So 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.
On top of that, if you listen to a wide range of genres the attempt to shoehorn your history into 6 Daily Mixes yields some comical results. Like Doobie Brothers followed by Nirvana.
Give me a home screen with 12 or more Daily Mixes that segment my listening behavior at a finer resolution, and I'd be a lot happier with the service.
I understand why all the other playlists exist, but I generally have an idea of exactly what I'm trying to listen to, so these low effort curated playlists are pretty useless for my listening style.
Well for me at least, I listen to music depending on mood. It's not generally that I dislike mixing, quite the opposite actually. But when I'm in the mood for metalcore, I'm not in the mood for happy hardcore. And when I'm looking for something quick, I don't want a slow song mixed in.
I like the idea of mixing genres, but Spotify seems to totally miss on what aspects I want mixed.
That example might be OK, but my daily mixes include "Weird Al, Nerdcore Comedy, and also Radiohead" and "60s/70s/80s Rock and also Broadway Show Tunes". The transitions are very bizarre.
The local classic rock radio station I listened to growing up has continued to slowly expand what they consider "classic"; whenever I go back home, it's always interesting to hear stuff like grunge and some metal (like certain Metallica songs). Hearing a Nirvana song right after the Doobie Brothers is exactly the type of thing I've probably heard before from them!
I agree. I love the wider scope of Spotify’s mixes. If I wanted a narrow scope then I’d just have created the playlist myself like the old days (or just thrown an album on). The reason I use Spotify mixes is for a variety within an approximate mood. And I’ve discovered so many good news tunes and artists through their mixes.
That all said, I do wish I could turn off their podcast recommendations. I never listen to podcasts and worse yet they keep shoving that same comedians is absolutely hate (and there aren’t many comedians I dislike; which just goes to show how far off the mark their podcast recommendations are)
Then you can simply find a song that matches what you're exactly wanting to listen to and start the "song radio" from there. For me the problem is exactly the contrary, I can't find enough diversity in the daily mixes, it's mostly all songs I've either explicitly "liked" or heard a couple times before.
Diversity in daily mixes is an issue for sure. I do use the song radio feature but find it's hit or miss - they usually start off strong, but seem to lose the thread at a certain point.
It's a fine balance between existing liked songs and expanding within sub-genres, but I have at least noticed the recommendations improving over the past few years.
I suspect it would help to port over my entire pre-Spotify music library into Spotify to provide a bit more data, my current library is all post-Spotify so it fails to capture the breadth of my music taste. I've just never gotten around to it.
I've considered getting a spotify family account, using separate accounts for major genres and one for browsing. I have a browsing profile for Netflix so I can freely explore without messing up the suggestions.
For me, I listen to a lot of 40s, 50 - 60s lounge / exotica, early to mid 90s hip hop, 80s metal, and the standard indie stuff... then I have a bunch of chillwave and synthwave stuff that throws another wrench in the mix. The daily mixes I get are a total mess, much like yours.
The genre-specific mixes they make are pretty decent, but discovery is low.
I have a separate account just for Amazon Echo because I don't want my kid's selections to influence my main account suggestions.
I also have my own account for the car, where explicit songs are disallowed. This allows me to listen to the music I like, but it avoid explicit songs for when my kids are in the car and that setting doesn't affect my main account.
That's the exact reason I switched to YouTube Music.
I remember even about 10 years ago, last.fm's algorithm on bringing songs I would enjoy basing on previously listened/liked songs was far more accurate than Spotify's today.
YouTube makes recommendations around engagement metrics only (1 political video gets you Fox News recommendations for years), spotify still gives me plenty of small bands - I think if you’re listening to very popular music you’re screwed either ways
I was at a conference the other week and Spotify had a Keynote. They talked about the tradeoff between playing "diverse songs" and "consistent songs". It is a hard problem to solve.
When you start your listening session they try and predict how long you are going going listen (based on your past history and time of day). If you are probably going to listen for a while, they are more risky and might play something "different". Playing different stuff is risky (short term) because you MIGHT not like it. Playing the same stuff is safe (short term) because they know you will like it - BUT people will eventually go searching for something new, so they have to risk diversity eventually.
