I'm a bit wary of logging in. Does Spotify provide OAuth with fine-grained control, i.e. will the page only get access to the music history or could it in theory change playlists and billing information?
It looks like they request these permissions: user-top-read, playlist-read-private, playlist-read-collaborative and they also gets your your name, username and profile picture.
The Pudding is, per the footer on that page, "a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays". It's been around for a few years already. https://pudding.cool/archives/
This looks really cool, but I wish it displayed some sort of lip service guarantee about not preserving my data. As-is I'm unable to determine whether this is a fun project or a kind of trojan horse to grab as much Spotify data as possible. (and obviously at the end of the day it comes down to trust)
Interesting. Judging by the people sitting next to me in traffic or at the beach, most people are perfectly fine with letting the entire world know what kind of music they enjoy listening to. Even when the rest of the world doesn't care and really really doesn't want to hear it.
By my reading of their privacy policy, it seems they will keep data they collect as part of a story or project.
Personally, I never use anything that asks me to sign in with something else. My data is my business and IMO there are plenty of ways to get a laugh without compromising privacy.
> Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..
After it picked the one very popular song I listen to in order to laugh at me for listening to non obscure things, ignoring the piles of weird random crap I normally listen to that nobody ever seems to know. Funny but not very accurate.
It picked out Brendan Byrnes as one of my obscure artists, though he is probably one of the more popular microtonal artists. It was able to pick out my own band as one of my "obscure artists", so I don't think "too unpopular" is a thing for it, haha.
12 hours ago was what, 5am London, Midnight East Coast?
Timing is everything. If a tree falls in the forest and 75% of the potential readership are fast asleep, does it make a sound?
(Numbers are fictional - and possibly eurocentric - for the purpose of conversation. I think the point stands with or without their veracity, it's just easier for form a sentence with values)
In theory you could account for this, right? HN (and reddit, etc.) could score based on how many typical voters have seen it, or just bias directly based on average active times across a week.
Dang sends email to people suggesting they repost it if he thinks it should have gotten more traction, probably an easier system. I could see reddit doing something like that but hn seems pretty basic
> oh great another Rise Against stan...
> You've been listening to a lot of Logic lately.
> u okay?
> >Yeah why
> no reason...
> Of course Twenty One Pilots.
Not gonna lie, I'm feeling a bit judged by this AI:)
On second thought I do think Paul Westerberg has a strong melancholy streak.
At first I had stuff "Waitress in the Sky" or "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" or "Alex Chilton" or whatever in mind, but now that I think about it there's a dark undercurrent to plenty of the songs in the core Replacements canon: "Hold my Life", "Unsatisified", "I Will Dare", "Bastards of Young", "I'll Be You", etc. - not to mention of a handful of slow tempo tracks with obviously dark themes.
I don't normally associate the Replacements with mopey music but in retrospect I'm not sure why. It's kinda all over the place, under a very thin veneer of drunken cynicism.
Exactly. To your point, I'm thinking of 'Swingin' Party,' 'Here Comes a Regular,' even the lovely 'Skyway' is melancholy at heart. Read 'Trouble Boys' by Bob Mehr to find out why.
Ha! I also got 26% score and it was ridiculing me for listening to Ed Alleyne-Johnson [1] and David Hicken [2] even though they are not even mainstream performers :)
Mine was wonderfully vicious too, though I am noticing we got some of the same synonyms (I was at 17%): "masters-in-creative-writing" instead of "please-read-my-manuscript" and I would much have preferred "walmart-hawaiian-shirt" over "tommy-bahama". That stung.
> You're stuck in the early 2010s. For you, music's been all downhill since Orden Ogan made The Things We Believe In.
Now I wonder if this is because my account is old, or if I really listen to that much old stuff, or if my favorite bands just don't release that much. Weird.
But I'm entirely fine with the other assments:
> Your spotify was renaissance-faire -too-much-power metal bad.
> Thank your obsessions with medieval rock and power metal (e.g., Sabaton and Dreamtale) for that.
> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
> hail-satan bad
> You are 0% basic. Ewigheim and Winterstorm? Where do you even find this shit?.
And I think winterstorm and ewigheim aren't even the most obscure bands.
I don't follow the recomendations, I click "Fans also listen to". Here is the rest of my assesment.
> Your spotify was moonshine-renaissance-faire bad.
> Thank your obsessions with Johnny Cash and medieval folk for that.
> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
> napping-in-your-mancave bad
> Here's what else is going on in your aural trash fire:
You listen to these tracks too much:
Enter The Ninja by Die Antwoord
Napalm Sunshine by Lying for Friends
The Lachrymal Sleep by Doom:VS
Thousands Of Bees by In Gowan Ring
The Seer and the Seen by In Gowan Ring
You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent:
VNV Nation
Winterfylleth
WEH
Rome
Falconer
You are 1% basic. Trepaneringsritualen and Svartidaudi? Where do you even find this shit?.
You're stuck in the early 2010s. You only listen to Obama-era jams like Ensigns Of Victory by Winterfylleth and Streamline by VNV Nation.
Everyone got the same message about the 2010s it seems. Don’t fail the Turing test. Or the reverse Turing test where an AI makes you question your own humanity. :)
It's about time for their next album. Got any recommendation? So far, I've found Ratatat are in their own league, nobody comes close to that very specific feeling and genre.
Well, unfortunately no. Ratatat is my lucky find. Heard their 'Gettysburg' while watching some random gaming clip that feature their music! and they're not my usual genre I've listen to. So Google is your best friend...
Other of my fav instrumental band is CHON, but they're more of math rock and not really the same.
> You're stuck in the early 2010s. You only listen to Obama-era jams like Nocturne in B-Flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1 by Frédéric Chopin and Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467: II. Andante by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The output it spitted out while processing was pretty good though.
6% basic.
AI hates me.
Apparently, Your spotify was overdramatic-instrumental-yoga-studio-heavy-eyeliner-post-punk bad. And this was just the beginning of the insults.
HN allows reposts of an article when earlier submissions haven't gotten attention yet. This is our way of mitigating the randomness of what gets traction off /newest.
It makes for a something of a lottery in terms of which submission ends up with all the attention, but it's on our list to implement some kind of karma sharing across multiple submissions. It's been on our list for years, but we'll get to it eventually!
Haven't used Spotify in over a year now so it'll judge an older me, but it apparently has my favorite Melon as a reference of good taste so it can't be all that bad.
Well, it absolutely hated me (Possibly because I have one massive playlist) despite noticing enormous amounts of Death Grips on my profile, and recommending me a Neutral Milk Hotel song at the end (which I was quite impressed with although it could've been a lucky guess)
> Oh wow Taim and Viper! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..
It's vaguely sentient.
It has some really bizarre opinions about certain songs - Guthrie Govan is basically a god amongst men for guitar players but it absolutely hates his work.
A final note: I assume this is a joke, but please don't try to objectively rank music.
> Guthrie Govan is basically a god amongst men for guitar players but it absolutely hates his work.
They apparently just took public reviews, but I geniuinelycan not imagine someone disliking Guthrie Govan. Maybe the score is also inversely proportional to popularity/# of reviews found? It'd fit into the hipster gag
Like/Dislike ratio of 6600/98, they must be extrapolating from some bad data (or possibly extrapolating from the genre not being particularly melon-y).
