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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations
- ljm 5y agoA small start would be to fix the behaviour on release radar/discover weekly playlists. You can mark a song you don't like and say to stop suggesting music from that artist, but it doesn't do anything. Yes, Spotify...I played some weird cat music playlist _once_ for my cat. Once! That doesn't mean I'm a lifelong cat music fan.
- beezischillin 5y agoMost platforms should have easily accessible "don't show me this" or "show more of this" buttons on their home page where most of the algorithmically generated results are shown. On YouTube it's hidden behind menus and on Facebook it's also kind of a chore to try to curate stuff.
- mimanning 5y agoDoes anyone know if the spotify recommendation algorithm analyzes the actual music in order to group songs? Or does it only do clustering based on users' listening habits? It seems like incorporating the former could help with discovering new and potentially less well known music, which is an area I'd like to see spotify improve on.
- MutableLambda 5y agoI'm pretty sure it's done via collaborative filtering (other user preferences), and not the actual music features (like Pandora does, or did before).
- mimanning 5y agoThat's too bad, I'd love to have the ability to explicitly trade off the recommendation criteria between music features and user preferences. I understand there's no real incentive for spotify to do this though.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoCorrect. But collaborative filtering works better with dislike feedback. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, it's like a Tinder for music https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- lanevorockz 5y agoSome smells fishy about the criticism of podcasts on spotify. Stop lobbying against features… it’s regressive and just open doors for competitors.
- mdrzn 5y agoI enjoy Spotify's "Weekly Discovery" which promotes new artists and new songs to new listeners, but I REALLY don't like how they don't have "Don't recommend this podcast" button. I listened to 10 minutes of one podcast ONCE in a long car drive, and now my homepage is filled by podcasts which I NEVER listen to. And there's no way to tell Spotify to remove them.
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoI actually wish most networks had a rating system than up/down. Including social media.
- omega3 5y agoI've deleted my Spotify account after noticing that the recommendations algorithm is useless.I don't understand how there can be regression in that regard from soulseek, what.cd network graphs, last.fm or even radio stations. Seriously, how hard is it for Spotify to hire some music heads to put together playlists for people.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoIf you liked soulseek and lastFM, I think you'll love Piki. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- edejong 5y agoI’d love to dislike all and every autotuned song of the last fifteen years.
- cto_of_antifa 5y agoSo pretty much any song professionally recorded, then.
- npteljes 5y agoRegarding recommendations, Mixcloud's approach worked for me best. Starting from a genre, label or song, it lists popular mixes that often have been selected by DJs, radio presenters, curators etc. And when I find someone with a similar taste, their suggestions are wonderful. And often I find that songs work better in the context of the mixtape, than standing alone. But of course this depends on the type of music.
- notyourwork 5y agoI work in this industry and actually we’ve found from online experimentation customers generally don’t want to tell you they dislike something. The expectation is customers get what they like (relevant) and sometimes they want to express stronger affinity for specific things. The converse hasn’t shown to be true. Generally customers don’t have a clear picture of how their explicit signals impact recommendations. Though some customers have shown desire to want to manage these signals. Edit: one other consideration is disliking can usually be inferred from other activity. Skipping a song after less then 20 seconds for example can train a model as well as incorporating an explicit dislike button.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoI had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, or at least a "forget everything you think you know about me"-button. Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of this and other frustrations.
- notyourwork 5y agoWithout specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that most customer's have no use for and won't use. In general, you had to be doing something to be getting recommendations so there is some action that when most customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will like some genre and it just so happens you don't.
- chillingeffect 5y agoWhat industry just out of curiosity? I see dislikes used judiciously in youtube and reddit fwiw
- 5y ago
- simlevesque 5y agoI'll never use Spotify again. My account was hacked by a latino and now my recommendations is 100% latin music. They told me there is nothing they can do to fix this. My recommendations are broken and my only option is to create another account, cancel my subscription, buy it again... Not gonna happen.
- smoldesu 5y agoWhen this happened to me, I just changed my password. Seems to have worked so far, though it doesn't filter out Latin music.
- mikeywazowski 5y agoYeah me too, a couple of years ago. Initially I was in denial that my account might have been compromised, but eventually I changed my password and haven't had that issue since.
- jcastro 5y agoI found out you can break your recommendations without losing control of your account. I listened to one podcast episode and it's been stuck on my home screen for two months. I've tried listening to it, ignoring it, unsubscribing, deleting (you can't!). It's just there forever now. And of course, that means it's always recommending related podcasts all the time so most of my homepage is now filled with this stuff and I have no way to remove it.
- vanilla_nut 5y agoI’ve never listened to a podcast ever on Spotify. Refuse to, given their approach of trying to wall off podcasts in their own app. I’ve had an entire top-level list of podcasts recommended to me for over a YEAR now. I will never use it, but I have to constantly scroll past it and dodge podcast recommendations in new podcast + music playlists (that aren’t clearly marked) as well. I used to love Spotify. I got so many friends to sign up, I discovered so much music in my Discover Weekly, I convinced friends to switch from all kinds of other platforms, I built collaborative playlists with friends… but the recommendations seem stuck in a rut for me, probably because they can’t handle the size of my library (hundreds of artists and thousands of albums that I listen to regularly). The product doesn’t respect me. I’m actively researching ways to host my own music library and use something else for discovery. Recommendations welcome so this frog can escape this slowly boiling pot.
- splintercell 5y agoI think the main issue is that sometimes you just don’t want the song but other songs like that are fine, and other times you don’t want that song or any song like it. - Don’t play this song again but others like this are fine - Don’t play songs like this again
- blondin 5y agoi am actually impressed to see this come out cornell. i tend to see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic. they greatly reduce why a user would dislike something. i am annoyed at youtube only allowing me to choose from "i didn't like it" or "i have already watched it" for example. i have thousands of other reasons. that's why i don't use dislike buttons.
- 1_player 5y agoA dislike button is too simplistic, but having no way to dislike something is extremely bad user experience. How do you train a recommendation engine without a negative signal? Sometimes I dislike something and I don't want it around anymore. Which is the reason I've migrated to Youtube Music, which is an inferior product, but has a dislike button.
- Bluecobra 5y ago> i tend to see like and dislike buttons as too simplistic. Same here. I’m still a big fan of star ratings in iTunes, though I’m not sure if they do anything or influence playback. I have a pretty eclectic taste in music and only want to hear certain songs once in a while and I give those songs get three stars. (Sorry Donnie Iris if you are reading this.)
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you really like rating and being a music critic https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- young_unixer 5y agoMi problema con Spotify es que cuando le hackeo la cuenta a un gringo y escucho mi música, a este le molestan las recomendaciones latinas y despues de un tiempo deja de pagar la cuenta.
- vadfa 5y agoHow do you even handle this? You can't both be listening music at the same time. Are you sure the gringo doesn't stop paying because he keeps having his playback stopped?
- young_unixer 5y agoIt was a joke referencing another comment in this thread, but it got flagged, so it was probably coinsidered bad taste.
