22 ms·

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic mu

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great. Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist. This has the effect of subtly changing the recommendation algorithm for that playlist over time. Eventually I end up with a playlist with about 100 songs on it, and recommendations that at least roughly align with the mood. I tend to get bored of songs pretty quickly though, so when a playlist gets too stale, I will prune the old and tired songs from it. This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

ckosidows 6y ago
I do the same thing now, but the recommended section leaves a lot to be desired on mobile. There's no way to prevent songs from getting suggested (other than maybe blocking a song entirely?). My recommendeds don't seem to get updated until the playlist has changed dramatically. And repeat songs get added to the section even if I haven't added it the umpteen times it was suggested prior. Is the experience different on desktop or am I doing something wrong?
johnwyles 6y ago
Anyone here remember turntable.fm? I do. Sad. JQBX.fm isn't the same either. That was a great way to get a higher "hit" ratio though.
- MivLives 6y ago
  I miss it so much. Nothing else has come close. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't added a feature like it.
ugh123 6y ago
My "philosophy" with listening to music while programming has been that if I can tell I like the song, then i'm probably focusing too much on it rather than the task at hand.
- airstrike 6y ago
  +1 I do something similar. As a general rule, I prefer to listen to songs I don't already know while working. If I'm humming or singing along, I'm doing it wrong.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    I've actually discovered some of my favorite bands/songs this way. Programming along, with background music playing - when suddenly I become "aware" of the song playing and how good it is. That's when I give it the "Thumbs Up" in Pandora, then go back to work. Might happen once a session if I'm lucky.
jnurmine 6y ago
I do this too. It works well. In addition I have several playlists, as a song might suit the current playlist, and another song might fit playlist B instead. So any playlist might be seeding several other playlists at a time. Sometimes I go through many, many recommendations, listen to a song in short pieces quickly by skipping most of it. It sounds weird but that way I can pretty accurately tell if the song is shit or not (read: if I end up liking it). If the song passes my filter, I put it to some playlist. I just do this quickly and finally go back and listen to the new ones. As for "dislike", there isn't one per song but there is a "Don't play this" per artist. I sometimes play children's songs or pop as requested, and after some time the recommendations include music I truly never want to hear again in any recommendations (Marcus & Martinus I'm looking at you). Also, it feels like only the first songs in a playlist actually matter for the recommendations. I don't know if this is really the case. I'd hope the recommendation engine took a random sampling of the entire playlist and recommended based on those. Edit: there's a "hide" for a track.
artursapek 6y ago
I've had trouble with this. It seems no matter what I play, Spotify just wants to recommend three songs by Pavement on repeat.
Alupis 6y ago
I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows. The "shuffle" alone on Spotify was enough to send me running. Have a playlist with 200 songs from 80 different artists? Well, we'll just play this one artist - the same album even! - back to back to back until you're annoyed enough to manually select the next song! I understood people flocking to Spotify back when it was the only game in town that allowed you to play specific songs, make playlists, and "download" songs for offline (airplane) playback. But now Pandora does all this too - and has for the past several years. The two services are even priced about the same... So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?
- m-p-3 6y ago
  For one, it's US-only. And the recommendations from Spotify so far are good enough for my needs and my whole family is on it so the work required to migrate from one platform to another isn't null so unless there's a major irritant I don't plan on switching.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  > Pandora is only available in the U.S. right now – but we are working on bringing our music service to other parts of the world. I guess Spotify is still the only game in town :(
  - Alupis 6y ago
    I didn't realize Pandora was region locked - what a bummer! The rest of the comment still stands for all US based users, however.
    - andruc 6y ago
amelius 6y ago
> If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. Which button is that?
klmadfejno 6y ago
The secret to my success to spotify is be a free user with adblock. On desktop browsers, there's no forced shuffle / variance. It just plays the album from start to finish, and, of course, no ads. Pick something manually you like. When you're done, pick a an artist from their list of similar artists. Play entire albums at a time. If you're not immediately dissatisfied, you'll probably feel good about the next half hour of music.
randomstring 6y ago
Pandora's suggestion algorithm is much better than Spotify's. What you describe is what I used to do with Pandora. I migrated to Spotify several years ago. Spotify generates some decent genre based playlists based on my listening history. Not as good as Pandora was. Lately with the pandemic, I've created a super-chill, ambient play list (I started with Moby's Long Ambients and expanded from there) to relax before bedtime. This has been really helpful for unwinding in these stressful times. However, an unintended consequence is that Spotify now thinks I listen to soothing ambient more than 50% of the time. My year in music is all ambient and my suggested play lists are all wishy-washy now. Apparently there is no "ignore this playlist when tracking usage." You can only manually disable tracking under "Settings > Social" and it times out after every session.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  I haven't used Pandora in a decade, but when I did, it strongly preferred to play mainstream artists, and within artists, only a handful of specific tracks. They weren't bad choices, but I got pretty bored of them. Spotify takes a lot more risks and I think its highly preferable.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    A decade is a long, long time. The catalog is definitely on-par with any service out there today.