*ponders if "Obama-era jams" means music that came out during the Obama-administration, or music Obama would have jammed to when he was younger
Both have a lot of potential, as it would seem the former President and I have very similar musical tastes (that is: a very strong love for Stevie Wonder)
To be a “Stan” is to be a truly diehard fan, bordering on obsession. The term comes from the Eminem song of the same name. It can be used as a noun or a verb.
Just some fun history, but "stan" is actually a millennial portmanteau courtesy of Eminem [0]. It came out around the time the older Gen Z's were born, actually. Although, yes, it has seen a revival amongst Gen Z.
I was hoping it was a questionnaire about how bad Spotify recommendations are. I have no idea why Spotify feels the need to clutter my recommendations with radio stations like "Rap Caviar" and "Music for when you know you're the bad bitch", meanwhile it doesn't show me new releases for music I actually listen to because of all the irrelevant suggestions taking up space. I ended up creating a new account because apparently listening to a couple of podcast episodes means you want half your page filled with recommendations for shows on the same topic.
I’m really bummed at the amount of effort which is going into building walled gardens for podcasts. Yet another amazing thing on the open web which is dying.
I keep hoping that someone will crack the micropayment idea and kill advertising on the web.
Ok -- technically not micropayments and technically killing advertising is not a goal. But many of us are personally against advertising, and a viable alternative for funding free/libre/open works would certainly put a dent in advertising coffers.
You're right, but I'm grateful anyway. I used to listen to Joe Rogan's podcast sometimes (on Overcast, which is awesome)... since he moved to the vastly inferior Spotify platform, I don't listen to him at all. The platform is pure shit for podcasts, so I've cut Rogan out of my life, and saved many hours per week in the process. Not that his $100M is going to notice my absence!
Besides that, Spotify is now getting flooded with all those coaching podcasts.
How to flirt better. How to earn more money. How to be more lucky.
In the beginning there were lots of sex podcasts, seemed like everybody who had sex at least twice got its own podcast on Spotify, but now it's all filled with the generic stuff I already hate in the other places.
Yeah I can't think of anything I've missed by following Release Radar each Friday. It would be nice if it was clearer on Release Radar whether the new release was a single or an album. You can infer this from the single having a separate title than the listed album, but sometimes it's the title track.
It's not just you, I've literally never listened to a podcast on Spotify but they're front and center on the Home page for me too. I wish there was a way to turn them off, I'm just not interested in podcasts.
a big part of my motivation for going back to a local music library soon are those annoying ads at the top of the screen when you first open the app. its even more annoying that I am paying them for premium and there is still not option to disable them.
is pretty much the same reason I moved to linux because microsoft kept trying to push crap apps like candy crush on me even though I bought the "pro" licence. #everythingIsTerrible
I listened to a number of audio books by the same author during a road trip last year, this tells me I listen to this author to an uncomfortable extent ;)
I believe it focuses quite a lot on artists or tracks listened to a lot, and judging from the covers it shows it selects some top N songs for its analysis. Fun stuff though!
So fun! My score plummeted when I answered the interactive questions.
Hit a bug where it asked me “do you recognize this song?” And tried to play some audio, but nothing actually played. (Safari on iOS; could have been caused by an ad blocker)
Happened to me but it was because the mute switch was set to vibrate. Turning the switch let the song play. I guess unless the ringer is on iOS controls whether Safari can play audio?
Looking at title I thought it was rant about product quality. But it's not, so I'll provide mine.
Since 2013 when I've started paying for Spotify it has turned from one of my favourite apps to one of those I hate most. On my previous Android phone it would freeze every other day when there was no internet. Why? Who knows. Could be related to me using SD card, or could be something else. The phone wasn't very old, but still on many days it was basically unusable. Somehow I was gifted a new phone and it kind of works. I say kind of, because sometimes when I click on a downloaded album it doesn't work - no tracks display. Why? Who knows. And few days ago something bugged out and tracks suddenly started setting volume to max. Apparently it's known issue that appears occasionally. Why? Who knows. Happily I wasn't wearing headphones so I did not get hearing damage. But who knows, maybe this will happen again.
There is also desktop app which severely crippled local file support few years ago. That really sucked for me, because I record a lot of my own stuff and I want to listen to music in one place. I don't know if this was fixed since then because I pretty much switched to using web app, which usually works. There is also iPad app which seems to routinely delete stuff I have downloaded do my iPad; and sometimes it also freeze in offline mode when browsing my library. At this point I didn't even try filing a ticket with support, I lost hope of them fixing this. I suppose soon I will simply stop paying them and make switch to something else.
EDIT: Why post this here? I hope people at Spotify see that submission about Spotify is on top of HN, and maybe, hopefully, someone sees my comments and thinks twice about setting 2021 OKRs and put some capacity into improving the app reliability. I know, this is optimistic, but who knows.
I canceled Spotify and switched to Amazon Music Unlimited, primarily due to how buggy Spotify is. AMU does have one annoying bug I've found (that seems to have emerged after the recent redesign) but other than that it's been totally flawless. Reliable apps are such a joy to use. I feel this side of software is not appreciated enough anymore.
To add to the list of complaints... The Chromecast streaming feature is also broken. It will randomly pause in the middle of playback. This bug has existed for months and months. My configuration is very vanilla. Common phone, TV with built-in Chromecast, no other devices you could stream to on the network, stable internet connection...
I've got the polar opposite opinion to yours. Spotify has been God's gift to mankind as far as my experience goes. I'll get the negative out of the way first: their UI teams loves to keep tweaking stuff, which is annoying. It's a stable app and they should leave it alone.
Having said that, it's wonderful. I can download all my music. It has some truly wonderful playlists for when I'm coding. It's recommendation engine seems to recommend really nice tunes week after week. The yearly reviews, the On Repeat etc. all this stuff is really nice to look back at.
Then, I FINALLY have a podcast search which can search for podcast episodes and then, when I click on the search result, take me to tho god-damned episode instead of the full podcast with 2500 fucking episodes to hunt through. It actually has a sane podcast interface that isn't a cluttered mess.
I was so sceptical of it because I loved Pandora to the absolute hilt, but now it's the only Saas I pay monthly for.
I had similar opinion to yours until around 2015, then things started to break randomly. To be fair, I discovered some good stuff via recommendation and I like other features you mentioned (though I don't really use podcasts). However none of this matters when basic playback functionality is broken.
I completely fell in love with Pandora at first. New music discovery is one of my favorite things. Eventually, though, it stopped giving it to me. Despite having over 100 stations, I started hearing mostly repeats. Also, of the artists I liked, they were only playing me a small fraction of their work. And I missed albums.
Spotify has been a breath of fresh air, I switched a couple years ago. It is missing some stuff here & there, but I haven't hit too many bugs like others have (on Windows or Android), and their catalog is much bigger than Pandora's was when I was using it heavily. Turns out, what I needed was more content. What once seemed like Pandora's best strength - that 'special sauce' recommendation algorithm - is now clearly being done to a similar or greater level of competence by damn near everyone else in the space. And like you say, the podcast stuff has been solid & gotten better, too. These things never turn out how I expect.
And they removed most of your opportunities to steer recommendation. There should be a like/dislike band/song at every point in all UIs for paid users; there used to be but it was taken away from most places on most UIs. The community forum has thousands of votes on this matter and Spotify ignores it.
I suspect recommendation is more steered by contract agreements than showing you new bands you might like.
I have a similar experience, the mac client has been pretty broken for me in the last few months, it refuses to play about half of all tracks among other things. And opening of links to tracks has been semi-broken for years.