- schmorptron 5y agohue hue hue hue
- dmitriid 5y agoYou know what would improve any recommendation system? A button that says (and does) "wipe my recommendation profile clean, and start learning recommendations from scratch".
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want to start your recommendation journey from scratch: https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- unstatedAnswers 5y agoSure, it would be useful… if users used it. My guess is they don’t. Did you use the like/dislike buttons they tested on Spotify radio? I didn’t, too much effort. They probably get more signal from the skip button
- short12 5y agoI've used it extensively on Pandora for probably a decade now and it makes a station go from great to spectacular
- mey 5y agoIt blows my mind that some of my Pandora stations are more than a decade old and still listened to regularly.
- MaxikCZ 5y agoI would use it, and dont understand why its only avaiable in Spotify Radio and not everywhere. I think my dislike of a song in an album can still be utilized to refine my suggestions. Whats worse, there was a song that was constantly playing after my playlist ended. No matter how many times I marked the song as Dislike, it was always in first of 5 songs that play when playlist finished. Made sure the song appeared nowhere in my playlists (had to manually search in each), and neither did the artist. After contacting support and jumping trough few "restart app" styled suggestion, I was suggested to mark the artist as "never play this artist". This surprised me, as I never seen that option before. And then I understood why: its only in mobile version. You cant solve it on PC. Bleh
- jorgesborges 5y agoSo basically they’re developing a product marketed to streaming platforms to identify what’s “more attractive” to consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user). That’s exactly why I’m unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I’m being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what’s currently in vogue, and not just artistically but politically, with playlists like this-gender-race supporting this-cause. I actually just want to listen to music. I still use it but stumble my way through looking at related artists while avoiding playlists and recommendations.
- wara23arish 5y ago100% I remember seeing a promoted playlist about empowering women voices (this is music) I was so confused. In literally most of the world, this isn’t even a point of contention.
- snthd 5y agoThey're probably trying to offset the guilt they feel from payola[0]. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-input-in-your-personalized-recommendations/ https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-11-02/amplifying-artist-in...
- rhcom2 5y ago"In honor of the revolution, it's half-off at the Gap"
- blondin 5y agooh and for streaming platforms. sometimes, it's just because that song you recommended (and started playing) should not be played after the one that just finished because it ruins the mood. this has nothing to do with the song itself. so again, reducing it to like/dislike buttons is missing a great deal.
- Groxx 5y agoI have really been hoping for a spotify-API-driven recommendation engine to improve this kind of thing. Which is why I've been scrobbling to last.fm for over a decade. One algorithm will never work for everyone. Even if it's one of the best in aggregate, that doesn't mean it's not awful for me. It's not feasible (nor does it make business sense) for Spotify to identify and build the best system for each individual user, so I really don't expect them to do more than optimize for the majority.
- mjmsmith 5y agoMe too. I still find more interesting stuff by following last.fm recommendations than anywhere else. Apple Music knows the 10k songs that are in my library and its suggestions are still meh.
- dagi3d 5y agoI just wish they fixed the problem with the bands disambiguation. I just hate everytime I get a recommendation in the release radar for a band that happens to have the same name as the one I like but stylewise they have nothing to do with the music I usually listen.
- gs17 5y agoI'm still stuck wondering if one artist I found recently had a very different style originally, or if it lumped two unrelated acts together.
- oriolid 5y agoThey do lump unrelated acts together. It's somewhat obvious when one of them is a current young musician and other had their career in 60s.
- n8ta 5y agoYou can email them and they'll fix it. I've done this twice. It takes about a month but they do get to it.
- speedgoose 5y agoI have done it too, they have a standard procedure in their support platform.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoGaylord! One is a progressive blend of funk, hard rock, jazz, psychedelic from New York, active in the mid 90s to 2010[0], and the other is an anti-fascist (anti)black-metal band from London formed in 2018[1]. Both are interesting, but I only like the music of the first one. Google Play Music used to mix them together. [0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_(band) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaylord_(band) [1]:https://genius.com/albums/Gaylord-band/The-black-metal-scene-needs-to-be-destroyed https://genius.com/albums/Gaylord-band/The-black-metal-scene...
- nonameking2026 5y ago[flagged]
- spurgu 5y agoI'm sure a lot of artists would be offended.
- Yuioup 5y agoYeah if I could dislike Coldplay a million times I would.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- HKH2 5y agoA 'don't play any of [artist]' feature would be very effective, so they will never implement it.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoYou can do this if a song is on release radar or discover weekly
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want the opportunity to dislike Coldplay ;) https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- greggman3 5y agoI cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your history https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we-clear-Recently-Played-songs-from-our-history/td-p/5131603 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we... Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recommending music, ever
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- sam_bristow 5y agoI'm in a similar situation at the moment. Somehow Spotify has decided that I listened to a bunch of Hindu music a couple of months ago and now over 50% of my recommended playlists and podcasts are in that genre. Their refusal to let you delete history is just puzzling.
- sodality2 5y agoSounds like your account was stolen and sold for premium status, possibly.
- sam_bristow 5y agoI think more likely is I searched for something, hit the wrong result, then got distracted while it was autoplaying through related artists for a few hours.
- blackoil 5y agoYou mean Hindu religious/fusion music or Indian music?
- approxim8ion 5y agoYouTube music has both like and dislike buttons. I don't use them as much as I should, but I'd be interested in the results.
- judge2020 5y agoYT Music works pretty well for me, using the dislike/like buttons for when I know what I think about the song and just skipping when i'm just not in the mood for that song.
- mey 5y agoThe time invested in my Pandora stations keep me on that platform. I actually really hate that they recently removed the downvote buttons in the Android auto interface.
- wly_cdgr 5y agoThis is the #2 feature I most want in every music streaming app (The feature I most want is an interface for tweaking the rec algo to my liking - at minimum, for being able to crank up its adventurousness. Rec algos are depressingly conservative as a rule, I guess because most customers are the kind of people who eat at McDonald's when they travel abroad, stay at package resorts, and complain movies have gone to shit because they can't find anything they like on Netflix or Hulu)
- kortex 5y ago> at minimum, for being able to crank up its adventurousness. Absolutely. At times, it makes me wanna blast it with cosmic rays, induce a burst of mutations, mix things up. Just give me a knob. Sometimes I want to stick on one specific sound. Other times I need to explore.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. The recommendations are more "risky" than your typical streaming app recommendations. https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- klyrs 5y agoAn option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them. Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I only like listening to one at a time. I don't want a rap mix to be invaded by a Bach sonata. And yet...
- gundmc 5y agoI listened to one episode of "Call Her Daddy" because I saw it ranked as one of the most-listened podcasts out there and Spotify will not let go putting it front and center on my home screen every day.
- jonathankoren 5y agoI was using Spotify for podcasts because they were there, but then my home feed got dominated by them, and they occasionally get queued up and giving me a mix of podcasts and music, which I don’t want. I started migrating to Apple Podcasts so I can context switch more easily.
- bkraz 5y agoI agree. Spotify acknowledged the request to remove podcasts from the home screen in June of this year: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Podcasts-Option-to-disable-or-hide-podcasts/idi-p/4812243 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po... Keep adding votes and pressuring them.
