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Here is the referenced July paper [1]. Spotify has a very cool feature called Community [2] where users can talk about what they want Spotify to do. The most u

• dv_dt 6y ago
  Spotify would do better to get back to basics on song suggestion instead of trying to guess emotional state - Pandora still finds similar songs by musical elements better than Spotify. A good example to try is to select a song that is out of genre for an artist - an acoustic version of a song that usually doesn't do acoustic for example. The suggestions for similar songs from Spotify all have to do with the artist genre not the actual song.
  • peteretep 6y ago
    My Spotify Most Hated Bug is that I have to be careful what I name playlists now as it’ll completely fuck over the recommend songs if you’ve named it something it thinks it knows about
    • ssss11 6y ago
      Interesting! Like what.. a genre name?
      • nameequalsmain 6y ago
        I named a playlist "metal", it started recommending metal songs without me having added anything yet.
        • piva00 6y ago
          That would be just one signal for the recommendation engine, given that you only named the playlist without any songs that probably weighed in quite heavily on the recommendations. Did it change after you added songs or kept suggesting metal songs?
          • p49k 6y ago
            Just tested it and yes, it keeps recommending metal even after adding a handful of obvious non-metal songs.
    • IndySun 6y ago
      This playlist name thing I've also noticed. More widely, many, if not all, of any recommendation algorithm in any field (music and beyond) are not 'intelligent' (meaning smarter than the right human) in any way whatsoever; as noted, usually some tag sorting going on - and where items have been auto-tagged vs manual makes no difference to the quality; you're still dealing with a programmed personality when auto-tagged. However, they do (appear to) 'work' (exhibit intelligence) when it's performed on a topic of which you know little; there they offer a helping hand.
  • xxpor 6y ago
    Spotify has all of their resources focused on podcasts, because that's where they'll be able to become a real aggregator and start making Real Money. It's a damn shame because the open nature of podcasts is one of the most appealing things about them. I get where they're coming from though. If they weren't spending ungodly amounts of cash on podcasts (cough joe rogan) they could probably buy pandora (just guessing, not looking at any actual numbers) and replace their recommendation engine with theirs.
    • shaoonb 6y ago
      I don't understand this business model. How does taking podcasts (something people are used to getting for free with few or no ads) and breaking the currently open ecosystem there is around them benefit anyone, least of all Spotify themselves?
      • TaylorAlexander 6y ago
        I assume they believe exclusive podcasts will gain them paying subscribers. Of course by fracturing the open ecosystem they may find themselves unable to acquire some podcasts, but given that they are a large player they are well positioned to out bid the competition.
        • nitrogen 6y ago
          They might also make a cut off of dynamic sponsorship/ad segments within podcasts.
          • squeaky-clean 6y ago
            These were quite eery the first time I heard them. I was listening to an episode of Conan O'Brien's podcast from early 2019 and in the middle was an ad (read by Conan) for enjoying Miller lite at home during the covid quarantine. I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what the hell had just happened until I found a page promoting Spotify's dynamic ad insertion for podcasts.
• airstrike 6y ago
  > The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state, they just want rather basic features to work. Obligatory “If I’d asked customers what they want, they would have told me a faster horse.” People may not realize the value of this new feature because they have not even imagined it.
  • falcolas 6y ago
    What value does mining emotions provide for the customer?
    • behringer 6y ago
      A better tailored playlist
      • winocm 6y ago
        And here I am, thinking that Spotify will start to provide me suicide prevention advice if I start listening to extremely depressing songs. I know Twitter tried to do that to me.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      I use YT Music's Mix feature to discover music and it's pretty good. If my supermix would figure what to play when, that would be pretty dope.
      • falcolas 6y ago
        What emotion should Spotify be shooting for? Good music can cause a lot of different emotions; dopamine can come from many emotional sources. Even no emotion is fine. Music doesn’t need to exercise our brains all the time. Or even every time you listen to a particular song.
        • renewiltord 6y ago
          I don't particularly care about the details. I want the mixes or radios or discovers to be interesting to me. I'll give them lots of information if it will help them get it right.
• milofeynman 6y ago
  I want private mode playlists. Playlists full of my kids songs that put the app in private mode so they don't mess up my suggestions.
  • hashmal 6y ago
    Can't you achieve the same result with a family subscription?
    • airstrike 6y ago
      You can switch between profiles, though
      • airstrike 6y ago
        can't*........
    • RobertKerans 6y ago
      Oh, here's a missing basic feature: casting in the Spotify Kids app. Which isn't possible, so I use my account for my kid's songs
• highwind 6y ago
  Yeah, I gave up on my subscription after I couldn't figure out how to list all the songs by a given musician. It's a simple feature that's part of all the music software that I've used before: Winamp, iTunes, Amarok, Gnome Music. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• ridaj 6y ago
  Don't worry, patents are hardly ever indicative of a company's actual priorities.