They have over 1k employees, surely many of them experience the same easily fixable flaws? My fav theory is, once a company becomes successful and big enough, noone wants to own problems, everyone wants to be part of new exciting projects with a purely positive outlook. And if business is going well, upper management has no reason nor (informal) mandate to get tough and make strong demands.
Couldn't agree more. Spotify is one of those products that I sort of almost can't live without but yet it's painful how bad they have become in the last couple of years. Instead of improving the service and customer experience, it only got worse (if I had the chance to straight up use an outdated client from a couple of years ago, I would!).
The fun thing is, my company has jumped on the agile train a while back (nothing wrong with that per se in my opinion), and Spotify was always that cool example "where agile works". Well, no idea what they're doing, but if their KPIs mainly consist of how bad of a UX they get away with, they for sure are very successfully improving their product.
It constantly forgets which episodes of a podcast I've already listened to, or where exactly I've stopped when in the middle of an episode. Their support for downloaded songs at this point seems to be almost non-existent (I stopped using spotify offline quite some time ago as it became too much of an annoyance). If a song I liked is not available anymore but is then available again, I have to like it again. It still can't differentiate between studio and live versions of songs which I would like to filter out (I hope someone corrects me that I'm just too dumb to find the right button). I once got an email that one of the bands I liked released a new album - but it was a band with an identical name (and never heard of before!); apparently, they send out mails by matching band names instead of some unique IDs (no idea how that passed any kind of review; must've been some mashed-together 11-hour release).
... the list could go on and on. The thing is; I really want Spotify to be good, it's what made me stop pirating music, it was just way more convenient. It still is, but it could be so much more, especially given all the cash they're rolling in.
Spotify on the Mac has given me lots of little issues here and there in the last year. It's incredibly frustrating to have to restart it now and again.
I have encountered situations where I hit PLAY and nothing happens, or I hit PLAY and it says it's playing, but there's no audio, or I hit PLAY and the app says it's unable to play the track. Restarting the app seems to fix most of these issues.
There are also scroll bugs when browsing podcast episodes. The scroll position will just jump to the same spot as you try to scroll down the page, making it impossible to view the episodes in a series.
Yes! One of the issues is definitely due to switching on/off Bluetooth headphones during playback. It has actually changed my behavior. I intentionally pause playback now when I turn on headphones.
This is the main issue I had as well. I'm on Linux, and tried all Linux flavors of Spotify that exist to no avail. I switched to Amazon and haven't looked back. You press play, music plays.
Spotify became entirely unusable for me when I started using Bluetooth headphones on my computer. When I turn them off, Spotify goes into some weird attempt to play every single song in rapid succession as it has no Output device to play to. Finally crashing so bad that I have to end the process and reopen it.
It doesn't help that I've reported that a long time ago and even though the QA triage should have marked this as a low hanging fruit, nothing has happened.
// rant end, I know this post doesn't help anything but venting is always a form of self-therapy haha
I agree about the Spotify desktop app. It got worse and worse. But for me there are different reasons. Especially the performance got worse enormously. Still running the 0.9.7. The old Android apps were way faster, too. I really miss those times. Hardware got better but software got so much worse it's pure insanity.
Funny, but I was hoping this might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.
Spotify constantly queues and recommends songs to me that are so bad, I can’t even imagine how there could possibly exist any data indicating that any significant sample of listeners has ever enjoyed hearing them. Spotify has 5+ years of my listening history, and orders of magnitude more data from listeners all over the world, and yet every time I set it to recommend anything to me I just sit there pressing “skip” repeatedly until I give up.
I always blamed myself, thought I was just becoming old and curmudgeonly in my 30s. But yesterday I finally discovered the problem isn’t with me. I switched to Apple Music, and it queued up 50 songs I’d never heard, and I enjoyed almost all of them.
I can use my HomePod now, too. I’m really loving Apple Music so far, highly recommend it to anyone who thinks their Spotify account is permanently broken like mine was.
I always thought my recommendations are that broken because I listen to two very different music directions. For now, I fixed it by finding new Music via YouTube and using artists playlists etc.. Apple Music is probably no option, though, as I'm exclusively on Android.
I've had the same problem. I like multiple genres but Spotify recommendations tend ever more toward overly harsh and angular electronica. I've tried retraining it multiple times by intentionally listening in a different direction but it never fixes the problem for long. Really frustrating.
Android does have an app for Apple Music though it's been years since I've used it. I was quite happy to pay the subscription fee but an update broke the whole app for me. It would play only a part of the song and then suddenly skip to the next one.
My music taste also diverges drastically but Apple seemed to handle it quite well IIRC.
Same here. Wonderful playlists. Constant exposure to new music. This discussion seemed to get people in the mood for the airing of grievances, so here we are.
Just a couple of months ago Spotify temporarily blocked playlist exporting and there was an uproar. And it turned out that a lot of the uproar was about those Spotify automagically created playlists. Read some sentiments, coupled with some Apple Music comparative opinions, here-
I guess it just turns out that maybe Spotify isn't for all people. Nor is Apple Music. Some discussions just draw out the edges from whatever side and it becomes the narrative.
If I remember correctly, they blocked API access for one user because that user was violating the API usage terms, namely exporting Spotify's content (their playlists) to competing services. I actually though that was pretty reasonable of them.
I wasn't aware that playlists can be copyrighted. And what's the difference between someone mechanically scraping playlists (because, quite frankly, spotify alter their playlists all the time -- I've experienced this with the Soul playlists they have), and someone hiring people via mechanical turk or getting 3 other people together to make text-based lists?
> I wasn't aware that playlists can be copyrighted.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but "a curated collection of units-of-art" seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to, independently of ownership of the actual units-of-art themselves (overly-generic terminology is intentional, since although we're discussing playlists here, the same argument could be made for, for instance, "a particular framing/hanging of visual arts")
> And what's the difference between someone mechanically scraping playlists [...], and someone hiring people via mechanical turk or getting 3 other people together to make text-based lists?
What type of difference are you interested in?
* Effective difference in terms of output? None.
* Spotify's desire to prevent people from doing so? None (they would want to provide both - and justifiably so, IMO, since, again, the playlist _itself_ is their own (algorithm's) creation).
* Likelihood of evading prevention? The MTurk solution is less likely to get shut down, for sure. That doesn't mean that you have magically gotcha'd copyright and that corporation will cease trying to protect their IP, it just means that you have found the next step in the arms race.
> I Am Not A Lawyer, but "a curated collection of units-of-art" seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to
I'm going to need a citation on playlists specifically being protected under copyright. I'm not sure how you can claim that what is effectually a simple plaintext list of things can be copyrighted. What original content there is being put under copyright?
As you already stated, they do not alter the music itself in the way that a rearrangement would, most media players provide fade-in/out functionality so they cannot claim that is unique, and they do not provide any supplimentary content to enhance the experience, at least not in the same way that a book published list, or internet top ten list would ordinarily provide some kind of commentary on the items.
What you're claiming here is effectually that, not even the content, but the mere titles of every single "top 50 foos" list on the internet can be copyrighted. Or that the rearranging of a book's chapters without any change to the contents, can itself fall under copyright
I'm not sure how anyone could think that this is at all a reasonable position to have? It's baffling, to be quite honest.
> I'm going to need a citation on playlists specifically being protected under copyright
And I'm not going to give you one, because, as I said, I Am Not A Lawyer (and even if I was, you're not paying me to be). But, regardless, note that I made no reference to copyright whatsoever - I said "this seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to". I'm making no reference to law whatsoever - just to what _I_ think is reasonable for a corporation to protect. You are free to disagree.