- ardit33 5y agoSpotify had both thumbs up and thumbs down button a while ago. It even asked why do you thumb down something: Wrong Rec Do not like the artist/show less Do not like this song Heard it too many times/pause for a bit etc... It got removed... as the whole functionality (Radio) got phased out, and the new stuff didn't incorporate it. Employees changed, and moved on to other companies, and the new that came didn't think it will improve things. etc... and the feature got forgoten. I think a lot of people in here are asking a 'reset my recommendations' feature. And that did exist as well at some point. Not sure why it got removed/it is not in production.
- notyourwork 5y agoYou might be on to something with the idea that it was there it was removed. I might presume it was removed because data showed that customers don't use it. The rest of this thread seems to think otherwise. The idea of resetting recommendations is a minority feature ask from customers as well and I wish companies (including my own) handled that better. Sadly its a pretty expensive project for such a minority stake.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. It's like a Tinder for Music, so the dislike is a big part of the recommendations: https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- lethologica 5y agoRadio functionality is still there but it’s a shell of what it used to be. I find it absolutely useless now actually because all it ever seems to do is play music I’ve already added to my library.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoEach time the dislike button is pressed, it reminds the user that they might want to unsubscribe. So they removed it ;) I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations. We actually embrace the dislike button https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- Oddskar 5y agoOf course they can't add this: they're too busy rebuilding the UI so the (I assume) new Art Director can climb the corporate ladder.
- californical 5y agoYup - cancelled my Spotify account a year ago, after they changed the UI for the 15th time, making features that I wanted to use harder, and pushing things on me that I don't want (podcasts). And introducing bugs constantly in some of the non-default features that I used a lot (eg. changing playlist sort order was broken at one point). Add to that their shuffle playing the same ~20% of songs in my playlists, and never hearing the other 80%, for some unknown reason. Then being gaslit when I tried to report "bugs". It was just constantly frustrating to battle them, so I switched to Tidal, and it's been amazing. The UI is just simple and lets me play music, and nothing has broken in the last year. The only changes have been minor improvements that make it even easier to do the one thing that I want: to play music.
- ant6n 5y agoI find Spotify is riddled with small annoying bugs and antagonistic UI, I'm really really sick of it. Instead of having a discussion about how it could be improved, maybe we can have one about which alternatives exist and how good they are (tidal, is it?) EDIT: I tried Tidal, that app has a confusing mess of an interface just like Spotify. Plus they have a "convenient" bug during sign up that may sign up students with more expensive non student accounts.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want a pure discovery app, with a focus on likes/dislikes feedback https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- switch007 5y agoMy Spotify Weekly is infested with Swedish songs. I don´t know if this is because I once listened to a Swedish song or because Spotify is Swedish. Their support told me me there is nothing they can do
- endorphine 5y agoI'm deliberate about any new music I hear, that I never use Spotify's recommendations. I prefer doing my own research and digging for stuff that I might like.
- VBprogrammer 5y agoOh, what I'd give for a dislike button. I tend to use Spotify to listen to nursery rhymes in the car while traveling with our toddler. This doesn't mean I need to have a daily mix full of nursery rhymes and there is no way to tell Spotify that.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations that takes into account your dislikes https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- jhoechtl 5y agoIt would improve any social network. Leaving dislike out is like voting without a Ney button
- dfdz 5y agoI have seen this article before. The author are so close to understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button >To dislike a song is easy – to like one, you have to actually invest time in it. Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the dislike button. In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: there needs to be a way to distinguish between a user enjoying a song and the user not paying attention (in that case the user will provide no input whether they like the song or not.)
- jdsully 5y agoSometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or genre. A skip doesn’t imply I’d never want to hear a song again.
- charcircuit 5y agoA song you always want to listen to is better than one you only want to listen to sometimes.
- kristopolous 5y agoIt's far more complicated than that. Some songs have extremely long shelf life and others are extremely short. For instance, an "adult contemporary" station could probably get away with playing Elton John's "Tiny Dancer", a 49-year old song, without anyone thinking anything is weird. More popular songs of that year such as those by Roberta Flack or Gilbert O'Sullivan would not get the same non-reaction Some songs have even longer shelf life that are associated with real world things like birthdays, holidays, seasons, etc. It's pretty common to hear a set of Christmas music that was literally recorded during WW2 with everyone's approval. Some songs grow on people, others grow tired quickly. The classic example is novelty songs that specify a dance such as the cover of The Birdie Song by The Tweets or Black Lace's Agadoo, which reached impressive popularity and then were promptly forgotten forever. Ones that you may be familiar with such as Rick Martin's Macarena, probably gave you a headache just thinking about it. But not all. Chubby Checker's "The Twist", a song in this category of instructional dance pop music, has escaped the ban hammer of time. But overall the pattern of memory holing proscribed dance songs is robust, even for songs that developed a dance without actually calling it out, such as "Achy Beaky Heart". Also there's no asymptotic drop after release date. Some songs that are popular now and symbolic of an era weren't as popular when they were new and some have second lives when featured in say a television show, video game, or covered by a more contemporary artist. Every few years a new version of Gershwin's "Summertime" seems to come out followed by renewed interest in previous versions by people like Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin and Ella Fitzgerald. Should Ella Fitzgerald albums be recommended to people for the next 18 months now? Probably not the right way to interpret those results. There's an exogenous contextual reason for such things and those have to be accommodated for It's completely non-trivial and a simple model of skips and likes without sophistication behind it will dramatically fail to be anything other than an irritation
- nvr219 5y agoI feel like I'm the only one that doesn't really care about recommendation engines because I still don't use them. I get music recommendations from friends or music journalism the way I did pre-Pandora and it still works for me. Maybe I'm missing out on some sick bands though.
- refracture 5y agoI feel you. I haven't paid heed to a single recommendation Spotify has ever given me; Most of the bands I've discovered in the last several years were by way of Reddit or word of mouth.
- dgellow 5y agoI expect to be an outlier here, I also never use recommendation because I listen to the same stuff since 15+ years, and I couldn’t be happier :) Elder Scrolls and Castlevania OSTs (Symphony of the Night and Super Castlevania mostly) represent at least 90% of what I listened to during the past decade. The other 10% is Shpongle and other soundtrack from games I enjoyed.
- vanilla_nut 5y agoAt the risk of wildly upheaving your music listening habits — give the Starbound soundtrack a try. I like the soundtracks you enjoy a lot and Starbound definitely makes my heavy rotation. And Stardew Valley, but that has the addedcool factor of being made entirely by one guy.
- snthd 5y agoListenbrainz[0] looks like an interesting project for building better (or at least more open) recommendation systems[1]. [0] https://listenbrainz.org https://listenbrainz.org [1] https://blog.metabrainz.org/2020/12/24/playlists-and-personalised-recommendations-in-listenbrainz/ https://blog.metabrainz.org/2020/12/24/playlists-and-persona...
