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Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep
by volkk 6y ago
Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from getting a new account?
- njovin 6y agoThis is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself. Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.
- volkk 6y agoSee I was doing that, and I guess I didn't do it long enough because it didn't do anything for me. I think that algo is so heavily trained at this point. I think Spotify should really release something that is obvious and UI friendly that isn't some weird hack/workaround to fix this issue.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoMaybe being able to mark something as a guilty pleasure which would exclude it from algorithmic use - and ideally from showing it to your friends on facebook if they still do that!
- dawnerd 6y agoSpotify needs to enable dislike on any song playing, not just in discovery playlists.
- dajohnson89 6y agoyes please. i'll never understand why this isn't default behavior.
- vmception 6y agooooooh I thought Spotify just had a schizophrenic A/B test started every other quarter, I didn't realize the UI changes are contingent on what kind of song list you were listening to.
- dcbadacd 6y agoThey do have schizophrenic A/B testing though. Just recently they started playing the exact same ads but sometimes they have a few syllables messed up. I think I now have first-hand experience in being gaslit, it really makes you doubt your sanity if you heard the "same" ad but "wrong".
- LoathsLights 6y agoI wish we could just "ban" a song from ever playing, that way I won't have to make a new playlist from an existing one just because i don't want to listen to these one or two songs I find super annoying. I have playlists that work as filters for me, if I'm mass copying a playlist I first put it into the filter playlist, then I press "skip duplicates" now all the songs that are not on my shit list (fiilter list) will end up at the bottom labeled "now" on "date added" then I copy those to the playlist I want to and erase them from the filter.
- 6y ago
- aeturnum 6y agoI think Spotify would do well to allow users to set a label of some sort on their listening. Like, there are times when you listen to your music for yourself in the car, and there are times when your phone is being used to power the speakers at a gathering. I don't know what the internals of the system looks like, but it seems like allowing users to maintain different profiles would be simple.
- jasonv 6y agoThings I've wanted from Spotify, or from another platform: * Album playlists, with "shuffle by album/entry" * Disable song in album * Tags for albums/tracks, sort by tags * Genre block lists (they have artist block lists, let's go one step forward) * Download n-minutes of a playlist (for when they're 16 hours long) * Block tracks over n minutes on shuffle
- mosdave 6y ago> * Disable song in album <glares at The Girl Is Mine>
- nix0n 6y agoYou could create different whole accounts and put them on a family plan together.
- jdminhbg 6y agoI'd be happy with just a simple Incognito mode. Not so much that I'm embarrassed about listening to some things, as I am "I wonder what that sounds like" but don't want my recommendations poisoned.
- tlbsofware 6y agoHa, Yeah just mentioned incognito at the same time as you, totally think this should be a thing
- daxelrod 6y agoThis exists. It's called "Private listening". https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/how-to-enable-private-listening/ https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/how-to...
- hanniabu 6y agoOne more reason why I prefer Google Play. The recommendations are based off a single station. If you start a new station it starts from scratch.
- BeniBoy 6y agoAm I the only one that received an email from Google telling me that Google Play music was going to close soon and that I should transfer my playlists?
- tgb 6y agoI do not seem to have received such an email.
- ylere 6y agoSame here. Youtube Music is the replacement and it seems to have the same content and the same bugs, just a different design (which I personally find a bit less intuitive but I might be biased) and a new name. You can even upload your own music to YouTube Music now the same way it was possible with Google Music before. It's just Google making a new product to replace a previous one again instead of fixing/improving what they already have...
- conradfr 6y agoIt's not exactly the same as your uploaded music doesn't blend with the rest, it's on a separate tab, low quality videos are mixed with the "normal" music and all you're Youtube likes related to music are mixed with your previous GPM likes (for god know what reasons). And more.
- conradfr 6y agoYes it's killed at (supposedly?) the end of the year. I'm bummed because I really don't like Youtube Music.
- hanniabu 6y agoYou really need to manually transfer the playlists? That's pretty retarded. And does this also mean that in order to do so I need a subscription to both?
- somehnguy 6y agoYES! I played Daddy Yankee's Gasolina at a party once as kind of a joke and for weeks my Discover Weekly was filled with Spanish music. I wish they had a 'stealth' mode or at least an option to reset your tastes.
- parthdesai 6y agoPrivate session?
- aerospace_guy 6y agoYeah it’s an option in settings. I always thought it was just to make your listening activity private from your followers, but maybe it does more.
- heed 6y agoIt used to only hide your activity but now apparently anything you play in a private session won’t influence recommendation features: https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/how-to-enable-private-listening/ https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/features/how-to...