> they do not provide any supplimentary content to enhance the experience, at least not in the same way that a book published list, or internet top ten list would ordinarily provide some kind of commentary on the items.
The collection _is_ the supplementary content. If a Spotify playlist was a quasi-random collection of tracks from across the entire catalogue, then you'd be right, but they're not - the playlists are curated and specifically chosen to fit some niche (genre, artist-relation, time period, etc.). By virtue of _being in a playlist called_ (e.g.) "1940's Smooth Jazz", the songs are demarcated as being a) relevant to the particular criteria, and b) of a high-enough "quality" (whatever that means) that they have been chosen. So, yes, the plaintext-listing of those song titles _would_ have some value, just like a list of "(only the titles of the) top ten sci-fi novels of 2019" would have some value. I would, for instance, value such a list more-highly if it came from someone whose taste in sci-fi I respect and resonate with.
> What you're claiming here is effectually that, not even the content, but the mere titles of every single "top 50 foos" list on the internet can be copyrighted
Again, I'm intentionally _not_ touching on issues of copyright as legal status - but, yes, I am absolutely suggesting that someone who has gone to the effort of curating a "top 50 foos" list, _and_ of associating it with a powerful taste-making brand like Spotify's, would be justified in perceiving that list _itself_ as a valuable and protection-worthy creation.
---
After the cut because it's less relevant to the discussion, but:
> that the rearranging of a book's chapters without any change to the contents, can itself fall under copyright
I mean...if you _don't_ see how it could be possible for someone to remix the content of an existing artwork into a conceptually-new work, by making statements _with_ the playing-with-form, then I think we're just looking at art from fundamentally different perspectives and are never going to agree. If you truly _do_ want to understand my perspective, you might try thinking about how the consumption of art is affect by the context of how it is consumed and presented, not just the sequence of bytes/soundwaves/visual-elements that compose it.
+1 for the general fantasticness. I use the app on my iphone - no problems whatsoever. They even recently updated their watch app to stream directly (without the phone being nearby). Apple music has had this feature for a while.
In my experience Spotify's recommendations for my big anything-goes playlist are terrible, but the one's for my smaller playlist for mostly British D&B music (https://open.spotify.com/track/22Z4p2gRkDPqmw8DgVixML?si=jeb... - for a taste of the genre) can give very specific and quite good recommendations of smaller artists.
I'm not typically one to buy into conspiracy theories, but I really can't help but wonder if the Spotify algorithm favors songs that have more favorable licensing terms.
I had exactly the same feeling. The daily recommendations contain 80% from albums I've either already downloaded or liked (or auto-liked, which was also a very annoying thing I had for a while). The remaining 20% is recommendations of different songs of the same artists mostly.
With New releases it is different. If I ever play, say, a song someone else sent me to listen to in a different genre, then it screws up my recommendations here for months, sometimes forever.
Two years ago they were already shoving Drake all over paid subscribers' playlists[0]
I've paid for spotify for more than a decade and I definitely wasn't pleased to have every single playlist recommending an artist I don't like, and it was just ridiculous how EVERY[1] playlist had his photo regardless of the genre.
I'm surprised that they haven't taken a page out of Netflix's book: sign small artists that sound close enough to what's popular to their own internal record label and push them in playlists?
Don't wonder. Just be realistic. Did you ever work in an IT business environment? Remember the situations when good taste slowly morphed into business interests? Yeah, that's natural in a capitalist environment.
By no chance spotify dodged that bullet. Positivity and goodwill is fine but don't spare anyone from corruption.
It feels like it's a self-fulfilling spiral of bad music. The more I listen to the recommended music, the more of the same crap keeps getting recommended to me. Even if I skip them.
I remember that Spotify actually had pretty good recommendations when I first started using it at the start of this year, because I had only listened to the songs I actually liked so far. But now I'm lucky if I find one decent song out of a hundred recommended ones.
Seems there is exactly the same sort of discussion on another HN thread about poor recommendations from YouTube, also leading into a spiralling decline to more and more rubbish
It's not just media. Every year or so I reinstall the Swype keyboard and it works great. But after about a month or two it 'learns' from my jokey misspellings or starts learning a lot of my more obscure vocabulary and starts muddying up the very basic level of Swyping I actually want it to do.
It works great when it types out phrases as I swype and I go back and edit in whatever jokes, memes, or 10 dollar words I want to include. It starts to suck when it starts trying to include those into its predictions.
There's like a sweet spot of machine learning beyond which the machine gets more annoying than helpful.
Yeah. I've commented about this in the past. I have two YouTube accounts in different languages. One has great recommendations. One is terrible.
I wonder for the one with terrible recommendations if I fell into a particular failure spiral: YouTube tried to give me some new stuff for a period, but I happened to not like any of it. The AI noted I was just clicking suggestions from my subscriptions. It eventually tried different recommendations. I didn't like those either, and clicked videos I'd seen before from my subscriptions. Eventually the AI decided I only like watching videos for channels I'm subscribed to, and now doesn't recommend me stuff outside of that. Even when I branch out into a new area, it no longer suggests related channels or anything like that.
Similar experience for me - they always shuffle me most awful songs ever - I could never rely on their algorithms to the extent that no matter the mood/kind/playlist I choose, I end up skipping 20 songs that are just horrible and I just quit Spotify.
I wonder how much better algorithm could be if they'd recognise a skip within 10 seconds of a song as "no, bad choice, never play it again".
Their recommendation engine is really bad IMO. I was hoping for a futuristic machine learning + listening based recommendation engine that could find similar songs based on what they actually sound like. Mostly they just find songs based on what other playlists your song exists in. It's really boring and not good at finding new music for me. It does OKAY and it isn't why I use Spotify, but I can't help but feel like they are missing the boat here. I remember working with Gracenote software like 15 years ago and it could fingerprint songs and find similar music at least that long ago.
e: my overall sentiment on Spotify is very positive, I just wish recommendations were better.
Pretty good! I tried it with some random cross-genre combinations of stuff I like and it found a bunch of other fairly niche bands I like. Looking forward to trying out the other recommendations. Works fine for genres other than punk & metal btw.
Blog post below on how the hate5six creator made this algorithm. Boils down to using the lyrics and community listening habits from last.fm to build a similarity graph for artists, then community detection to group similar artists.
FWIW, I’ve had the exact same experience. Started a 3 month Apple Music trial and was so blown away by the number of bands I’d never heard of and absolutely loved that I am ditching Spotify. I somehow found my Spotify account recommendations either recommending songs of bands I’d already told it I liked (duh!) or new bands that I absolutely detested.
> might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes.
That's just Spotify. The AI did a better job of figuring out what I like (138 and uplifting trance) than Spotify does (EDM). I blame it in Armin van Buuren: he is an extremely popular EDM DJ and he plays a very wide variety of EDM. If you listen to EDM chances are he has at least a few dozen sets you'd enjoy. That's the problem: he's prolific and he connects every genre of EDM to every other genre of EDM. He's a "super-connector" and I could easily see how this wrecks recommendation algorithms, all roads lead to Armin.
Basically: recommending music is not the same as recommending goods, and I think the same approach is being used.
I don't think that's a bad thing per se, if the algorithm correctly identifies that you like EDM. We then come to the micro-genre discussion - how specific are you in your tastes, and how precise is the algorithm required to be?
Fans of any genre say this. If you don't like metal then it's all loud guitars and screaming. When you do like metal there is fractal complexity of subgenres all the way down.