- thepasswordis 5y agoHas pandora licensed their music DNA engine to anybody? Pandora recommendations have always been 1000x better than anybody else. It’s not even a comparison.
- zz865 5y agoYeah I was wondering if Pandora had a patent on channels based on likes/dislikes.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoI find pandora recommendations to be absolute garbage and HEAVILY weighted to certain local maxima, typically favoring mainstream songs. A few that invariably came up for me that I remember and didn't block: This must be it by Royksopp Headstrong by Trapt Outside by Staind
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Pandora believes in the music genome project, the idea that if I like a song, I will like every sonically similar song, with a popularity bias, of course. If you want something better, give us a try: https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoI wrote a blog post some twenty years ago (good luck finding it) but the basic point was I went and Googled "Martin Luther King" and the third item was hosted on Stormfront (neo Nazi hosting site - IIRR cos no one else would host the sort of stuff on it). I surmised that some academic papers were linking to this and Google chose that as a positive recommendation. I remember realising then that what we needed was not just a link but a standrdised way of conveying attributes on the link (including not recommended). As everyone now infers from behaviour (time on page etc) but I still think there must be value in "this resource has this meaning to me and is important enough that i am labelling it"
- AtNightWeCode 5y agoFirst, Spotify likes have been broken since forever, things you not liked end up as liked tracks. Second, it is obvious that the recommendations are mostly based on what you previously listen to. Hence, all parents are spammed with kids songs. I think they made a fix for that now though. People does not act according to there believes and I have a hard time thinking that votes would beat history when it comes to mass consumption of music. Down votes are in general also known to cause problems. For me, Spotify recommendations are by far the best recommendations on any entertaining platform I use. I use them all the time. Compare it with Youtube for instance were music recommendations are repetitive and mostly irrelevant.
- xkgt 5y agoI am curious, what was the fix for parent's profile being spammed with kids songs? I hate to pay for a family plan just to maintain individual profiles when I never plan to listen on more than one device concurrently.
- AtNightWeCode 5y agoBacktracked and it was from an ad. The family plan was the solution I am afraid.
- saltedonion 5y ago“ Piki selects music from a database of roughly 5 million songs and incentivizes users by giving them $1 for every 25 songs they rate. The Piki interface plays a song, and then gives the listener the ability to rate it after different amounts of time. Specifically, the user can “dislike” the song after 3 seconds, “like” the song after 6 seconds and “superlike” it after 12 seconds.” These people are training on a completely different set of features than what Spotify is using. For example, listen time is likely to be a important feature where a short time or a skip will be a pretty good proxy for a dislike. In other words, the authors conclusions are conditioned on only using the features outlined in the article, like, dislike, and super like. And I’m not sure it will generalize for Spotify.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- werdnapk 5y agoDeezer has a button to not recommend tracks.
- juanitolol 5y agoSpotify does have a dislike button on their recommendation playlists and also, Spotify's recommendations engine is by far the best that have ever been on the market. It managed to discover new artists that I'd have never found unless I lost several dozen hours on Discogs. The important part is to train recommendation playlist accordingly.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- spondyl 5y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned the fact that Spotify used to have explicit upvote and downvote buttons like 5 years ago? I assume they decided they could infer the same metrics from users skipping tracks for example
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoSometimes you skip a song because you don't like it and sometimes because you're not in the mood right now. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- deeblering4 5y agoI think spotify should just hire DJs and run live radio shows. Its been a long time since the algorithmic playlists provided anything useful for me. I find most new music by listening to different online radio streams these days.
- hooande 5y agoI could swear that spotify had a dislike button, at least on the android mobile app. I remember using it on songs that I found annoying. It would continue integrating them into playlists anyway. The thumbs down dislike was removed from the app years (?) ago. I didn't use it very often, which is why I assumed they got rid of it
- fidesomnes 5y agowoke is broke
- campground 5y agoI'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music. I think you do have to prime the engine a bit. I "like" a lot of albums and songs. Every time I hear something new that I like I press the little heart button. Same when I discover music outside of Spotify (I listen to WFMU a lot). I make a lot of playlists. And I use the radio feature all the time. Click on the ellipses next to any song, artist, or album and you can "Go to radio" and Spotify will spin off a playlist of related music. I'm continually discovering new things that way. My Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists are always full of great stuff.
- ascorbic 5y agoI also find it strange. I find the algorithm incredibly good. I did link it with iTunes back in the day, so it started off knowing what I like, and I always Like tracks when I like them. Now I often find myself pressing like on most tracks on Discover Weekly because it's so good at recommending things I'll enjoy, and quite a lot in Daily Mix and Artist Radio too.
- hk__2 5y agoThe radio feature is awesome to discover new music. You can make a short playlist of a few songs you like, and start a radio from that. You can later tweak the playlist to change what you get in the radio while it’s playing.
- hkon 5y agoYes, same, I enjoyed the weekly recommendations for about a year, each week being recommended some songs which remain favorites. But the algorithmic recommendations then got heavily skewed towards Finnish rap music. Which made the recommendations garbage. The convergence towards Finnish rap is not uncommon on Spotify.
- oriolid 5y agoI've never had the problem with Finnish rap, but at one point the discover weekly was full of death metal. Also, for some reason they pushed really hard Ricky's Hand by Fad Gadget (awful, but at the time they had a well hidden ban button), Swamp Thing by Chameleons (kind of OK, but don't they have other songs?) and Love Will Save You by Swans (kind of OK, but do have long discography so why always that one song?)
- stuaxo 5y agoBack when lastfm still had a radio it had a ban button and that was essential (think it got removed after getting bought)
- zizee 5y agoI'd like something similar for Netflix. Let me click a "never show me this again" button. It would unclutter the interface so quickly. I suspect the reason we'll never see such a feature is because it would be quite revealing how little content Netflix has that is of interest to any one person, and how much filler they have.
- bombcar 5y agoI also suspect that these companies have tuned the algorithms to emphasize content that is cheaper for them to play.
- jerhewet 5y agoA "dislike" button would be helpful, but what I really want is a "I already own this album / track, and your recommendation is completely spot-on" button. You recommended this to me, and I agree 100% with your recommendation. Now that would be brilliant.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoOh happy days :) Spotify recommendations - at least for me - are generally useless. It feels like "here are some palatable suggestions. You might not actually like them but we're confident they're inoffensive (in a not at all interesting sort of way)." Mind you my range of musical styles is wide. But I went 2 or 3 weeks listening to Daily Mixes and heard nothing at all worthy of my attention. I hope Google does similar with YouTube. Why does it keep suggesting things I've scrolled past 5 or 10 times?
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoBecause assuming you don't like it because you didn't click on it, is too strong an assumption. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- hammyhavoc 5y agoFuck Spotify's recommendations. What counts are recommendations from people instead of algorithms. Intent is everything with making a recommendation. If someone I know recommends me x because y, then I know it'll be at least interesting, if not great.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoSpotify recommendations come from people (indirectly) since they are based on what people listen to. Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article, is based on what others have liked/disliked, so it works better. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- blackearl 5y agoI never used Spotify but I've been happy with Deezer, which does have a "don't recommend this song" and "don't recommend this artist", plus a "change mood" option which is helpful if I'm feeling more phonk than funk
- capex 5y agoWon't Spotify be able to tell dislikes by how quickly someone skips to the next song?
