? 2 of them are from artists whom I listen to regularly. 1 clearly new song.

I have very similar rate with “daytime mix”.

So which one do you mean? “Discover weekly” and ”release radar” have new songs, yeah. But “radios” are like the previously mentioned playlists.

No none of those. Is a special dynamic playlist, starting to wonder if its not a standard playlist everyone has..

sort of like the DJ mix without the annoying voice. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EP6YuccBxUcC1

It has a very similar rate for me, a little bit better. Btw, there are new songs in every playlist. The problem isn’t that there is none, the problem is priorities, especially with radios.

If I look at mine today (00s indie britpop Thursday early morning) I know pretty much every song and artist on it

if you stick with it the cycle will introduce new stuff. I have been using for months and still get new music (with occasional repeats)

I can’t say I have had the same experience, I don’t mind it though.

I’ve had Spotify since it launched in the U.K. so it has plenty of my listening history!

> I don’t mind it though

their algorithm is working then

wow, TIL. Did not know that exists. Thanks!

I never got on with Spotify radio.

In fact, things have never been as good as last.fm used to be when it hosted its own music.

YouTube is much better than Spotify for this in my experience.

My experience with YouTube is that I start with an obscure song/artist and it will gradually bring me to the mainstream. Maybe that is just me... I feel like ideal algorithms died with last.fm era.

This.

My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com