Wow, a mention of Armin van Buren! I wonder how much discovery of his work is just happenstance. His track is the first thing on Google and Bing that gets thrust into your face when you search for "this is a test".
That's my default browser bar search term for checking that my interwebs are still wired up, and I've often thought that this was either genius or a really happy accident.
Good point. I started to notice a lot of the Spotify recommendations sounded like half of an EDM track I might like, mixed with half of something that it should’ve never been mixed with.
Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.
It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!
Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.
I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.
Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.
I can't speak to Spotify but YouTube Music seems to do a good job with recommendations. If I start by seeding it with a "radio station" built off an artist I enjoy a lot of the follow-up music is enjoyable and helps me to discover new bands. YouTube Music even has a free ad-supported tier, which is nice.
Hahahaha YouTube has 8 years of my Google Play Music listening history, as well as my entire music library I uploaded back in 2012 when Zune (later XBM/Groove) got killed.
I started it on "The Little Things Give You Away" by Linkin Park, and let it play. For a while it was alright, it gave me chill downtempo kinda emo music selections with some like newer stuff from Linkin Park and like Green Day.
Normally I listen to slow/soft shit from bands like 3 Days Grace, Breaking Ben, 3 Doors Down, My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and so on with my Linkin Park (especially the Minutes to Midnight album), so Green Day and Fall Out Boy aren't bad per se even though I like my older stuff. And I do have lots of playlists with GD + LP + FOB + other random pop punk bands.
But then it started throwing in shit like NF, Machine Gun Kelley, Eminem, Logic, then D12, Run DMC, DMX. The Smart DJ on my decade old Zune HD does a better job at building a playlist and recommending music (with the same library).
Pandora, Last.fm, GPM (after 8 years it finally started to "get" me FUCK YOU GOOGLE), Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, etc. They have all done this to me, they all inevitably end up playing some sort of rap, or move to super modern pop music. I do not understand it at all beyond 'it makes them money'.
I do listen to rap music, and I do like listening to those groups and artists. I have quite a few playlists built with just that music, and aside from Eminem, they do not intersect with my emo/punk/rock playlists. If I start listening to Linkin Park, I am never going to want to go from there to early 2000s rap.
I. Don't. Give. A. Rats. Ass. if every other person on the planet listens to Linkin Park with Eminem and DMX. I don't and I tell them every time I play a song or build a playlist, or skip, or remove a recommendation what I like and don't like.
Why can my deprecated Zune appreciate that and keep my genre interests separate and accurate and a billion dollar AI algo can't?
After playing an album I select (usually soundtracks), Spotify falls into a tiny selection of 10-20 tracks that it plays on shuffle forever. It appears music discovery is incredibly poor.
...I'm also afraid to play something for my son, then the recommendations while coding will surely be polluted by that; just like if you play one or two kid's videos on youtube.
Counter anecdote: I've built up playlists full of tracks from good recommendations from Spotify. The genres are relatively niche and electronic (sub-genres of house, techno, uk garage, electronica, etc). The only downside is it gets a bit too eager to recommend the most played few tracks from a given artist, but I've discovered a lot of new artists this way though.
I remember that my suggestions were pretty obscure the last time I tried the spotify algo. But actually it is pretty natural that they suggest niche or less known artists because those have shittier deals and are less expensive to stream. Also, in that position you don't want to promote the top artists for free.
Hilariously I just switched from Apple Music to Spotify and had the exact opposite experience! I wonder if recommendations get "stale" so you get bad ones, where as if you switch services you get recommendations based on different data sets so they're temporarily better.
I made the same assumption about what the link was going to be about.
My solution to terrible music algorithms this year has been to, well, give up on them entirely, and go back to the world of curated music. When Google Play Music died, and YouTube Music left an even worse experience in its place, I was done. So now people curate my music instad of machines. Whether that's in the form of letting the artist curate it for me with albums, letting myself curate my favorites with playlists, or letting a DJ curate music discovery on a streaming radio station, I find that humans do it better.
College radio stations (and their streams) are great, by the way. I can't evangelize them enough. Minimal or no ads, and some of the most interesting and creative sets I've heard in my life.
Music algorithms didn't use to (or seem to) be terrible when the initial data they fed on was already curated music collections. It allowed the algorithm to really learn what you liked then provide recommendations from people with very similar music libraries.
Now it seems that everyone is listening to songs and albums based on recommendations based on what everyone else is listening to, which is also based on recommendations, so you don't find what you really like, you find what everyone else likes and it creates a feedback loop of mediocre garbage totally unspecific to your tastes. And if you try to break out of the loop you land in a loop with people who "broke out of the loop" and you get caught in the cycle again with weirder shit. Rinse and repeat until it pigeonholes you into some inescapable nether of music you might nearly but not really be into.
I would also like to plug Green River College's radio station 89.9 KGRG FM. It has an app and I've never heard a better modern Rock/Metal station
sometimes spotify recommends songs that are so bad it makes me wonder is it some sort of test to check if i am even paying attention :)
i get good results from discover weekly for the most part though. I used to spend a lot of hours on social music sites like thisismyjam and the like, where I would stumble across a gem every 1 in 50, but with spotify it feels more like every 1 in 20 or 30, so I'm happy with that and it's also less work not switching between multiple services
other people I know have nothing good to say about discover weekly so I dunno. maybe I just have low standards!
It seems to always give me the best songs first and last in the Discover Weekly and Release Radar auto generated playlists. But in the middle there are sometimes unbelievably ill suited songs for me. Maybe it’s the artificial intelligence attempting to probe the boundaries a bit.
I think it just gets stuck on old songs you played. My kids played "The Bacon Song" a few times on my spotify, you can imagine what my recommendations are like now. I wish Spotify had a way to remove "bad songs" from whatever algorithm is used.
"I can't judge your music without seeing your Spotify. I mean, I can guess from your browsing history and cookies that your taste is rough, but that's all I'll say for now.
Log in with Spotify"
I never used Spotify, so he was doing this assessment from my cookies...from where? Youtube? I don't login there either, I just browse it. Anyway, that's my test on this.
Oh, it's a joke? I didn't realized that. I thought that legit it does some AI stuff, not just randomly takes insults from a database and throw it at you.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadPatiently anticipating how bad my taste is
Spotify permissions it asks for make sense.
It was really confused by all the kid music I play. Why so much Raffi? Their training set must not include people with children. :)
> "You listen to 'Super Simple Songs' a lot. I mean A LOT. Are you ok?"
Personally, I never use anything that asks me to sign in with something else. My data is my business and IMO there are plenty of ways to get a laugh without compromising privacy.
> You are 26% basic. You're trying to be cool with Kapitan Korsakov, but your favorites are the same as everybody else's..
> Your spotify was please-read-my-manuscript-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad.
Ouch.
Really interesting project by all means. I hope they release the source - I'm curious about how it was built.
Edit: This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513886 here and is not at all getting the same popularity. Anyone got ideas?
After it picked the one very popular song I listen to in order to laugh at me for listening to non obscure things, ignoring the piles of weird random crap I normally listen to that nobody ever seems to know. Funny but not very accurate.
Overall all I got a good laugh though.
you ok?
[lol, jk.] [yeah, why?]
Timing is everything. If a tree falls in the forest and 75% of the potential readership are fast asleep, does it make a sound?
(Numbers are fictional - and possibly eurocentric - for the purpose of conversation. I think the point stands with or without their veracity, it's just easier for form a sentence with values)
The Act of HN submission. But broadly speaking US working time zone get a much higher chance of submission being upvoted.
