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Anecdotal, 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 lib

Anecdotal, 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 ago
Fair 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 ago
  They 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.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    True. It's just that I don't think I've ever experienced Spotify's take on Shuffle anywhere else before, so it's shocking and frustrating, leading to a lot of "next, next, next" skipping.
  - tikkabhuna 6y ago
    And they wrote a blog about it in 2014: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-... Interesting stuff!
    - Alupis 6y ago
      That is an interested blog post! However, I've used Spotify since 2014 and still experienced the same Shuffle behavior. Strange, perhaps I'm looking for it now, and introducing some sort of bias. It is interesting, however, that a music playlist company took so long to realize people wouldn't like their original Shuffle implementation. I don't think any device or software I used before Spotify had such a remarkably bad Shuffle experience - including the original iPods and other, much older software and devices.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
chimpansteve 6y ago
I'll absolutely agree with this. The Discover Weekly playlist seems to know my musical preferences better than I do myself, and i'm certainly not sticking to just a couple of specific genres that I listen to
- deeblering4 6y ago
  I enjoyed Discover Weekly at first but over time got sick of only hearing suggestions from inside my own “bubble”. I’ve switched to human curated radio and the variety is so much better. haven’t looked back.

Alupis 6y ago

Fair 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 ago
They 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.
- Alupis 6y ago
  True. It's just that I don't think I've ever experienced Spotify's take on Shuffle anywhere else before, so it's shocking and frustrating, leading to a lot of "next, next, next" skipping.
- tikkabhuna 6y ago
  And they wrote a blog about it in 2014: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-songs/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/2014/02/28/how-to-shuffle-... Interesting stuff!
  - Alupis 6y ago
    That is an interested blog post! However, I've used Spotify since 2014 and still experienced the same Shuffle behavior. Strange, perhaps I'm looking for it now, and introducing some sort of bias. It is interesting, however, that a music playlist company took so long to realize people wouldn't like their original Shuffle implementation. I don't think any device or software I used before Spotify had such a remarkably bad Shuffle experience - including the original iPods and other, much older software and devices.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

chimpansteve 6y ago

I'll absolutely agree with this. The Discover Weekly playlist seems to know my musical preferences better than I do myself, and i'm certainly not sticking to just a couple of specific genres that I listen to

deeblering4 6y ago
I enjoyed Discover Weekly at first but over time got sick of only hearing suggestions from inside my own “bubble”. I’ve switched to human curated radio and the variety is so much better. haven’t looked back.