- cletus 5y agoI wonder if you really need a like or dislike button. I'm increasingly convinced they're both being used wrong. If you're listening to a random stream of songs there are only really two actions by the user that matter: 1. They keep listening. This is about the best "like" signal (IMHO); and 2. They skip to the next song. This is effectively a "dislike". Both can be situational not absolute too. But what does like/dislike gain you beyond those two signals? Liking something requires the user to do something but users only really do something when they don't like what's happening. Requiring explicit action to keep playing songs like the current one seems somehow backwards.
- max68 5y agoThat’s not true. I like the beginning of some songs, especially when listening to 20 min+ classical pieces, but not the end. A skip in that case doesn’t mean I don’t like it, but that I don’t want to finish it.
- charcircuit 5y agoGiving a song 6 minutes of watch time is still good compared to other songs.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoWhat you're describing is basically how TikTok works, it's based on the time spent on a piece of content. A problem with this approach is that sometimes we spend time on things we don't really like (think sexual or fake news content) so an explicit feedback (like, dislike, superlike) is helpful for the algo. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- winddude 5y agoI could swear they used to have a button that allowed you to remove songs from playlists
- DigitallyFidget 5y agohttps://i.imgur.com/k3doFqL.png https://i.imgur.com/k3doFqL.png This is my relationship with Spotify.
- 0898 5y agoDiscover Weekly is remarkably good at suggesting new music. But I’m surprised at how few of my friends use it. It doesn’t seem to be promoted prominently now. It’s a bit like how Steve Jobs proudly demoed Expose in Mac OS X 10.3, but then subsequent versions of the operating system progressively hid it - to the point almost no Mac user knows it exists.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoDiscover weekly effectively pushed lesser known artists. The major labels, who are important stakeholders, did not like that, so it got less promoted in Spotify. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- cushychicken 5y agoMaybe if it did Spotify would stop trying to convince me that I like Kurt Vile. I never, ever want Spotify to play "Pretty Pimpin" for me ever again.
- mberning 5y agoI would like to see varying levels of dislike. For me personally there are a wide variety of reasons that I might wish to “dislike” something and with something like Pandora I always have to wonder if the impact of dislinking will be appropriate. Some levels of dislike off the top of my head Hate the whole genre Hate the artist, but not the genre Hate the song, but not the artist And so on and so forth, the same applies on the like side of the equation as well.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoYou make some great points. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations that take dislikes into account https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- madisp 5y agoBut there is a dislike button in Spotify, specifically in the Discover Weekly playlist where most of the recommendations happen? https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Discover-Weekly-Remove-certain-Songs/idi-p/1184177 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Implemented-Ideas/Discover-...
- CamperBob2 5y agoThe dislike button seems to come and go at random. Sometimes it's available in the desktop app, sometimes not. Sometimes I have the option to dislike songs in CarPlay, sometimes not. It's as if they hired B. F. Skinner as an engineering consultant.
- siva7 5y agoNot only that, sometimes the dislike button doesn’t seem to do anything
- CamperBob2 5y agoExactly, hence the Skinner analogy (the power of intermittent rewards being a key observation in behaviorist psychology.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_reinforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Schedules_of_rei... The real hackers understand this sort of thing intuitively, and companies like Spotify pay big bucks for their insight. We nerds are just their tools.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoAnd most people didn't use it so they (mostly) got rid of it..
- coder543 5y agoNo... unfortunately, that has been gone for probably close to a year now, replaced with a "Hide Song" button that doesn't seem to influence the algorithm in any way.
- ipaddr 5y agoFor us oldtimers what is the best way to create a personalized spotify clone from your mp3s? Something to simulation the spotify experience or something to simulate a pandora clone?
- alvarlagerlof 5y agoI don't use the like button. Works for me. I think it picks up on me adding to playlists or skipping.
- toomanyrichies 5y agoI’ve said this in another comment here, but I see a lot of folks debating about the utility of a dislike button in terms of its improvement on recommendations, and I think that misses the point. If enough users want the button, that seems like a good enough reason to have it, even if they don’t use it. They may enjoy having the ability to express their opinion, which is an entirely separate derived benefit from such a button’s influence on their recommendations. It might even be a bit like the “Close door” button on an elevator. Sure, it’s rumored not to even do anything in some cases, but it’s widely available anyway because users appreciate feeling like they have agency over their circumstances (even if that feeling is built on a lie).
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. The interface is like a Tinder for music, and users dislike about 55% of the songs they are presented with, so the dislike button is an integral part of the recommendations. It's not there just to "feel good". Give it a try: https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- brenainn 5y agoA dislike button would be handy. There is that feature on some of the generated playlists, but I don't think they do anything. My two biggest issues with Spotify right now are: 1. Release Radar filled with re-releases and remixes, often from artists who have long since passed away. I want new music as in released for the first time. 2. Name collisions. I'm surprised this is an issue, but I will often get songs from different artists with the same name. And then I'm unsure if selecting "I don't like this song" or "I don't like this artist" will affect the actually intended artist. I've also reached a tipping point where I no longer find new music through algorithmic recommendations. To be fair it's taken about 5 years to reach this point. Now the good music I find comes from searching for curated playlists. It's come full circle as before streaming I got my music recommendations from blogs and friends.
- tehjoker 5y agoHow do you find good music blogs? I've basically given up on the recommendation engines and I don't have a ton of musically tuned in friends.
- kfarr 5y agoI still like https://hypem.com https://hypem.com as a meta music site aggregator. Also https://www.indieshuffle.com/ https://www.indieshuffle.com/
- gundmc 5y agoI used hypem religiously from 10 years ago or so. Good to see them still around!
- tkgally 5y agoA few months ago, I started listening to new-music programs on BBC Music Introducing [1], particularly the London program [2]. As you might guess from how I spell “programs,” I’m not British and have never lived in the U.K. But I’m an older guy who responds most viscerally to the same old songs I liked as a teenager. Listening to music created by young people today helps to get me out of that rut. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/M6hmZj0X5c8nxQQydfWjBW/bbc-music-introducing-radio-shows https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/M6hmZj0X5c8nxQQydf... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025tszp
- nhumrich 5y agoThe reason I still use Pandora.
- kjgkjhfkjf 5y agoIt seems extremely unlikely that nobody at Spotify has considered this. It's probably safe to conclude that Spotify are optimizing their UX and algorithms for different metrics than the ones used in this academic study.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoIndeed. Their metrics are focused on minimizing subscription cancellations. This means they give recommendations that are not surprising or risky. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want more exciting recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- cjlovett 5y agoI love my Spotify, especially love I can now use it in my Tesla. I mostly use it for podcast channels, like Joe Rogan and Charles Mizrahi. But I also rarely use their recommender, I mostly know what music I like or I get recommendations from friends I know well. A dislike button sounds like a great idea, even if it is purely for the psychological pleasure pressing it.