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      I would believe they've improved over time. But my comment wasn't that pandora had a poor catalog. It was that they wanted to play mainstream songs instead. Perhaps not even mainstream, but just very specific songs. They had a lot of artist's whole discographies but only a subset would ever come on. I can still remember a few of them for me: royksopp - this must be it trapt - headstrong ladytron - destroy everything you touch Some sort of remix of the hand that feeds by Nine Inch Nails (I think it was the photek remix or something) I got these songs a lot on many stations, and nothing else by those artists ever, haha. I don't hold a grudge from 10 years ago though
royaltjames 6y ago
Thank you for saying this. I've been trying to use Spotify for a year now and it leaves so much to be desired on process. You're doing gods work
everdrive 6y ago
> here's my secret to success: > effectively, I manually make my own playlist.
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  yes, but my method at least introduces me to music that I would have otherwise been exposed to.
nijaru 6y ago
>I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again. You can at least for radio playlists. You can specifically say to never play this song or artist again. They used to let you thumb up or down on tracks which I think was a much easier UI. Skipping songs doesn't seem to do enough for songs in your playlists so you have to go through the whole right click -> never play again workflow. I really wish I could just downvote individual songs as they play and tailor it that way since sometimes I'm just tired of a particular song, but maybe I like the song or the artist and don't want to click on 'never hear this again'. It just seems to repeat certain songs way too much based on your listening history.
CoryAlexMartin 6y ago
My solution to me getting tired of tracks in my work playlist was to keep adding more. It's currently at 2885 songs, or 5.2 days of music. It's mostly video game music, since a lot of video game music is written to not be too distracting. Though maybe I should say the majority of the playlist consists of songs I've imported into iTunes. Apple does a decent job at letting you seamlessly integrate your personal library with stuff from their streaming catalog.
smcnally 6y ago
> I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words) ... what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great. ... (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. SoundCloud Weekly[0] recommendations have been solid for months specifically with ambient: ~85% Good tracks with ~30% Resonating enough to Favorite. My other contexts / use cases include listening by Album and Artist, Genre, Mood- and Mind-Setting, and Discovery. Spotify works well for Albums and Artists. HypeMachine is my go-to for Discovery and Genre. SoundCloud and BandCamp work well for diving into artists and labels discovered. Playlists and Favorites across these are best for Mood- and Mind-Setting, as are "special purpose" options like Brain.fm and Ragya. [0]https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] [1]https://www.ragya.com/ https://www.ragya.com/
lazyant 6y ago
This is what I do, except using a general playlist. At ~ 300 songs almost all recommendations I didn't like. At current ~ 400 songs all recommendations I don't like and Spotify gave up with a passive-aggressive message sort of "I give up, add more songs if you want better recommendations". (Note that I have a wide variety of styles in the playlist; too lazy to break up in genres and also I kind of like the "surprise" factor)
linux_devil 6y ago
Do share your playlist , if its public
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  Music preferences are subjective, because familiarity is a huge part of appreciation. Sharing my particular fingerprint of music appreciation with other people doesn't do me any good, because they will only criticize my preferences as they are not their own.
sentinel 6y ago
I recommend the app Mick Tagger for the drag process. Makes it easier and keeps you in the zone with programming instead of having to fiddle with a song and playlist.
pgt 6y ago
Share an electronica playlist and prove it ;).
mercer 6y ago
> Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist. I take a similar approach, but I've found that the recommendation algorithm is pretty bad, so as an extra step I click on the artist and spend a bit of time listening to their other songs (and add those too, in the hopes it'll affect the algorithm). > This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again. That's one of my main issues with the 'recommended' algorithm. 90% of it is stuff I already have in other playlists, or stuff I keep skipping. I really wish the algorithm did a bit more with all the data it has, but I imagine they optimize for sales (to us or promoting artists/labels) over our actual desires.
sli 6y ago
I mostly use this approach as well but my experience with multiple services is that I eventually (and sooner, rather than later) end up hearing same 100 or so recommended songs. Maybe I'm too picky, but I just don't have great luck with recommendation engines anywhere I go.

ckosidows 6y ago

I do the same thing now, but the recommended section leaves a lot to be desired on mobile. There's no way to prevent songs from getting suggested (other than maybe blocking a song entirely?). My recommendeds don't seem to get updated until the playlist has changed dramatically. And repeat songs get added to the section even if I haven't added it the umpteen times it was suggested prior. Is the experience different on desktop or am I doing something wrong?

johnwyles 6y ago

Anyone here remember turntable.fm? I do. Sad. JQBX.fm isn't the same either. That was a great way to get a higher "hit" ratio though.