Hilarious, especially since these are pretty much mainstream artists of my (not so small) niche. I'd love to see how it comes up with those.
Not gonna lie, I'm feeling a bit judged by this AI:)
Asked the same thing to me, but about Radiohead.
At first I had stuff "Waitress in the Sky" or "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out" or "Alex Chilton" or whatever in mind, but now that I think about it there's a dark undercurrent to plenty of the songs in the core Replacements canon: "Hold my Life", "Unsatisified", "I Will Dare", "Bastards of Young", "I'll Be You", etc. - not to mention of a handful of slow tempo tracks with obviously dark themes.
I don't normally associate the Replacements with mopey music but in retrospect I'm not sure why. It's kinda all over the place, under a very thin veneer of drunken cynicism.
- Ryan Caraveo, u okay? - ...of course, K.Flay
Hope that didn't ruin the magic.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJwAZMq08xA
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHtdqGy3g5Q or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YftAYq1AHiE if you are in a more upbeat mood
> > Your spotify was ira-glass-in-your-airpods-manic-pixie-dream-girl bad.
Made me laugh!
My spotify was 'heavy-eyeliner-post-punk-boomer-relaxation-dads-still-cool bad'
> You're stuck in the early 2010s. For you, music's been all downhill since Orden Ogan made The Things We Believe In.
Now I wonder if this is because my account is old, or if I really listen to that much old stuff, or if my favorite bands just don't release that much. Weird.
But I'm entirely fine with the other assments:
> Your spotify was renaissance-faire -too-much-power metal bad.
> Thank your obsessions with medieval rock and power metal (e.g., Sabaton and Dreamtale) for that.
> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
> hail-satan bad
> You are 0% basic. Ewigheim and Winterstorm? Where do you even find this shit?.
And I think winterstorm and ewigheim aren't even the most obscure bands.
Oh but there is a new stribog album. nice.
I got the same thing with a different song. What's funny about this one is it's from 2017.
I made my account this yeah, and i got the same "you're stuck in the early 2010s". I guess I just listen to a lot of music from then.
It's complaining about me listening to Eluveitie and Ost+Front too much (and Metalocalypse and Celldweller).
I'm sorry that I went searching for other german industrial metal bands when rammstein took forever to put out another album.
I don't follow the recomendations, I click "Fans also listen to". Here is the rest of my assesment.
> Your spotify was moonshine-renaissance-faire bad.
> Thank your obsessions with Johnny Cash and medieval folk for that.
> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
> napping-in-your-mancave bad
> Here's what else is going on in your aural trash fire:
You listen to these tracks too much:
You stan these artists to an uncomfortable extent: You are 1% basic. Trepaneringsritualen and Svartidaudi? Where do you even find this shit?.You're stuck in the early 2010s. You only listen to Obama-era jams like Ensigns Of Victory by Winterfylleth and Streamline by VNV Nation.
Analysis completed in 4.012 exhausting seconds.
Thanks for letting me see your music I guess.
Shutting down.
> You listen to these tracks too much:
> - Rock-A-Bye Your Bear by The Wiggles
Which, to be fair, is my second favourite Wiggle song!
> You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around Ratatat's Magnifique.
The last line is definitely something I will mention to my therapist ... :-)
Still, it validated my hipster taste, even though it made fun of it. Suck it bot, I'm cool and your programmers aren't.
Other of my fav instrumental band is CHON, but they're more of math rock and not really the same.
oof, I'm not even angry lol
> You are 5% basic. Old Man Gloom and Distorted Harmony? Where do you even find this shit?.
I feel called out, but also kinda proud.
> You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around The Dear Hunter's Act Iv: Rebirth in Reprise.
Early 2010s were amazing era for Prog metal alright.
"You are 1% basic. Oh wow Penelope Trappes and Titi Robin! Your taste is so obscure that's so cool I bet you're super interesting..
You're too trendy for your own good. You only listen to music made in the last year."
"You are 1% basic. Have you considered there's a reason nobody listens to DJ Marsta?.
You're stuck in the early 2010s. You must have peaked right around Mez's Tyrone EP."
> You are 15% basic. Yeah, you've got some obscure artists like VanKatoen, but your real top ones are ultra-mainstream like The Weeknd..
> Based on your listening habits, I can also tell you your spotify was...
> dad-rock bad
> neverland-ranch bad
> nineties-dorm-room bad
> studded-leather-jacket bad
> wannabe-tenor-but-probably-a-bass bad
As a rock-listening dad who spent most of the 90s living in a dorm room, I felt spied on.
The output it spitted out while processing was pretty good though.
HN allows reposts of an article when earlier submissions haven't gotten attention yet. This is our way of mitigating the randomness of what gets traction off /newest.
It makes for a something of a lottery in terms of which submission ends up with all the attention, but it's on our list to implement some kind of karma sharing across multiple submissions. It's been on our list for years, but we'll get to it eventually!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I revoked access to the Spotify API shortly after use, and it didn't seem to do any harm to my account.
The concept of "objectively good music" is hilarious enough that this is already a win in my book.
It's vaguely sentient.
It has some really bizarre opinions about certain songs - Guthrie Govan is basically a god amongst men for guitar players but it absolutely hates his work.
A final note: I assume this is a joke, but please don't try to objectively rank music.
They apparently just took public reviews, but I geniuinelycan not imagine someone disliking Guthrie Govan. Maybe the score is also inversely proportional to popularity/# of reviews found? It'd fit into the hipster gag
Like/Dislike ratio of 6600/98, they must be extrapolating from some bad data (or possibly extrapolating from the genre not being particularly melon-y).
Excuse me, I need to go and practice...
My activity seems to have messed it up:
"You only listen to Obama-era jams like Sleepy Brown Noise by White Noise for Reading" err..
How do I delete my data?
Both have a lot of potential, as it would seem the former President and I have very similar musical tastes (that is: a very strong love for Stevie Wonder)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_(song)
I keep hoping that someone will crack the micropayment idea and kill advertising on the web.
Trying! https://wiki.snowdrift.coop
Ok -- technically not micropayments and technically killing advertising is not a goal. But many of us are personally against advertising, and a viable alternative for funding free/libre/open works would certainly put a dent in advertising coffers.
How to flirt better. How to earn more money. How to be more lucky.
In the beginning there were lots of sex podcasts, seemed like everybody who had sex at least twice got its own podcast on Spotify, but now it's all filled with the generic stuff I already hate in the other places.
is pretty much the same reason I moved to linux because microsoft kept trying to push crap apps like candy crush on me even though I bought the "pro" licence. #everythingIsTerrible
I believe it focuses quite a lot on artists or tracks listened to a lot, and judging from the covers it shows it selects some top N songs for its analysis. Fun stuff though!
Hit a bug where it asked me “do you recognize this song?” And tried to play some audio, but nothing actually played. (Safari on iOS; could have been caused by an ad blocker)
It also absolutely disliked the amount of Daft Punk I listened too, and called me pretentious for listening to Periphery, this was hilarious.
Since 2013 when I've started paying for Spotify it has turned from one of my favourite apps to one of those I hate most. On my previous Android phone it would freeze every other day when there was no internet. Why? Who knows. Could be related to me using SD card, or could be something else. The phone wasn't very old, but still on many days it was basically unusable. Somehow I was gifted a new phone and it kind of works. I say kind of, because sometimes when I click on a downloaded album it doesn't work - no tracks display. Why? Who knows. And few days ago something bugged out and tracks suddenly started setting volume to max. Apparently it's known issue that appears occasionally. Why? Who knows. Happily I wasn't wearing headphones so I did not get hearing damage. But who knows, maybe this will happen again.