- can16358p 5y agoI don't think it's worth the additional complexity and having a "negative" element on the user interface. It's not only about the engineering and sucking that last bit of optimization from a technical perspective, it's also about creating a product/service that people love and embrace. Something with a negative-though invoking elements like a dislike button wouldn't be in favor of that. Spotify is a big company and I'm pretty much sure that they've thought about adding it multiple times throughout years. If they haven't, there must be a reason.
- jiahaiqi 5y agoIt's a good idea, and when I'm listening to a song, I want to be able to recommend songs to me through my favorites, so that I can hear a lot of songs that not famous but that's nice
- aaron695 5y ago> But Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they still not let you vote down a song? Sorry, but what's the fucking answer? Yes, children know about dislike buttons. Why does Spotify (Google says worth $10-$66 billion) not have one? It's certainly not because the algorithm is hard. So, once they can answer that question perhaps they might be able to improve things? Or is academia officially just a citation farm now? Does HN think a multi-billion dollar company is to stupid to think up and implement a dislike buttons because that's the game now, we think we are smarter than them on nonsense criteria? Clearly Spotify will have looked at Dislike from the start, will have looked at Dislike from inference (Users actions, like skip or lower volume might imply Dislike) from the start, will have looked at interactions (what was played previous, is it their first time hearing it) around Dislike from the start and rehashed this 100's of times using highly intelligent, well trained mathematicians and whoever else's.
- MutableLambda 5y agoI used to use Pandora (even in Canada with VPN), but the sound quality deteriorated for some reason and player options aren't so great. Even with a paid account it sounds worse than Spotify and library is not that huge compared to Spotify. But back in a day in was an example of a perfect service, where you could just say what music features you like and it would play everything close to it, expanding the boundaries. You could also dislike songs and like them (which made channels really really convenient). I wish Spotify could do something like that.
- amotinga 5y agoI'd like a ban button on a song. I like listening to various genres when I work out depending on the mood, but as soon as I hear 'pussy' I want to throw my phone out.
- stevesearer 5y agoI’ve kind of been getting back into listening to the radio recently. Am curious if there are any radio station-style djs one can support through Patreon where there is a mix of banter and music you can listen similarly to a podcast, though more regularly like a morning show.
- quadrangle 5y agowhen are we gonna have an anti-pandora or anti-spotify that specifically shuffles non-randomly to provide maximum diversity?
- jrm4 5y agoBy observation; why crowdsourced recommendations for music suck is that there's no "cost" to being a critic/influencer, and therefore no real effective filter. I realized that this is why current hip-hop is so much worse now; it's not (mostly) the artists; its that the "filter" used to be much more ruthless. Fewer opportunities for deals and "difficulty" in being an influence (e.g. DJ gigs, selling tapes from cars, general violence, general censorship etc etc) weeded out every content that wasn't good and every participant that wasn't dedicated.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoWant to be a music critic? I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- userbinator 5y agoFor brevity and the same length of text, I think it should be called the Nope button. (I thought of Hate, but it's too strong if the existing one is Like and not Love.) ...but whatever happened to rating instead of binary choices? I have a theory that making people think of things in only binary terms intrinsically causes divisiveness.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoExactly! I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- 01100011 5y agoThings I want from Spotify: - Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom. - Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists. - Hide the damn podcasts. There will never be a situation now or in the future where I want to use spotify to listen to a podcast. Users should be able to hide them. - Improve your audio quality. I've shamefully returned to bit torrenting flac files because some of what I've heard on spotify is so bad. Part of that is because I want access to a vinyl mix. - Your interface sucks. One thing I liked about Google Play Music was easier access to an artist's discography. Please give me an option to hide "Popular releases" or put a quick access button to reach either Albums or a full discography at the top of the artist's page so I don't have to scroll down and hunt for an easily missed label to reach the discography when I use the Android App. When I start the app, there should be a search box ready to go. I shouldn't have to click the magnifying glass and then a search box. Either put a search box/icon on the home screen which goes direct to an input dialog, or make the magnifying glass respond accordingly. I miss Google Play Music. It wasn't perfect but it was, in my experience, a far superior product. It's regrettable that YouTube Music is such a dumpster fire.
- lrem 5y agoWhile YouTube Music is still a clear regression from GPM, it's slowly catching up. Any year now it'll be good... But it seems it might already annoy you less than Spotify? Which is interesting, most people seem to believe Spotify is superior.
- 01100011 5y agoDid it stop mixing YouTube likes with music likes? Destroying my 'liked' music playlist was an unforgivable sin in my book. Fortunately I was able to get my old GPM info with Google Takeout before it went away, so I just scripted up a solution to recreate those likes on Spotify.
- 5y ago
- marsven_422 5y agoPeople would dislike "woke" music and podcast, we can not have that.
- Agentlien 5y agoIt's not just a matter of recommending songs I don't like. While Spotify does this a lot it wouldn't solve two more subtle issues with its daily playlists and random play: 1. Even for artists I really like it tends to always choose the same few songs. It's especially annoying for artists with a huge discography. 2. There seem to be some categories which Spotify uses for its daily mixes which don't make for good playlists. As an example I mostly listen to metal but also a fair bit of softer Swedish music (Lars Winnerbäck, Peter LeMarc, ...). For a few months now the one of my daily mixes based on this type of music has also had a few Swedish hard rock artists that really don't fit. Mainly Mustasch, which is a great band, but I don't want to hear them in this context.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- musesum 5y agoHmmm, there is a dislike (Song | Artist) feature on the Desktop version -- as least for the Discover Weekly channel.
- tempestn 5y agoI'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted. I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could even be optional; they could just treat like and dislike as 4 and 2 or something, and let people who want more precision use them.
- lanevorockz 5y agoThe more information the better, thing is platforms want to sell their content first and foremost. This removal of user input was pushed by the business so they could push content regardless of personal interest. Ever wonder why Netflix keeps on pushing bad content ?
- lrem 5y agoWhat is Apple selling to have so little settings in MacOS? ;)
- kettleballroll 5y agoDo you have any evidence for that claim, or is that pure speculation on your part?
- nickmyersdt 5y agoI don't have any written or direct evidence, however I worked for a public service broadcaster, who regularly dealt with Apple and Netflix, and the feedback from both was that star-rankings were driving a lot of royalty payments and user choice (people would ignore poorly ranked content). The impact of this was that low performing content providers made less money. By removing the collective scoring, the company would implement their own recommendations algorithms, which gave them the ability to both deliver 'better' recommendations based on what the user consumed and spread the royalty payments more broadly. If what you wanted was to see what everyone else was watching/listening to though, that's not in the interest of their business. Anecdotal and third hand but I believe the people that relayed this to me.