Exactly. There's no reason the "personlized" Daily Mixes can't be built/labeled to indicate "acaccuracy" rate. It annoys me when I'm in the mood for new or different - which is 60% of the time - and all the new Daily Mixes feel like the day / week before.
I'd love a personalized playlist titled "Curveballs" that contined things different and/or challenging.
I get mostly small bands in Spotify and I worry that Spotify is actually bias towards them. I assume the royalties are cheaper for smaller bands and that may factor into recommendations.
Weird, I switched to Spotify once Google Play Music (or whatever silly name it had when Google ate songza) became YouTube Music because I found it such a poor experience.
Perhaps I was missing something but the change def did not improve the recommendations - it made them drastically worse.
In my experience, Spotify's recommendations are good for a few months, and then stick in a rut at some point for reasons I don't understand. So you're probably in that nice honeymoon phase where it's actually allowing you to discover new things instead of surfacing the same 20 artists over and over and over again.
For me Spotify was discovering good new music for years before getting “stuck” recommending the same artists over and over again last year. I do mark them as “I dont like this song” but it still will recommend them later. I think it’s time to reset and start over.
Does the algorithm of YouTube Music behave similar to standard YouTube? YouTube (not Music) basically always recommends the same tracks in the same order and within the same genre bubble. It is hard to discover anything new which makes me not want to try YouTube Music.
My experience is the algorithm is a bit different. I have not been on the platform for long, but my recommendations have been great. I've also been listening to music on the same youtube account for 10+ years, so I assume they have alot of data.
This was my experience with YouTube music - no matter what genre station I started off with, it eventually settled back onto the same small number of currently-trending songs. I get much more diverse recommendations from Spotify.
I just switched to youtube music, its leagues better than spotify. YouTube music seems to have a pretty solid recommendation algorithm, and I frequently find music more in tune with my tastes there than on spotify. Honestly, I would not mind seeing spotify disappear.
I'm thinking of going the other way, I just dislike how YT Music doesn't have some small feature like saving my queue to a playlist. But perhaps I should hold out.
Fwiw, I was shocked how much better YouTube music was than Spotify. I turned on the trial on a whim, and now I actually miss it (it expired a few days ago).
It was so nice that I’m seriously considering just turning off Spotify. It’s sort of interesting to analyze why we don’t —- for me, it’s become unconscious habit to reach for Spotify and not anything else. Plus a lot of other stuff integrates well with it.
(What if… what if we can use both? Mind asplode, it’s not a decision.)
Its funny how much better Googles side show product is. Shows that the internal technology is truly advanced and capable of swiping away another company at the drop of a hat.
I'm just trying it out now based on the recommendations in this thread. When you start it asks you to pick some favorite artists. The first few rows were clearly based on artists that I've watched recently on YouTube, so it's pulling in history (I mean...no surprise).
Then I scrolled down a bit b/c I wanted to give it a strong signal of what I liked. I found an artist, clicked it, and noticed the recommendations below changed immediately afterwards.
So then I scrolled some more (because there were still 95% misses), found one I liked, scrolled to see the next row then clicked on the artist I liked above to see if it indeed changed.
It did. But not only that. I love every artist on the following row. Then it quickly diffuses back to noise, but holy cow that was a bit of a spine tingler lol.
Anything that can be exploited by the user for self-exploration and discovery is being removed - for the purpose of serving content that generates more revenue, I assume.. At first it was subtle, but the gloves came off with the recent UI overhaul.
Playlist search result page is just an endless grid of images and truncated names. For the playlist duration, description, number of songs, follower count, etc. you have to actually open each individual playlist. Good luck finding what you were looking for.
More and more Spotify-fabricated content is being pushed. Most of which contains the same limited selection of songs that Spotify keeps feeding you over and over anyway.
Podcasts aren't my thing, Spotify wants me to listen to them really badly though. Majority of the ones they're suggesting I'm not at all interested in, and sometimes some of the podcasts they're advertising seem to contain some pretty disturbing content. On a sidenote: I don't know who he is, or what he does, but I hate Joe Rogan and Spotify is to blame for it.
There is a setting hidden under advanced that is supposed to make Spotify stop messing with the shuffle functionality. It is labeled "Allow smooth transitions between songs in a playlist" vague huh, it's also placed directly underneath the song crossfade slider. I'm fully convinced that this was done on purpose. Also this setting seems to do precisely nothing at all, so I'm not sure why they even went through all the effort.
