We are living through the best ever time to be a music lover. With so much good music being made and added to the existing body of recordings, together with the

We are living through the best ever time to be a music lover. With so much good music being made and added to the existing body of recordings, together with the great (albeit commercially compromised) recommendation systems, it's just fantastic. Algos are useful for finding and playing music but they are just a tool. The human touch is needed to create the best musical experiences. That's why we need DJs now more than ever. To experience the best music, for you, you're going to have to do a bit of work to search out new sounds and old sounds. So go digging and create awesome playlists, for you, and share them: they'll probably be better than algo-created playlists. Algorithmic playlist systems are great but I believe we should counteract their prevalence by also supporting human efforts: by also listening to online radio stations and DJ mixes, supporting music journalism and publications (as well as buying physical media and merch, going to gigs, of course!) I don't understand exactly what this Google paper is describing but it sounds like it's going to anticipate whether I want to listen to up beat or down beat music. What a very googleish thing to do! - this doesn't help me at all. Also I'm turned off by it's opening statement: >We present a music recommendation ranking system that uses Transformer models to better understand the sequential nature of user actions based on the current user context. This comes across as nonsensical gobbledygook, but also a bit dystopian.