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The biggest problem with the Discover Weekly is its inability to understand _why_ you're listening to a specific subset of music. It might not be that your tast

The biggest problem with the Discover Weekly is its inability to understand _why_ you're listening to a specific subset of music. It might not be that your taste in music suddenly changed, or that you discovered a new genre that you're incredibly interested in, even though your most listened to genres or songs changed for a few weeks, or your listening patterns changed for a few weeks. A few examples: I'm Norwegian, and listen to quite a lot of Norwegian music in Norwegian. Norwegian music is also European music, Scandinavian music, Nordic music, etc., and as a result I get music from Germany, France, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, among other countries and languages. However, the reason that I enjoy listening to Norwegian music is because I speak and understand the nuances in the language perfectly, while this is not the case with any of the other languages. In Norway, we have «russefeiring» (russ celebration) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russefeiring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russefeiring) from approximately mid-April to mid-May. In the recent years, many groups of «russ» have been making/ordering songs to represent them throughout their celebration, and in that period, I listened to some of those songs because it was fun during that period (around April-May), but it's not interesting to listen to outside of that time period at all, pretty much like Christmas songs. Now it's the second week of October, and my Discover Weekly list still contains a lot of songs (12 of 30 songs) created specifically for the «russefeiring». Imagine getting half your Discover Weekly filled with Christmas songs in May, because that's pretty much my experience with this. I don't know what they have to do to make Discover Weekly not give me shitty suggestions, but right now it keeps giving me suggestions that are outdated and uninteresting and I have no good way to give that feedback. I'm really saddened by this, because for the first half year of Discover Weekly, the playlists were so good that I stored them in separate playlists to be able to go back and listen more to them.

revx 9y ago
My problem as well. I recently was in charge of putting together the playlist for a friend's get-together. They have significantly different taste in music from me, so now my recommendations are all messed up!
creaghpatr 9y ago
Maybe they can factor out those event/location-driven trends, or dampen them down. I think the Christmas example is a good one, I wouldn't want half my Discover to have Christmas songs- but I wouldn't mind having 1 or 2, perhaps from an artist I had never realized had a christmas single.
micahjonas 9y ago
Maybe don't listen to the discovery weekly playlist for the week and just listen to other playlists you like. If you listen to the genre because it's in your weekly playlist, than spotify is probably going to think you like those songs. Search for some open playlist you like and don't listen to the discovery weekly. In my experience spotify is fairly good a taking the hint. One alternative would be the daily selection which seems to be more sorted for genres.
- markussss 9y ago
  Thanks, but this is what I've been doing for the last few months, although I have also listened to music that is somewhat similar in genre (Norwegian music, electronic, hip-hop, pop, etc). I don't think I should stop listening to the music I like in order to manipulate the algorithms into giving me the music I like and want to listen to. It's counter-intuitive.
pj_mukh 9y ago
I really wish I could get Spotify to "forget" or "reset" my preferences. When I first started using Spotify, I listened to a lot of slow calming music (because I was working). Now ALL my Discover weekly's are just 'Iron and Wine', 'The National' derivatives. Its made Discover Weekly useless to me.
- scrooched_moose 9y ago
  I have the same issue with Iron and Wine and I don't get why. Every recommendation engine I've tried decides I absolutely love them, no matter what seed I start with or what songs I like/dislike. I don't mind Iron and Wine but they are definitely a 'meh' for me, so it gets frustrating when they dominate every playlist. And, disliking/thumbs down never seems to get rid of them. Are they generic enough that the algorithm finds something similar between them and everything I like?
  - n42 9y ago
    You might be on to something. Iron and Wine might be the Kevin Bacon of music recommendation algorithms.
erikbern 9y ago
We had to build some explicit filters for this at Spotify. For instance we blacklisted Christmas music from being part of the listening data – until them people would get a ton of Christmas music recommendations every January. But to your point, there's a long tail of other contextual things.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Weirdly, some genres seem to be entirely absent. I listen to a lot of jazz and classical, and with the exception of the occasional jazzy pop song, I never get recommendations for those genres. Granted, Spotify doesn't have a huge amount of contemporary jazz (much of what I listen to are imported ECM tracks that Spotify doesn't have, though not all), but it does have a lot of classical. I don't think it's ever recommended any Latino or folk music, either, come to think of it.
  - erikbern 9y ago
    classical music has notoriously bad metadata on spotify – it just doesn't fit into the data model of artist/album/track. i think that causes the system to filter out a lot of the listening data or fail to find patterns. not sure what's up with jazz but i'm guessing it could be a similar problem

revx 9y ago

My problem as well. I recently was in charge of putting together the playlist for a friend's get-together. They have significantly different taste in music from me, so now my recommendations are all messed up!

creaghpatr 9y ago

Maybe they can factor out those event/location-driven trends, or dampen them down. I think the Christmas example is a good one, I wouldn't want half my Discover to have Christmas songs- but I wouldn't mind having 1 or 2, perhaps from an artist I had never realized had a christmas single.

micahjonas 9y ago

Maybe don't listen to the discovery weekly playlist for the week and just listen to other playlists you like. If you listen to the genre because it's in your weekly playlist, than spotify is probably going to think you like those songs. Search for some open playlist you like and don't listen to the discovery weekly. In my experience spotify is fairly good a taking the hint. One alternative would be the daily selection which seems to be more sorted for genres.

markussss 9y ago
Thanks, but this is what I've been doing for the last few months, although I have also listened to music that is somewhat similar in genre (Norwegian music, electronic, hip-hop, pop, etc). I don't think I should stop listening to the music I like in order to manipulate the algorithms into giving me the music I like and want to listen to. It's counter-intuitive.

pj_mukh 9y ago

I really wish I could get Spotify to "forget" or "reset" my preferences. When I first started using Spotify, I listened to a lot of slow calming music (because I was working). Now ALL my Discover weekly's are just 'Iron and Wine', 'The National' derivatives. Its made Discover Weekly useless to me.

scrooched_moose 9y ago
I have the same issue with Iron and Wine and I don't get why. Every recommendation engine I've tried decides I absolutely love them, no matter what seed I start with or what songs I like/dislike. I don't mind Iron and Wine but they are definitely a 'meh' for me, so it gets frustrating when they dominate every playlist. And, disliking/thumbs down never seems to get rid of them. Are they generic enough that the algorithm finds something similar between them and everything I like?
- n42 9y ago
  You might be on to something. Iron and Wine might be the Kevin Bacon of music recommendation algorithms.

erikbern 9y ago

We had to build some explicit filters for this at Spotify. For instance we blacklisted Christmas music from being part of the listening data – until them people would get a ton of Christmas music recommendations every January. But to your point, there's a long tail of other contextual things.

lobster_johnson 9y ago
Weirdly, some genres seem to be entirely absent. I listen to a lot of jazz and classical, and with the exception of the occasional jazzy pop song, I never get recommendations for those genres. Granted, Spotify doesn't have a huge amount of contemporary jazz (much of what I listen to are imported ECM tracks that Spotify doesn't have, though not all), but it does have a lot of classical. I don't think it's ever recommended any Latino or folk music, either, come to think of it.
- erikbern 9y ago
  classical music has notoriously bad metadata on spotify – it just doesn't fit into the data model of artist/album/track. i think that causes the system to filter out a lot of the listening data or fail to find patterns. not sure what's up with jazz but i'm guessing it could be a similar problem