Shuffle is not random. If this is so on purpose, that purpose does not involve happy users. Else perhaps their devs are afraid of touching some jank script that might be holding it together.
Edit:
Almost forgot about the new artist's pages! They used to consist of a long list of all songs grouped by album. This was far too convenient for us users, so with the redesign they simply removed the lists of songs leaving only a grid of albums, forcing you to go into each individual album to find a specific song and play it play it.
After many complaints they implemented something vaguely resembling what we had before, but with such odd UX that it must be sabotaged on purpose again. But of course, adding this overview back to the artist page was out of the question. Instead what they implemented as the only way to access this, and I kid you not, is a plain text link in the most random place ever.
No one is going to use this feature if they don't know it exists. All this just to get a reason for removing it that is spinnable. Machiavelli would have been proud.
What’s funny is that I used to love listening to the Joe Rogan podcast and hate Spotify just as much, because I tried to listen to his podcast and somehow ended up listening to about TEN MINUTES of ads and the podcast NEVER started playing. I finally uninstalled Spotify and haven’t listened to his podcast since, sorry. It’s mind boggling that Spotify could drop the ball so hard, as ostensibly they were trying to funnel people like me into their platform, and whiffed in an absolutely astounding manner while also alienating people like you who already use Spotify.
> 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 feel the same way. It's not just music either. I get this feeling every time I try to consume anything. Everything is just so fake. Like it was made just to push some silly agenda.
"Recommendations" are ads in disguise. I already block them on YouTube. Wish I could block them everywhere.
Yeah, this is the exact reason I switched to Apple Music even though I'm on Android, since their playlists (for the most part) seem to actually be made based on what they think will be interesting for the listeners, not what they got paid to promote. I might be wrong though and just getting played.
similar experience here, after 12 years with spotify I had enough of the confusing UI and poor recommendations. They literally know all the music I like and still I don’t discover enough new music as I did just listening to the car radio. Bought into Apple One and will see how that goes, I just need to migrate some playlists.
whoa thanks for the heads-up! I've always wanted to try other platforms but I've thought it impossible since I have so much data in Spotify. Any gotchas here?
You will have to share access to your data, so expect them to sniff a lot about you and your friends from Spotify. Highly recommended to remove access once the migration is complete.
The free version transfers only 1000 tracks, about 1-2 songs per second, and some might be missing in the destination, e.g. when moving from Spotify to Apple.
Favorite artists cannot be transferred to Apple Music.
I use Apple Music because it works well with the rest of the ecosystem. But the official playlists just seem to resurface what’s already popular, at least for dance, electronic and hip-hop. Whereas Spotify introduced me to new music. Maybe it depends on what genres you listen to?
I've never used Spotify or any other recommendation service. Music is like food: it's far too important too substitute with junk. I won't eat Subway, I won't listen to auto-generated recommendations. I browse (and support) rateyourmusic.com, I use the last.fm API (to find out what my neighbors are listening to) and I listen to music for free on YouTube before I buy it. I also heavily use tags on my purchased music so I can easily put together a playlist matching my mood.
Disagree with the premise - you don’t have to sacrifice productivity to put time into finding good music. For one, you don’t have to do your music research during working hours. But even if you do, it doesn’t mean you’re trading off productivity in order to do it.
you don’t have to do your music research during working hours. But even if you do, it doesn’t mean you’re trading off productivity in order to do it.
Trying to find music when you could be focusing is by definition, trading off productivity.
I’d rather have an algorithm dictate what songs I want to listen to (in order to focus) than spend an hour wading through junk to find something i like before I start coding.
I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc.
I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists that interpolate between these.
I want to be able to pay a fee to subscribe to music discovery, then be able to mix these with my own library. If I really like a track, I'd like to buy it and add it to my collection.
I want an open API so desktop apps can be written to use it. Also, let me export my annotations and music library on demand.
Music for power users. Don't give me a single button. Give me hundreds of them.
Check out Navidrome [0]. It's the closest one that I've found. It supports the Subsonic API so there are plenty of mobile apps and probably some desktop ones that work with it. I use play:Sub on iOS.
Unless I'm mistaken, this doesn't fulfill the requirement:
> I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists that interpolate between these.