MivLives 6y ago
I miss it so much. Nothing else has come close. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't added a feature like it.

ugh123 6y ago

My "philosophy" with listening to music while programming has been that if I can tell I like the song, then i'm probably focusing too much on it rather than the task at hand.

airstrike 6y ago
+1 I do something similar. As a general rule, I prefer to listen to songs I don't already know while working. If I'm humming or singing along, I'm doing it wrong.
- Alupis 6y ago
  I've actually discovered some of my favorite bands/songs this way. Programming along, with background music playing - when suddenly I become "aware" of the song playing and how good it is. That's when I give it the "Thumbs Up" in Pandora, then go back to work. Might happen once a session if I'm lucky.

jnurmine 6y ago

I do this too. It works well. In addition I have several playlists, as a song might suit the current playlist, and another song might fit playlist B instead. So any playlist might be seeding several other playlists at a time. Sometimes I go through many, many recommendations, listen to a song in short pieces quickly by skipping most of it. It sounds weird but that way I can pretty accurately tell if the song is shit or not (read: if I end up liking it). If the song passes my filter, I put it to some playlist. I just do this quickly and finally go back and listen to the new ones. As for "dislike", there isn't one per song but there is a "Don't play this" per artist. I sometimes play children's songs or pop as requested, and after some time the recommendations include music I truly never want to hear again in any recommendations (Marcus & Martinus I'm looking at you). Also, it feels like only the first songs in a playlist actually matter for the recommendations. I don't know if this is really the case. I'd hope the recommendation engine took a random sampling of the entire playlist and recommended based on those. Edit: there's a "hide" for a track.

artursapek 6y ago

I've had trouble with this. It seems no matter what I play, Spotify just wants to recommend three songs by Pavement on repeat.

Alupis 6y ago

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows. The "shuffle" alone on Spotify was enough to send me running. Have a playlist with 200 songs from 80 different artists? Well, we'll just play this one artist - the same album even! - back to back to back until you're annoyed enough to manually select the next song! I understood people flocking to Spotify back when it was the only game in town that allowed you to play specific songs, make playlists, and "download" songs for offline (airplane) playback. But now Pandora does all this too - and has for the past several years. The two services are even priced about the same... So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?

m-p-3 6y ago
For one, it's US-only. And the recommendations from Spotify so far are good enough for my needs and my whole family is on it so the work required to migrate from one platform to another isn't null so unless there's a major irritant I don't plan on switching.
CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
> Pandora is only available in the U.S. right now – but we are working on bringing our music service to other parts of the world. I guess Spotify is still the only game in town :(
- Alupis 6y ago
  I didn't realize Pandora was region locked - what a bummer! The rest of the comment still stands for all US based users, however.
  - andruc 6y ago

amelius 6y ago

> If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. Which button is that?

klmadfejno 6y ago

The secret to my success to spotify is be a free user with adblock. On desktop browsers, there's no forced shuffle / variance. It just plays the album from start to finish, and, of course, no ads. Pick something manually you like. When you're done, pick a an artist from their list of similar artists. Play entire albums at a time. If you're not immediately dissatisfied, you'll probably feel good about the next half hour of music.

randomstring 6y ago

Pandora's suggestion algorithm is much better than Spotify's. What you describe is what I used to do with Pandora. I migrated to Spotify several years ago. Spotify generates some decent genre based playlists based on my listening history. Not as good as Pandora was. Lately with the pandemic, I've created a super-chill, ambient play list (I started with Moby's Long Ambients and expanded from there) to relax before bedtime. This has been really helpful for unwinding in these stressful times. However, an unintended consequence is that Spotify now thinks I listen to soothing ambient more than 50% of the time. My year in music is all ambient and my suggested play lists are all wishy-washy now. Apparently there is no "ignore this playlist when tracking usage." You can only manually disable tracking under "Settings > Social" and it times out after every session.