• ssss11 6y ago
  Agreed. I dont need Spotify to try to understand my mood, I actively dont want them to. I DO need them to understand (or give me a manual way to tell them) which playist is for my 4yo and stop trying to play me their songs when I’ve selected a playlist for me. Drives me nuts.
  • OJFord 6y ago
    While I understand it not being worth it to you/making sense (them not having their own device, presumably) yet for a 4yo, there's not much incentive for Spotify because in most cases like that they want to sell you a multi-account plan.
• vidarh 6y ago
  Maybe because people who want this aren't their customers. I've argued that recommendation system for music are near useless for years because they don't group music together by what I actually want to hear together, and that it needs to be more careful about interpreting my actions because what goes together varies by mood and purpose. E.g. you can't just take genre,or artist, because the music I want before bed need to be slow, soothing and familiar. Transitions between tracks also need to be much less abrupt than other times of day. Other times I want something new and surprising. Or loud and upbeat. Until they convince me they can do that they're not getting my money.
• IneffablePigeon 6y ago
  I've given up even wanting extra features, I just want them to fix the glaring bugs they've had for years. My current favourites: - if you sort a playlist you're playing, then click the album art to find the currently playing song, it will skip to the position of the track in the _unsorted_ list - playlists over a certain length just won't play via Spotify Connect. There's a couple of playlists I just can't play on my Sonos speakers. - playing a daily mix hides the shuffle button, and yet it still uses the shuffle state you had selected previously. If you want to turn shuffle off you have to play something else, toggle shuffle, then play the daily mix again I've tried reporting these. They made me jump through a thousand standard troubleshooting hoops despite them all happening on every device I own. Then a few days later they came back and said it was "working as intended". Mind blowing.
  • gbrown_ 6y ago
    Yup, my only major gripe is with Spotify matching the volume from my desktop (application level) to my phone (system level) and vice versa. I've seen lots of reports of this "feature" being more of a bug and reporters being told to go through hoops. So many I've not bothered pursuing it myself as I'm sure it's hopeless.
  • corobo 6y ago
    The thing they have that lets you change device within the app was absolutely flawless for me until a few months ago I'd be happy with them just not breaking the things that work.
    • permo-w 6y ago
      or removing their best features. You used to be able to long press on a song and it would play the hook of the song. It was a great way to get the general feel of a playlist. They randomly removed it 3 or 4 years ago because supposedly no one used it
      • corobo 6y ago
        Yes! They removed that on purpose? I thought it broke haha. I was still waiting for it to come back! I'm almost certain it didn't work on my friend's android when we tried it too. Also I'm pretty sure I discovered it by accident one day. Huh nobody is using this feature we've never mentioned and only exists on one platform. Sometimes Spotify comes off as just completely daft.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  Sounds like they've got plenty of people to work on the shiny new things but nobody to maintain the boring stuff. It's a shame because there are loads of engineers out there who enjoy maintaining stuff over long periods of time and generally doing the boring stuff that makes customers happy. These engineers are really undervalued in companies like Spotify. I think the success of companies like Microsoft is due in a great deal to valuing engineers who do the boring stuff.
• tda 6y ago
  How about this very reasonable request to "Remove current Song from Playlist" [1]? Filed in 2012, status shows as "Not Right Now", has collected 1343 votes and counting... They're even worse than Atlassian. I really hate Spotify for everything except their pretty complete library and reasonable pricing. Discovery, searching, UI, everything just plain sucks, I miss 8tracks. 1: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Mobile-Remove-current-Song-from-Playlist/idi-p/4953 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Mobile-Remove-cu... Edit: I've been hoping for years 8tracks would be back, and low and behold, they have relaunched: https://blog.8tracks.com/2020/04/19/welcome-back-8tracks/ https://blog.8tracks.com/2020/04/19/welcome-back-8tracks/ Edit2: not really, still not available outside of USA/Canada
• rapnie 6y ago
  I want Spotify specifically to stay away from my emotional state, or if they are looking at me that way I will stay away from them.
• dlkf 6y ago
  As a user, I agree that features which give users control and agency are preferable to increasingly opaque ML. But as business decisions go, this argument is terrible. The subset of users who bother to post new ideas to the community forum won't be large enough to affect Spotify's bottom line, and these users are almost certainly not representative of the average user (who probably doesn't realize the community feature exists). Spotify isn't optimizing for placating the vocal minority of power users, they're trying to increase their paid subscription count. It would be great if we lived in a world where these were the same thing, but they clearly aren't.
  • ycan 6y ago
    Their way of placating the vocal minority is the Community portal, where those who are passionate enough to express ideas to improve Spotify (in a way that is useful for the users, and not necessarily for Spotify) are given a place to discuss their ideas and are promptly ignored.