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> "if people would listen to what is more profitable to us, instead of what they enjoy listening to, we would make X more profit". I was ranting, immaturely, t
by drBonkers 3y ago
> "if people would listen to what is more profitable to us, instead of what they enjoy listening to, we would make X more profit".
I was ranting, immaturely, to my ML educated friend recently about how terrible modern discovery algorithms are ("if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?") when he explained this to me.
His response was "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit."
- mtillman 3y agoAnother good example of this is Apple’s “radio station” concept. It plays deep cuts unrelated to the originally chosen music about 3 songs into your list to spread the wealth (play songs with the smallest possible royalty costs).
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThings like this are super annoying to me, especially when Apple is engaging in it as well. Just like deduplication on cloud services, this "feature" is literally only beneficial for the company so they can reduce your file storage use and make your data less secure and have an excuse to get to know more about your data they can use for other purposes.
- democracy 3y agois it what dropbox did back in the days eh? ))
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI imagine they mostly all do it, with the exception of maybe Tresorit, possibly ProtonDrive but I am not super familiar with them. Its actually a "feature" of convergent encryption which Apple uses in lieu of true zero-knowledge e2ee like Tresorit.
- nwiswell 3y ago> this "feature" is literally only beneficial for the company Is this actually true? I don't know. I don't think consumer file hosting services would be viable at their present price points if they were storing every single file byte-for-byte. Certainly some of the value capture belongs to the company, but if you're not particularly concerned about security it seems like a win-win. If you are concerned about security, encrypt your files and everyone else with deduplicated files will subsidize the cost of your service.
- danielbarla 3y agoIt's not that they were simply smart and didn't de-duplicate identical songs; at some point they simply replaced instances of various recordings of songs with a single one. I could not be further from being an audiophile, yet I still understand the anger this could cause. Even at a basic level, there can be relatively major differences.
- threeseed 3y agoI don't think this has anything to do with de-duplication. It's likely referring to iTunes Match which is a paid service that allowed you to upload your own MP3 files to Apple who would then serve it to you alongside any purchased/streamed music. I believe that by default (but able to be disabled) your songs would be "upgraded" to the master-quality equivalent in Apple Music if they were identical. But then over time artists have been replacing those song with different versions/mixes.
- threeseed 3y ago> Just like deduplication on cloud services, this "feature" is literally only beneficial for the company so they can reduce your file storage use and make your data less secure Every distributed object store I've ever seen takes your data, chunks it into a fixed size, hashes it and then distributes copies on multiple nodes. So deduplication is intrinsic to the architecture and not some business decision layered on top.
- nikanj 3y agoAll the big players also take kickbacks from record labels for pushing selected artists. Essentially hit song astroturfing
- dreamcompiler 3y agoThis is called Payola. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola
- nikanj 3y agoIt’s illegal, but only for radio stations. Spotify et al are free to do ”product placement” deals all day
- llm_nerd 3y agohttps://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-royalty-rate https://artists.apple.com/support/1124-apple-music-insights-... Apple pays the same rate to everyone and for all music, and for what it's worth it is well known that Apple pays much more than Spotify does to artists. It is incredibly difficult to guess what related music people will like, and some people will like the selections, others won't. Apple recently added a "Discovery" station that tries to guess music you might like but don't listen to and I am a big fan of it, while many others absolutely hate it. Eh.
- mortenjorck 3y ago> if ML is so powerful why does Spotify exclusively serve up the steamiest of dog sh$t?" Has popular sentiment turned against Spotify’s algorithms? I thought their recommendation system was their most-respected feature – in my own experience at least, Discover Weekly continues to be Spotify’s moat.
- djaychela 3y agoI have pretty diverse music taste, and Spotify's discover weekly is nearly universally bad for me. My wife's taste is less broad, and hers is much better.
- rurp 3y agoI listen to a wide range of music and Spotify's recommendations had been really good for me. But more recently they have gotten terrible. It's really annoying and has made the service much less useful.
- dodslaser 3y agoI recently switched to Tidal, and decent recommendations are what I miss the most. While I prefer getting music recommendations from an actual person with similar taste, Spotify was generally good enough. That's more than can be said for Tidal. My recommendation playlists generally contain tracks and artists I already listen to (sometimes from completely unrelated genres), sprinkled with what seems to be random tracks from the "more like this" section of said artists. Still not enough to compensate for the shit stream quality and ever increasing price of Spotify though...
- smugma 3y agoEver increasing price? In the US and much of Europe, one price change since launch.
- droogthedroog 3y agoMy range is pretty broad as well, and over all I'm extremely happy with Discover Weekly. It's probably my primary vehicle for finding new music today, honestly. But it does seem to be pretty hit or miss for other people, for some reason.
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoCool story, but your friend knowing the answer has nothing to do with his ML education, I suspect, but with his business savvy. I say this because I used to work for a company in the online ads space; they were all knuckleheads but all of them would've told you the same thing.
- osigurdson 3y agoThey should then just have a “gold” version which does an optimal job for the end user.
- reustle 3y agohttps://Last.fm https://Last.fm connects to Spotify and can give you a bit more of an independent set of suggestions
- danShumway 3y agoInevitably what ends up happening in these situations is that some product manager thinks, "wait, what if we had a 'gold' version that people payed for and that version also pushed whatever content we wanted at them?"
- sampo 3y ago> "they aren't optimizing their discovery algorithms for your enjoyment, they optimize them for profit." Still in 2016, I could start with a song in genre X and then let Spotify autoplay for hours staying in genre X. I discovered some new bands I liked. Then circa 2017 or 2018 something changed. After a couple of songs, Spotify would switch to genre Y, and break my flow. I stopped paying for Spotify, and switched to Youtube, then Youtube Music. Youtube Music still does the good old thing, plays random songs staying within the genre I started with. Maybe Spotify is optimizing for profit, but my money they lost.
- rightbyte 3y agoIf you listen to some songs off track it will ruin the recommendation engine for a long time with Spotify. E.g. child music is the most obvious one. Having a party with people choosing songs ruins it. So in practice it is not very user friendly since you can't pause it.
- ansc 3y agoThere’s incognito mode for Spotify to avoid ruining your recommendations.
- rightbyte 3y agoDon't ruin my rant ;)
- sundvor 3y agoSpotify should still be able to realise when something completely outside of the normal is played. Maybe as a different listening mode, eg "Kids party" - and keep them separate.
- danuker 3y agoSometimes breaking the flow with something else the user enjoyed, for variety, keeps the user more engaged. But this behavior should be controllable by the user.
- solarkraft 3y agoFWIW, that's why I left.
- qingcharles 3y agoPeople always like to figure a conspiracy. It is very unlikely Spotify is optimizing their discovery for profit. Their algorithm is one of their primary selling tools and while it isn't unheard of for brands to fuck their goodwill to increase profit, I just don't see it happening here.