klmadfejno 6y ago
I haven't used Pandora in a decade, but when I did, it strongly preferred to play mainstream artists, and within artists, only a handful of specific tracks. They weren't bad choices, but I got pretty bored of them. Spotify takes a lot more risks and I think its highly preferable.
- Alupis 6y ago
  A decade is a long, long time. The catalog is definitely on-par with any service out there today.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    I would believe they've improved over time. But my comment wasn't that pandora had a poor catalog. It was that they wanted to play mainstream songs instead. Perhaps not even mainstream, but just very specific songs. They had a lot of artist's whole discographies but only a subset would ever come on. I can still remember a few of them for me: royksopp - this must be it trapt - headstrong ladytron - destroy everything you touch Some sort of remix of the hand that feeds by Nine Inch Nails (I think it was the photek remix or something) I got these songs a lot on many stations, and nothing else by those artists ever, haha. I don't hold a grudge from 10 years ago though

royaltjames 6y ago

Thank you for saying this. I've been trying to use Spotify for a year now and it leaves so much to be desired on process. You're doing gods work

everdrive 6y ago

> here's my secret to success: > effectively, I manually make my own playlist.

t0mbstone 6y ago
yes, but my method at least introduces me to music that I would have otherwise been exposed to.

nijaru 6y ago

>I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again. You can at least for radio playlists. You can specifically say to never play this song or artist again. They used to let you thumb up or down on tracks which I think was a much easier UI. Skipping songs doesn't seem to do enough for songs in your playlists so you have to go through the whole right click -> never play again workflow. I really wish I could just downvote individual songs as they play and tailor it that way since sometimes I'm just tired of a particular song, but maybe I like the song or the artist and don't want to click on 'never hear this again'. It just seems to repeat certain songs way too much based on your listening history.

CoryAlexMartin 6y ago

My solution to me getting tired of tracks in my work playlist was to keep adding more. It's currently at 2885 songs, or 5.2 days of music. It's mostly video game music, since a lot of video game music is written to not be too distracting. Though maybe I should say the majority of the playlist consists of songs I've imported into iTunes. Apple does a decent job at letting you seamlessly integrate your personal library with stuff from their streaming catalog.

smcnally 6y ago

> I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words) ... what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great. ... (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. SoundCloud Weekly[0] recommendations have been solid for months specifically with ambient: ~85% Good tracks with ~30% Resonating enough to Favorite. My other contexts / use cases include listening by Album and Artist, Genre, Mood- and Mind-Setting, and Discovery. Spotify works well for Albums and Artists. HypeMachine is my go-to for Discovery and Genre. SoundCloud and BandCamp work well for diving into artists and labels discovered. Playlists and Favorites across these are best for Mood- and Mind-Setting, as are "special purpose" options like Brain.fm and Ragya. [0]https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] [1]https://www.ragya.com/ https://www.ragya.com/

lazyant 6y ago

This is what I do, except using a general playlist. At ~ 300 songs almost all recommendations I didn't like. At current ~ 400 songs all recommendations I don't like and Spotify gave up with a passive-aggressive message sort of "I give up, add more songs if you want better recommendations". (Note that I have a wide variety of styles in the playlist; too lazy to break up in genres and also I kind of like the "surprise" factor)

linux_devil 6y ago

Do share your playlist , if its public

t0mbstone 6y ago
Music preferences are subjective, because familiarity is a huge part of appreciation. Sharing my particular fingerprint of music appreciation with other people doesn't do me any good, because they will only criticize my preferences as they are not their own.

sentinel 6y ago

I recommend the app Mick Tagger for the drag process. Makes it easier and keeps you in the zone with programming instead of having to fiddle with a song and playlist.

pgt 6y ago

Share an electronica playlist and prove it ;).

mercer 6y ago

> Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist. I take a similar approach, but I've found that the recommendation algorithm is pretty bad, so as an extra step I click on the artist and spend a bit of time listening to their other songs (and add those too, in the hopes it'll affect the algorithm). > This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again. That's one of my main issues with the 'recommended' algorithm. 90% of it is stuff I already have in other playlists, or stuff I keep skipping. I really wish the algorithm did a bit more with all the data it has, but I imagine they optimize for sales (to us or promoting artists/labels) over our actual desires.

sli 6y ago

I mostly use this approach as well but my experience with multiple services is that I eventually (and sooner, rather than later) end up hearing same 100 or so recommended songs. Maybe I'm too picky, but I just don't have great luck with recommendation engines anywhere I go.