- raffraffraff 5y agoLast.FM could have been great. Back in 2005 (17 years ago!!) it had a veritable encyclopedia of artists, albums and tracks, a decent recommendations system, "neighborhoods" that matched you with other users who listened to similar artists (and they even told you what you had in common so you other ignore users whose 12 year old also likes the Barbie song). You could add specific users to a 'Friends' section. You could look at their music libraries. Last.FM invented scrobbling (AFAIK)... Once upon a time my wife and I both paid them a monthly subscription for ad-free music. You couldn't play whatever you liked, because of the licensing model - instead you could pick a "radio station" based on your neighborhood, a specific neighbor, your likes, a band, a genre or even your whole library (ie: everything you ever listened to). It was really great for discovering new music, had a great interface, and had built-in love/ban buttons. Right when the world was about to lose its shit over the inferior Spotify, Last.FM absolutely fucked up. Instead of running a stable infrastructure and licensing music for on-demand streaming like Spotify did, they mismanaged their infrastructure, making music borderline unplayable. They had site outages. They broke their API with backward-incompatible changes. Once they proved beyond doubt that they couldn't run the streaming infrastructure, they gave up trying simply added a Spotify play button. And there went the only reason to give Last.FM your money, because now you had to pay Spotify anyway. Pathetic. A wasted opportunity. If I could have the Last.FM from a decade and a half ago with on-demand music and stable infrastructure I'd take it over any other service available right now.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, it's like a modern version of Last FM https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- raffraffraff 5y agoAh. Are you spamming the comments here to push your app?
- unglaublich 5y agoI listen to some background noise during the night when sleeping (rain, wind, that kind of stuff)... now, any mix, recommendation and whatnot consists of "soothing noise; relaxing Japanese traditional music; sounds of the beach" etc.
- nickstinemates 5y agoThe more I use Spotify, the less intuitive it becomes. The left bar is a mess. Playing specific albums, looking up discography for a band is painful. The home screen is less than useful.
- darthrupert 5y agoSpotify going IPO was the number one reason I dropped them on the floor. They now officially care only about profits and since they pretty much have just a single product, this means users are fucked. I begrudingly went to Apple Music and am missing my cd-ripped/torrented mp3 collections... Why does the free market have to consistently ruin every service?
- spywaregorilla 5y agoApple music isn't run by a profit motivated public company?
- darthrupert 5y agoSure they are but the significant difference for the consumer is that Apple has way more than one product.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThat's very silly reasoning imo. You're making decisions on believed future indicators and ignoring the actual present facts.
- hilyen 5y agoSpotify should have an accessibility feature that shows the lyrics for people who are hard of hearing or have APD.
- devoutsalsa 5y agoNo dislike button is why I didn’t use Spotify.
- mostelato 5y agoI always thought the skip button would get treated as a dislike
- techas 5y agoThere is a “don’t play this artist” option. With a coarser granularity they have the “unlike” information.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agobeen using spotify for about 5 years and i swear the recommendations get worse and worse. i can't use the release radar or discover weekly playlist because they're so awful. maybe thats a reflection of my usage, but would be nice to have a way to reset the recommendations or dislike. there wasa period when i would keep static noise from spotify on the background for a few hours and now 80% of my recommendations are static noise. annoying
- liquid_x 5y agoBiggest issue for me with release radar is that Spotify still doesn't handle the case that multiple artists use the same name while not being close to the same style of music. (Exodus the trash metal band isn't remotely the same as exodus the gospel group)
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoyeah it doesnt seem like a very nuanced system, well at least the end result doesnt.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations that fundamentally use your dislikes as an input https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- jstummbillig 5y ago> Cornell researchers recently asked the question: Why do they still not let you vote down a song? They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song. They also had a dedicated dislike button and removed it years ago. Apparently what they are doing now works better. > Specifically, they demonstrated that a listener is roughly 20 percent more likely to “like” a song if the algorithm is trained on 400,000 likes and dislikes, compared to an algorithm trained only on that amount of likes. Building a naive recommendation engine and giving it more good data – paid for, and also not factoring in the difference in time spent acquiring it – will obviously yield better results in a direct comparison. Striking a comparison to what Spotify is doing is pretty naive.
- jorvi 5y ago> They do. "skip" does things other than skip the song. This seems very unlikely as some people enjoy listening to just certain parts of a song.
- owlmirror 5y agoDo you know if the algorithm takes that into account? I also became suspect of the behavior of the skip button, I sometimes skip songs of artists I really like and could observe that I did not get them recommended anymore until I explictly played a song of them. Of course this could be just random luck but it made me careful to skip my favorite songs and instead I open the playlist and select the next song.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoThe algo simply bans the songs you dislike. Skipping might just mean you are not in the mood for that song right now. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- heed 5y agoWhen you remove a song from one of the auto-generated playlists (Discover Weekly / Release Radar) the app requires you to specify a reason, “I don’t like this song/artist”. Isn’t this effectively a dislike button? Or is this input not used in playlist generation?
- shmerl 5y agoDislike button will reflect mass market not understanding good music. Bad idea.
- another-dave 5y agoWould be great if Spotify had * "good fit"/"bad fit" button — I like a wide variety of music, but it needs to be appropriate to context. If I start a radio from a song, I'd like to teach it to tailor the suggested songs better but that doesn't mean I dislike the songs it _is_ suggesting. * Ability to give the social context — a band playing at a music festival will lean more towards hits in their back catalogue. At their own gig they may play some obscure stuff that die hard fans will really like. Similarly, what I'm listening to will be different if I'm having a party, friends over for dinner or on my own. On a family account, you should also be able to say who is listening & it should tailor to music that you might all enjoy. * I get that they don't want to block artists/songs completely but they _should_ allow limiting how many times they suggest it per day. If I've listened to Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac on one playlist I probably don't want to hear it again an hour later on another playlist
- brewdad 5y agoGood fit/bad fit would be genius. My musical tastes can be all over the map. From 80s pop to jazz and swing. Sprinkle in some Icelandic metal and rap and hip/hop. Don't leave out the occasional polka or Taylor Swift. My moods can change day to day and a more accurate playlist would be a Godsend.
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoThere is an opening for this. I would switch streaming service for a better shuffle algorithm.
- ytjohn 5y agoI haven't used it in a while, but this was a big advantage of Pandora for me. With pandora, you start a 'station' with a few seed songs and as you like/dislike songs, it keeps refining the station. The downside to Pandora is that you can't choose your music. You can seed a station with a specific song, but that song might not be the first one played. What I really liked with Pandora was that it was really good at producing endless playlists for me to listen to at work or car rides. I was a paid subscriber when I worked night shifts and drove a lot more. Spotify stations are really hit or miss. Sometimes the Spotify stations dive into foreign music and I can't find a way to specify which language of music I want to hear.
- rkuska 5y agoI always understood that when you skip a song the spotify counts that as a dislike.
- kuu 5y agoFor sure they use more than likes as a metric/feature for classifying the music you like/dislike. Skip most likely is one of them
- golergka 5y agoOne problem that I have with Spotify is just how often does it repeat songs. Yes, I liked it, I still do, but may be don't play it the times in one week? How do I communicate this and get to discover new music instead?