- aerospace_guy 6y agoThanks! I wish they’d say ‘will not’ rather than ‘may not’. Good to know they’ve thought about it though!
- stronglikedan 6y agoUnfortunately, it will silently turn un-private after only six hours, so you need to be on top of that, lest you end up in the same boat. I learned this the hard way while listening to focus/study music all day at work.
- bicknergseng 6y agoSecond the option to reset, but there is an "private session" mode in the nav menu that seems to not track your listens the same way. Netflix and the video streaming services are the worst here. I hate my Netflix recommendations, and can't get out of them.
- rosstex 6y agoIf you contact Spotify, they can reset your listening history and recommendations!! I learned this.
- DocG 6y agoUh, I do similar thing. I use narrated let's plays or podcasts on YouTube to go to sleep in the evening and YouTube knows this. It knows my habits so much that even not to recommend stuff I listen every evening, durning daytime. Only when I open my phone in the evening reccomendations are suddenly full of stuff I want to listen to get to sleep. I use YouTube bc it autostops playing and turns phone off when I'm already sleeping. And funnily enough, ads help me start sleeping faster :D
- StavrosK 6y agoLate at night, I usually design stuff to 3D print, and I figured I should live-stream some sessions. However, since my wife is asleep at that time, I had to be quiet, and the livestream turned out to be ideal to listen to while trying to fall asleep, which was the opposite of what I intended: https://youtu.be/i7aVCR5vE6g https://youtu.be/i7aVCR5vE6g Maybe this'll be as useful to you as it was to me.
- dilap 6y agoYeah, mine jumps all over depending on what I've recently listened too. Sometimes it's great and I'm like, "wow, this is magic!" Recently it's been garbage.
- faramarz 6y agoLOL! Same shoe; I cannot escape the piano and other instrumentals I played during my wife's pregnancy months. I'm almost at a point of surrender that maybe my time with Deep House and Electronic music has reached an end. The Discovery Weekly was my only way of finding hot indie talent in the electronics world.
- influnza 6y agoHave you tried Bandcamp?
- knappe 6y agoSoundcloud is still the place for finding EDM in general. The community sure has slowed down, especially with spotify being such a huge force in the music world, but I still find tons of great content there. Bonus, you don't have the same recommendation issues that spotify has (I'm in the same boat with non-sensical recommendations, or the same tired songs getting recommended over and over again).
- vmception 6y agoSoundcloud's mobile app has chronic issues. The full screen UI for playing music is beautiful, but the complete lack of discovery, or neglected sorting on an artist's profile is just ridiculous. I will never subscribe even the paid experience is better.
- Aeolun 6y agoThere’s 6 more ‘playlist for you’ things now with music/artists that you’ve listened to over different genres, maybe those can help?
- augusto-moura 6y agoSpotify has the feature of a Private Session, most of the time I need this random songs I activate it so they don't get picked up by the algorithm
- stronglikedan 6y agoThe private session feature is a double-edged sword as well, as I describe here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655005
- _zamorano_ 6y agoSame. Sometimes my girlfriend uses my account and she is very much into reaggeton, which I hate. If she listens just two or three songs, I'll get the dreaded reaggeton song in "Discover Weekly" next monday. If she uses the account for a whole day, the playlist is ruined for me.
- ta17711771 6y agoAlmost like they're trying to make each account customized to a single listener.
- kleer001 6y agoYoutube suffers from the same bias in their algorithm. I bet it's just a bias setting or a single falloff that would help things. It reminds me of Cronenberg's "The Fly" where Brundle had to teach his teleporting pod to reproduce living tissue rather than interpret it.
- strbean 6y agoAt least with Youtube, you can go through your watch history and delete videos, which makes it as if you never watched it as far as recommendations are concerned.
- mathisonturing 6y agoYou can also reject a recommendation. Click on the Options button for that video (three vertical dots), select "Not interested"
- NoodleIncident 6y agoRemoving the source of the recommendation from your history works a lot more reliably. Sometimes the "Not interested" button will allow you to say "I don't want recommendations based on <X> videos", but they're in denial about how that's the only thing their recommendation engine does, so the option isn't always there.
- wolco 6y agoBrowsing in private mode always works.
- strbean 6y agoYou mean like incognito mode on Chrome? Unfortunately I like most of the bubble I've built for myself of Youtube. It sucks when my recommendation stream of mostly educational videos from smart, quality-driven DIYers and educators gets overwhelmed with 5 Minute Crafts type garbage because I put on one "oddly satisfying compilation" to run in the background while playing boardgames with friends or something.