There is also desktop app which severely crippled local file support few years ago. That really sucked for me, because I record a lot of my own stuff and I want to listen to music in one place. I don't know if this was fixed since then because I pretty much switched to using web app, which usually works. There is also iPad app which seems to routinely delete stuff I have downloaded do my iPad; and sometimes it also freeze in offline mode when browsing my library. At this point I didn't even try filing a ticket with support, I lost hope of them fixing this. I suppose soon I will simply stop paying them and make switch to something else.
EDIT: Why post this here? I hope people at Spotify see that submission about Spotify is on top of HN, and maybe, hopefully, someone sees my comments and thinks twice about setting 2021 OKRs and put some capacity into improving the app reliability. I know, this is optimistic, but who knows.
Having said that, it's wonderful. I can download all my music. It has some truly wonderful playlists for when I'm coding. It's recommendation engine seems to recommend really nice tunes week after week. The yearly reviews, the On Repeat etc. all this stuff is really nice to look back at.
Then, I FINALLY have a podcast search which can search for podcast episodes and then, when I click on the search result, take me to tho god-damned episode instead of the full podcast with 2500 fucking episodes to hunt through. It actually has a sane podcast interface that isn't a cluttered mess.
I was so sceptical of it because I loved Pandora to the absolute hilt, but now it's the only Saas I pay monthly for.
Spotify has been a breath of fresh air, I switched a couple years ago. It is missing some stuff here & there, but I haven't hit too many bugs like others have (on Windows or Android), and their catalog is much bigger than Pandora's was when I was using it heavily. Turns out, what I needed was more content. What once seemed like Pandora's best strength - that 'special sauce' recommendation algorithm - is now clearly being done to a similar or greater level of competence by damn near everyone else in the space. And like you say, the podcast stuff has been solid & gotten better, too. These things never turn out how I expect.
I suspect recommendation is more steered by contract agreements than showing you new bands you might like.
They have over 1k employees, surely many of them experience the same easily fixable flaws? My fav theory is, once a company becomes successful and big enough, noone wants to own problems, everyone wants to be part of new exciting projects with a purely positive outlook. And if business is going well, upper management has no reason nor (informal) mandate to get tough and make strong demands.
The fun thing is, my company has jumped on the agile train a while back (nothing wrong with that per se in my opinion), and Spotify was always that cool example "where agile works". Well, no idea what they're doing, but if their KPIs mainly consist of how bad of a UX they get away with, they for sure are very successfully improving their product.
It constantly forgets which episodes of a podcast I've already listened to, or where exactly I've stopped when in the middle of an episode. Their support for downloaded songs at this point seems to be almost non-existent (I stopped using spotify offline quite some time ago as it became too much of an annoyance). If a song I liked is not available anymore but is then available again, I have to like it again. It still can't differentiate between studio and live versions of songs which I would like to filter out (I hope someone corrects me that I'm just too dumb to find the right button). I once got an email that one of the bands I liked released a new album - but it was a band with an identical name (and never heard of before!); apparently, they send out mails by matching band names instead of some unique IDs (no idea how that passed any kind of review; must've been some mashed-together 11-hour release).
... the list could go on and on. The thing is; I really want Spotify to be good, it's what made me stop pirating music, it was just way more convenient. It still is, but it could be so much more, especially given all the cash they're rolling in.
I have encountered situations where I hit PLAY and nothing happens, or I hit PLAY and it says it's playing, but there's no audio, or I hit PLAY and the app says it's unable to play the track. Restarting the app seems to fix most of these issues.
There are also scroll bugs when browsing podcast episodes. The scroll position will just jump to the same spot as you try to scroll down the page, making it impossible to view the episodes in a series.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ongoing-Issues/Spotify-won-...
Yup. That's me.
m000, you are my new best friend.
Liked those two, try these two.
Spotify constantly queues and recommends songs to me that are so bad, I can’t even imagine how there could possibly exist any data indicating that any significant sample of listeners has ever enjoyed hearing them. Spotify has 5+ years of my listening history, and orders of magnitude more data from listeners all over the world, and yet every time I set it to recommend anything to me I just sit there pressing “skip” repeatedly until I give up.
I always blamed myself, thought I was just becoming old and curmudgeonly in my 30s. But yesterday I finally discovered the problem isn’t with me. I switched to Apple Music, and it queued up 50 songs I’d never heard, and I enjoyed almost all of them.
I can use my HomePod now, too. I’m really loving Apple Music so far, highly recommend it to anyone who thinks their Spotify account is permanently broken like mine was.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
My music taste also diverges drastically but Apple seemed to handle it quite well IIRC.
Just as a counter point.
Just a couple of months ago Spotify temporarily blocked playlist exporting and there was an uproar. And it turned out that a lot of the uproar was about those Spotify automagically created playlists. Read some sentiments, coupled with some Apple Music comparative opinions, here-
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24747636
I guess it just turns out that maybe Spotify isn't for all people. Nor is Apple Music. Some discussions just draw out the edges from whatever side and it becomes the narrative.
Taste is a tough nut to crack.
The playlists that users created? No.
I apologise if that distinction was not clear enough in my original post.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but "a curated collection of units-of-art" seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to, independently of ownership of the actual units-of-art themselves (overly-generic terminology is intentional, since although we're discussing playlists here, the same argument could be made for, for instance, "a particular framing/hanging of visual arts")
> And what's the difference between someone mechanically scraping playlists [...], and someone hiring people via mechanical turk or getting 3 other people together to make text-based lists?
What type of difference are you interested in?
* Effective difference in terms of output? None. * Spotify's desire to prevent people from doing so? None (they would want to provide both - and justifiably so, IMO, since, again, the playlist _itself_ is their own (algorithm's) creation). * Likelihood of evading prevention? The MTurk solution is less likely to get shut down, for sure. That doesn't mean that you have magically gotcha'd copyright and that corporation will cease trying to protect their IP, it just means that you have found the next step in the arms race.
I'm going to need a citation on playlists specifically being protected under copyright. I'm not sure how you can claim that what is effectually a simple plaintext list of things can be copyrighted. What original content there is being put under copyright?
As you already stated, they do not alter the music itself in the way that a rearrangement would, most media players provide fade-in/out functionality so they cannot claim that is unique, and they do not provide any supplimentary content to enhance the experience, at least not in the same way that a book published list, or internet top ten list would ordinarily provide some kind of commentary on the items.
What you're claiming here is effectually that, not even the content, but the mere titles of every single "top 50 foos" list on the internet can be copyrighted. Or that the rearranging of a book's chapters without any change to the contents, can itself fall under copyright
I'm not sure how anyone could think that this is at all a reasonable position to have? It's baffling, to be quite honest.
And I'm not going to give you one, because, as I said, I Am Not A Lawyer (and even if I was, you're not paying me to be). But, regardless, note that I made no reference to copyright whatsoever - I said "this seems like a very reasonable thing to protect access to". I'm making no reference to law whatsoever - just to what _I_ think is reasonable for a corporation to protect. You are free to disagree.
> they do not provide any supplimentary content to enhance the experience, at least not in the same way that a book published list, or internet top ten list would ordinarily provide some kind of commentary on the items.