- Noam-grin 5y agoSO Cool
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- spywaregorilla 5y agoI'm very confused at the article and the comments here. Spotify does have a dislike button. It's the minus symbol. You click it, and can choose from "I don't like this song" or "I don't like this artist", and it will block them from recurring. For some reason, it seems this doesn't appear in music that you've curated yourself, but it does appear in playlists spotify makes for you, like discover weekly. Odd, but in my case that's the only place I'll be seeing new recommendations so it seems to fit my needs well. I find spotify's recommendation algo to be top tier. I get tons of low visibility artists on my recommendations that I think are awesome.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoDiscover weekly used to be left right and center in the app. Spotify is now more focused on streaming songs that are already popular. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- Pelam 5y agoI mostly use playlists generated by this service https://everynoise.com/ https://everynoise.com/ (you can get to them with desktop client by pasting playlist links from the site to the spotify client search box.) From the site: "Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 5,646 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2021-10-16. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier." I personally think that an algorithm trying to learn my tastes and recommend music to me is the wrong approach... especially as the algorithm does not actually seem to care anything about the actual waveform content. I feel I get get this strange "personal echo chamber effect" where I at least think I notice the effect of my past listening habits or the outsized weight of some stuff that was on powerplay some time ago. It gets hard to find new stuff or to learn to like new stuff. This varies though, sometimes the recommendations are great. Perhaps they work best for me if I don't constantly follow or listen to them, but instead listen to playlists curated by humans or everynoise.com.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want to get out of your echo chamber recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- jagged-chisel 5y agoI seem to recall Spotify did at one time have a dislike button. They removed it over the course of several UI iterations that renamed it, moved it to a menu, then the option vanished altogether. The closest thing they have now is “don’t play this artist.” Apple Music still doesn’t compare well with Spotify, but at least there’s a “play less music like this” menu item available. Edit: after reading more comments here - I definitely want options that include “dislike”, “not in the mood”, “you’re playing this to much”, “this does not belong on this ‘radio station’” -because I like the music, I just want it categorized correctly.
- epitactic 5y agoAn interesting parallel, Facebook and Twitter also do not allow downvoting, which may also have similar negative effects as Spotify's lack of dislikes: https://questioner.substack.com/p/our-violent-era https://questioner.substack.com/p/our-violent-era > So Twitter artificially removes all the negative feedback (the downvotes) and only shows the positive feedback (the upvotes), leading many of their users to the mistaken impression that their insane ideas are immensely popular.
- corobo 5y agoI always assumed skipping a song had the same effect My only problem with Spotify is that it seems to heavily lean on some songs, to the point I have to block them. I guess this in of itself questions my assumption I have a theory (read: confirmation bias) that "That's not my name" by the Ting Tings is cheaper for them to play or something the amount shuffle seems to want to play it. No matter how many other songs are in the list, if that ones in there it'll be played within 5 songs haha
- jeffe 5y agoAs someone who listens to numerous genres but is also selective with what I listen to, I am confident that spotify simply doesn't cater to my demographic. They are really about scaling to the masses, as is evident by their move into podcasts and constants frontpage ads on new releases, as well as aggressive song caching. From a business perspective, I believe its simply not worth the compute/development effort from their side to have a recommendation engine on par with say Pandora.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoI'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations for eclectic people like you https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- skrebbel 5y agoAt the risk of pointing out the obvious: Google's Spotify clone, "YouTube Music", has such miracles of UX design as: - a dislike button - a playlist that works like you'd expect - a "play album" button And tons of other similar totally obvious things that Spotify doesn't have¹ for no good reason at all. If you have no qualms about using a Google product that might end any day, then I think it's simply just Spotify, done properly. I think it's especially impressive since how meh Google tends to be at UX. As an extra bonus it has a huge catalog since it has both the usual label-provided music and everything that ever got uploaded to YouTube that their AI thinks is likely a music video. ¹ EDIT: I noticed, before rage-quitting Spotify over their terrible UX, that some of these omissions are platform specific. Eg IIRC their web player had a "play album" button but the Android app didn't, you had to either play an album on shuffle or hope that today's playlist state + star alignment would miraculously let you play the entire album when you started the first song. (YT Music looks and works exactly the same on every platforms I've used it on)
- lkbm 5y agoFun fact: you can downvote a song on YouTube Music and they'll continue to recommend it in your mixes or when you reaches the end of your current playlist. Since I have YouTube Premium anyway, I use YouTube Music, and before that used Google Music, but it's pretty terrible in a number of ways.
- aeturnum 5y agoThere are plenty of features on spotify I think could be improved but I have always been pretty happy with their playlists. What are the things that google does better?
- rapnie 5y agoI don't know about YouTube Music, but YouTube's recommender is doing such bad job for me, that I stand little chance to become 'engaged' (like eternally recommending the same video that I'm uninterested in but Google thinks I must see). I watch videos found by search queries, mostly via DDG too and not YT search.
- fomine3 5y ago
- sabujp 5y agoi would hope that spotify has an experiments system that they can canary
- jspash 5y agoA "Never recommend Joe Rogan again as long as I live" button would come in handy.
- NoPicklez 5y agoAs a Spotify user for ages, I can't understand why if I search an artist, I then can't see all of their songs in a list. I need to search their name, then hit the songs tab to then list all the songs under that query. I swear some time ago I could search for an artist, see their top 5 then scroll down and hit "See all songs".
- King-Aaron 5y agoI'm just still dark at Spotify over them adding adverts into podcasts, even though I've got a premium account. Grubs
- user_named 5y agoSpotify already has a button for removing a song from the recommended playlist. I would guess they already use that as the same signal as a dislike button. It's really just a difference in naming.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoThey don't use removing a song from a playlist as a fundamental input to their algo. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- pensatoio 5y agoI’m pretty sure hitting “skip” while listening to a catered playlist tells Spotify way more than a dislike button would. That said, I would love a dislike button just so certain songs don’t appear again. Not interested in hearing the latest tween pop track.
- Doxin 5y agoSo am I going mental or does spotify HAVE a dislike button? It's right there next to the like button![0] [0] https://i.imgur.com/UgUWUSk.png https://i.imgur.com/UgUWUSk.png
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoBecause the dislike is optional, most people don't end up using it. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- estranhosidade 5y agoI think many services nowadays end up offering a worst user experience in the name of "simplifying their interface" (I imagine this must be the only reason why Spotify wouldn't add this option). Not only on this case but, for instance, it would be nice if spotify easily allowed someone to import their playlist from other services, or even from some text playlist. But they don't add these options. And I don't understand why. Like, technically I assume it make sense for them to make as much of a pain in the ass to EXPORT your spotify playlists to other services, but they should make as easy as possible for the user to bring their favorite playlists and yadda yadda to Spotify.
- sasha_at_piki 5y agoExactly! Spotify already has a complicated interface and wants to keep things simpler. I'm the creator of Piki, the Cornell Tech app mentioned in the article. Give it a try, if you want next level recommendations https://piki.page.link/Rng5 https://piki.page.link/Rng5
- alexfields 5y agoYes, it would be great as they have weird recommendations just because you listen to one music; they will mess up your playlist recommendations.