- mitchdoogle 6y agoWhy not just listen to one of the many curated playlists in the genre you like? Go to music review sites and find a few albums that sound good and add them to your saved playlists? I find myself doing these things more often when I want to discover new music. The discover weekly gives me a lot of stuff I've heard already.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nijaru 6y agoYou used to be able to like or dislike songs on radios, but iirc spotify switched it to only favorite a couple of years ago. I don’t understand the reasoning, as it would help tailor their data much more.
- psadri 6y agoYes I wish there was a button to reset or stir the pot a bit. Or maybe pay more attention to your more recent playlists. Or discount listens to songs that were recommended to you (to break the feedback loop).
- indigochill 6y agoOn the point of the feedback loop, if we picture musical preferences as a mountain, with most-listened to stuff at the peak, I've been wondering what would happen if these algorithms (particularly Youtube's and Deezer's, but Spotify's a bit as well) would slide the mountain a little farther down instead of optimizing for the peak. So to over-simplify, something like instead of saying "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's another RPG soundtrack!" it would say "You just listened to an RPG soundtrack, here's a symphony". The idea is to lengthen the links of recommendations to encourage more exploration and wider discovery rather than circling the same narrow interest constantly.
- smogcutter 6y agoI agree, but I also suspect that this falls into the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do. Netflix used to have a huge library of classic and foreign films, but no one was watching them. The monotony of spotify’s recommendations is itself probably a sign that when most people get something surprising they hit skip.
- rainforest 6y agoSpam seems to be a growing problem too. If you follow (or even listen to) an artist, all someone needs to do is credit them on a song (or just squat on their name) for it to be eligible for Release Radar. There are weird pockets of the Spotify database for this (e.g. "lo-fi beats" artists that churn out hundreds of tracks with many artists) and no way to send any feedback (they shut down Line-In, their metadata feedback a few years ago). Disliking doesn't work because Spotify will only remember you don't like one of the artists, not all of them.
- phreeza 6y agoI have some music that I kind of consider slightly trashy but do enjoy on occasions. I have the feeling that Spotify knows that this is a kind of "guilty pleasure", and seems to explicitly not recommend it in my autogenerated playlists. Wonder if this is a fluke or a real thing.
- kamilszybalski 6y agoYou might try selecting a song that you enjoy and listening to the playlist radio for that specific song, it's an alternate take on the discover weekly.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoMy spotify wrap for 2019 was a giant list of assorted noise tracks. "You're in Pink Noise's top 5% of listeners!" Great
- fivre 6y agoI listen to a lot of ambient music normally and that ends up being seemingly 80% of my recommendations, despite also listening to a bunch of loud angry punk. Spotify's discovery tends to be pretty iffy for anything at least for me anyway, so I mostly follow labels I like on Bandcamp for discovery instead.
- tarsinge 6y agoHaving absolutely 0 insight or parameter tuning on these recommendations algorithms, from feeds to Spotify playlists, is really a shame. Like imagine you had 0 control on your computer parameters or smartphone, and it was always guessing like “This resolution should suit you”, “I just turned the WiFi off, hope you like it”, or “I just dialed that friend you seem to like to interact with”. It’s not a technical problem, I know there must be advertising incentive to not allow settings, but still the result when you think of it is ridiculous, having to reverse engineer algorithms and create alternate profiles just to emulate lacking UI for parameters.
- swiley 6y agoIt’s not just advertising. It gives the organization responsible for curating the feed an incredible amount of power over the consumers of the feed. Currently the most popular way to trade this power for money is via advertising.
- nitrogen 6y agoI recall some stats from Pandora a few years ago that showed Mumford and Sons were their highest paid artist that year by a decent margin. Also that year, M+S songs would show up in all of my unrelated Pandora stations. How curious.
- war1025 6y agoI don't use Spotify, but a decade ago my Pandora did the exact same thing. It was like the more I tried to tell it which music I liked, the less it played music I wanted to hear.
- jedberg 6y agoSame. My whole family uses my account, and now that I have kids, all I get are Disney music and Baby Shark knockoffs.
- sevencolors 6y agoThey have a "family" mode where you can get six subs account. Unless you really like baby shark ;) https://www.spotify.com/us/family/ https://www.spotify.com/us/family/
- jedberg 6y agoIt costs extra though. Also, the Alexa devices can only connect to one account, which would mean one of us would screw up the recs of the other depending on whose account was tied to the Alexa.