The collection _is_ the supplementary content. If a Spotify playlist was a quasi-random collection of tracks from across the entire catalogue, then you'd be right, but they're not - the playlists are curated and specifically chosen to fit some niche (genre, artist-relation, time period, etc.). By virtue of _being in a playlist called_ (e.g.) "1940's Smooth Jazz", the songs are demarcated as being a) relevant to the particular criteria, and b) of a high-enough "quality" (whatever that means) that they have been chosen. So, yes, the plaintext-listing of those song titles _would_ have some value, just like a list of "(only the titles of the) top ten sci-fi novels of 2019" would have some value. I would, for instance, value such a list more-highly if it came from someone whose taste in sci-fi I respect and resonate with.
> What you're claiming here is effectually that, not even the content, but the mere titles of every single "top 50 foos" list on the internet can be copyrighted
Again, I'm intentionally _not_ touching on issues of copyright as legal status - but, yes, I am absolutely suggesting that someone who has gone to the effort of curating a "top 50 foos" list, _and_ of associating it with a powerful taste-making brand like Spotify's, would be justified in perceiving that list _itself_ as a valuable and protection-worthy creation.
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After the cut because it's less relevant to the discussion, but:
> that the rearranging of a book's chapters without any change to the contents, can itself fall under copyright
I mean...if you _don't_ see how it could be possible for someone to remix the content of an existing artwork into a conceptually-new work, by making statements _with_ the playing-with-form, then I think we're just looking at art from fundamentally different perspectives and are never going to agree. If you truly _do_ want to understand my perspective, you might try thinking about how the consumption of art is affect by the context of how it is consumed and presented, not just the sequence of bytes/soundwaves/visual-elements that compose it.
They have already announced they intend to let artists buy their way into playlists in the future https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/could-spotifys-new-discovery-...
With New releases it is different. If I ever play, say, a song someone else sent me to listen to in a different genre, then it screws up my recommendations here for months, sometimes forever.
I've paid for spotify for more than a decade and I definitely wasn't pleased to have every single playlist recommending an artist I don't like, and it was just ridiculous how EVERY[1] playlist had his photo regardless of the genre.
[0] https://exclaim.ca/music/article/drakes_face_was_all_over_sp...
[1] https://twitter.com/DanieleRose22/status/1013845491757568000
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-denies-its-pl...
https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/spotify-denies-creating-fa...
I remember that Spotify actually had pretty good recommendations when I first started using it at the start of this year, because I had only listened to the songs I actually liked so far. But now I'm lucky if I find one decent song out of a hundred recommended ones.
It works great when it types out phrases as I swype and I go back and edit in whatever jokes, memes, or 10 dollar words I want to include. It starts to suck when it starts trying to include those into its predictions.
There's like a sweet spot of machine learning beyond which the machine gets more annoying than helpful.
I wonder for the one with terrible recommendations if I fell into a particular failure spiral: YouTube tried to give me some new stuff for a period, but I happened to not like any of it. The AI noted I was just clicking suggestions from my subscriptions. It eventually tried different recommendations. I didn't like those either, and clicked videos I'd seen before from my subscriptions. Eventually the AI decided I only like watching videos for channels I'm subscribed to, and now doesn't recommend me stuff outside of that. Even when I branch out into a new area, it no longer suggests related channels or anything like that.
I wonder how much better algorithm could be if they'd recognise a skip within 10 seconds of a song as "no, bad choice, never play it again".
e: my overall sentiment on Spotify is very positive, I just wish recommendations were better.
https://hate5six.com/sage
https://medium.com/@hate5six/sage-an-artificially-intelligen...
That's just Spotify. The AI did a better job of figuring out what I like (138 and uplifting trance) than Spotify does (EDM). I blame it in Armin van Buuren: he is an extremely popular EDM DJ and he plays a very wide variety of EDM. If you listen to EDM chances are he has at least a few dozen sets you'd enjoy. That's the problem: he's prolific and he connects every genre of EDM to every other genre of EDM. He's a "super-connector" and I could easily see how this wrecks recommendation algorithms, all roads lead to Armin.
Basically: recommending music is not the same as recommending goods, and I think the same approach is being used.
Except Phish fans. For them there is only Phish.
That's my default browser bar search term for checking that my interwebs are still wired up, and I've often thought that this was either genius or a really happy accident.
Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.
It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!
Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.
I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.
Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.
I started it on "The Little Things Give You Away" by Linkin Park, and let it play. For a while it was alright, it gave me chill downtempo kinda emo music selections with some like newer stuff from Linkin Park and like Green Day.
Normally I listen to slow/soft shit from bands like 3 Days Grace, Breaking Ben, 3 Doors Down, My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and so on with my Linkin Park (especially the Minutes to Midnight album), so Green Day and Fall Out Boy aren't bad per se even though I like my older stuff. And I do have lots of playlists with GD + LP + FOB + other random pop punk bands.
But then it started throwing in shit like NF, Machine Gun Kelley, Eminem, Logic, then D12, Run DMC, DMX. The Smart DJ on my decade old Zune HD does a better job at building a playlist and recommending music (with the same library).
Pandora, Last.fm, GPM (after 8 years it finally started to "get" me FUCK YOU GOOGLE), Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, etc. They have all done this to me, they all inevitably end up playing some sort of rap, or move to super modern pop music. I do not understand it at all beyond 'it makes them money'.
I do listen to rap music, and I do like listening to those groups and artists. I have quite a few playlists built with just that music, and aside from Eminem, they do not intersect with my emo/punk/rock playlists. If I start listening to Linkin Park, I am never going to want to go from there to early 2000s rap.
I. Don't. Give. A. Rats. Ass. if every other person on the planet listens to Linkin Park with Eminem and DMX. I don't and I tell them every time I play a song or build a playlist, or skip, or remove a recommendation what I like and don't like.
Why can my deprecated Zune appreciate that and keep my genre interests separate and accurate and a billion dollar AI algo can't?
...I'm also afraid to play something for my son, then the recommendations while coding will surely be polluted by that; just like if you play one or two kid's videos on youtube.
My solution to terrible music algorithms this year has been to, well, give up on them entirely, and go back to the world of curated music. When Google Play Music died, and YouTube Music left an even worse experience in its place, I was done. So now people curate my music instad of machines. Whether that's in the form of letting the artist curate it for me with albums, letting myself curate my favorites with playlists, or letting a DJ curate music discovery on a streaming radio station, I find that humans do it better.
College radio stations (and their streams) are great, by the way. I can't evangelize them enough. Minimal or no ads, and some of the most interesting and creative sets I've heard in my life.
Now it seems that everyone is listening to songs and albums based on recommendations based on what everyone else is listening to, which is also based on recommendations, so you don't find what you really like, you find what everyone else likes and it creates a feedback loop of mediocre garbage totally unspecific to your tastes. And if you try to break out of the loop you land in a loop with people who "broke out of the loop" and you get caught in the cycle again with weirder shit. Rinse and repeat until it pigeonholes you into some inescapable nether of music you might nearly but not really be into.
I would also like to plug Green River College's radio station 89.9 KGRG FM. It has an app and I've never heard a better modern Rock/Metal station
i get good results from discover weekly for the most part though. I used to spend a lot of hours on social music sites like thisismyjam and the like, where I would stumble across a gem every 1 in 50, but with spotify it feels more like every 1 in 20 or 30, so I'm happy with that and it's also less work not switching between multiple services
other people I know have nothing good to say about discover weekly so I dunno. maybe I just have low standards!
Log in with Spotify"
I never used Spotify, so he was doing this assessment from my cookies...from where? Youtube? I don't login there either, I just browse it. Anyway, that's my test on this.