- bombastry 6y agoIf you had a family subscription, you could use one of the accounts just for shared devices. Then you wouldn't have to worry about music played on your Alexa devices messing up your account's recommendations (although it wouldn't count any music played by Alexa devices that you liked either).
- unityByFreedom 6y agoYou can have two amazon accounts and associate one spotify account with each.
- Alupis 6y agoSpotify's awful discovery, and shuffle features for playlists are what keeps me firmly with Pandora. Now that Pandora lets you make your own playlists, or listen to individual songs, and download for offline playback (on airplanes for example), I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Spotify these days.
- deminature 6y agoAnecdotal, but Spotify's Discover Weekly feature has ridiculously good recommendations for me and I usually end up adding half of each week's playlist to my library. The recommended music is fantastic, obscure stuff I would never have known about otherwise. My experience with Spotify recommendations couldn't be more different to yours.
- Alupis 6y agoFair enough. Have you tried Pandora's for an extended period and are able to compare? For me, Spotify ended up just playing the same artist, same album even, over and over. Same problem with their Shuffle feature - I could have a playlist with 500 songs from various artists, albums, genres and more... but I'd get the same artist, same album back to back to back far too often. So often, it didn't feel random at all. Just anecdotal though.
- Spivak 6y agoThey are random! It's just that what is random in a mathematical sense isn't random to a human. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_clumping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_clumping The best song randomizer I've seen described generates a permutation of songs, then "plots" them in n dimensional space with closeness being closeness being a weighted distance of closeness in the playlist and whatever metadata you have about them. (artist, genre, year, mood). Then you iteratively break the clumps until you can't find any or the number stops decreasing. If you still have clumps then you raise the bar for what is considered a clump and repeat until you hit zero.
- coronadisaster 6y agoWhat Netflix does for that is that it lets you create sub-accounts... IE one for you, one for the kids, etc
- yowlingcat 6y agoI recommend a playlist centric approach as a workaround. Seed the playlist with some of your favorite songs, and start listening to things from that playlist. Recommendations for that playlist will be context local to that playlist rather than global. Here's the part I'm not sure about -- is the fact that you made a playlist with recommendations then a stronger signal for what the discovery playlist pulls? Is there a time decay involved (which I imagine there is) based on your listening history -- does it passively (so you'd just have to wait) or actively (so you'd have to actively listen to other songs to clear its presumptions) reset?
- Aeolun 6y agoChanging what I listen to for a week gives me more of the stuff I listened to last week (at least it seems like that). If not I’d still get baby sleeping songs.
- sevencolors 6y agoMy #1 listened to album last year was >Tropical Rain Storm Sounds To fix this i started using the mediation apps that have these sorts of sounds. I also ahem downloaded a few albums i really liked I wish there was a way to tell the algorithm to ignore a specific album, song or genre
- Insanity 6y agoSplit them in different playlists - only the playlist with the rain sound will suggest those if you use the playlist suggestions. I have a playlist for each genre and regularly discover new songs withing those.
- seph-reed 6y agoI have an open feature request for adding this type of functionality to Pandora: https://community.pandora.com/t5/Feature-Requests/User-control-of-Stations-quot-genre-DNA-quot-add-remove-dna/idi-p/26348 https://community.pandora.com/t5/Feature-Requests/User-contr... Seriously, I REALLY want a music service which gives me control over the discovery algorithms parameters. Just in general, I'm sooooo worn out from living in a world where nothing revolves around "super users" and everything revolves around... average decent 21st century people.
- edraferi 6y agoheh I had this problem with the inane music my kids listen to. Those plays poisoned my recommendations and I only noticed when my annual retrospective playlist popped up full of disney garbage. Solution: use separate streaming service for the kids! I still use Spotify for everything, but kids music happens on Amazon Music.
- freehunter 6y agoApple Music does the same thing. I spent a week listening to ambient music at work and it has permanently destroyed my recommendations. I don’t get a single “For You” list that doesn’t include ambient music which really kills the vibe. That was almost a year ago and it’s still recommending ambient artists.
- wyclif 6y agoYeah, so like others recommmend above, you need to create a few playlists and I'm fairly certain you'll be getting different recommendations. Still, I also agree with people here who say that you should be able to 'reset' it whenever you want.
- ivan1783 6y agoMan, I had about a month of a hardcore punk kick and its not my normal music style at all, however since then (about a year ago now) the discover playlist still suggests all kinds of crazy punk to me - dont know how to get it to stop. At least on youtube there is a button that lets you say "dont recommend this anymore". Spotify needs the same.