I'd actually pay for a 3rd party metadata service that doesn't actually provide the music at all, but just let's me tag and rate some across all music streaming services. I've even thought about building that (simply for myself to begin with). I want ratings, instrument tags, mood tags etc. Let me search for songs with 'piano + synth + dreamy + weird' instead of throwing some stupid recommendation my way. And use those tags to find similar tracks across genres and decades of time, instead of just saying "Nirvana and Pearl Jam must be the same because they're early 90s Seattle bands".
I use Airsonic right now, it is basically Jellyfin for a music collection. I use both of these as reliable alternative to Netflix/.../Spotify (where ... is a plethora of other video services such as Disney+).
3. More modern webui (though I recently found a good desktop subsonic client, sonixd which somewhat negates this)
Also, I haven't used the airsonic fork, but I was using subsonic before switching to navidrome
I found subsonic to be rather... unreliable. once in a while the database would randomly become corrupted and I'd have to delete the database files and start over. I haven't had any such problems with navidrome, it's been rock solid.
- Upload and download your own stuff if you want to (marketed as iCloud Music Library)
- Works offline
- Discovery services available
- API exists but mostly used to implement web players for some reason, works fine in desktop apps too, on top of that the current state of your music library is always available as an XML file even when you don't use the API at all.
It's fingerprint matching, and yeah it's poorly implemented. Most recent complaints I've seen on this were for the fan made explicit version of Kanye's Donda. It was basically impossible to upload since it would just get matched to the clean version.
Matching is optional. If a song cannot be matched, your own copy gets uploaded instead to your private iCloud library.
Edit: well, it's a bit nuanced of course, you can not match and not sync or match and sync but you can't mix and match that configuration. So it's either sync with matching when possible or no syncing.
I have a lot of rare stuff. Demos, live albums (grateful Dead, dmb), live captures of daft punk at Coachella, underground hip hop mixtapes, CDrips of local punk and Ska bands from the 90s
I haven't had an active subscription for a while (when iTunes was the desktop app instead of Music being the desktop app) but I distinctly remember being able to set metadata in the Info panel on a song or multiple at once that prevented fingerprint matching.
But as the name already implies, that one preferentially tries to match your files to the ones already available in Apple's music catalogue, with file upload only serving as a fallback if it can't find any matches.
And from what I've heard, the fingerprinting algorithm is fuzzy enough that it will often match songs/song versions that are very similar, but not actually identical, like censored/uncensored lyrics, different masterings, differing fade ins/outs, alternate takes and live versions, etc. etc.
Oh interesting – somehow in my mind I've mainly associated this phenomenon with Apple, but of course in a way this make sense and saving storage space that way is a tempting target for that kind of service I guess.
It makes me curious though how the accuracy vs. deduplication efficiency trade-off looks like in practice: How much storage is Apple saving with their current settings, and how much deduplication would they lose if they made their audio fingerprinting more accurate, up to a level where even audio buffs would stop complaining
I looked for that when Play Music got shuttered but could not find a satisfactory solution. I even paid for one iOS app but it wanted access to my entire drive, and maybe some other unnecessary permissions.. so hell no. I should be able pick one folder and that's it.
I guess I could have made a separate Google account just for music.
I bought a jelly pro (miniscule phone), rooted it, added some automation to autoload a music player on boot and activate airplane mode. I added a 256gb memory card with a lot of tunes. It's now my mp3 player. When I deactivate airplane mode it scrobbles my played tracks and 15 minutes later it automatically reactivates airplane mode unless the phone is charging, in which case it's available for wireless music sync from MusicBee. It also powers itself off after 30 minutes of being idle. Best damn mp3 player I've ever had.
My service, Astiga, does this. You can upload your files to any supported cloud storage service, pair it with Astiga, then play either via the Web, our apps or any other client that supports Subsonic.
funkwhale has the web interface, the subsonic api (dunno how well that works i dont use it), you can create your own "radios" based on genre and artist
The fact that Spotify doesn't optimise for discovery and recommendations is why you use physical media which has absolutely no mechanism for discovery and recommendation?
It’s fascinating to hear this feedback on Spotify because I’ve never used it this way. I don’t let it guide anything. I just use it as a music repository and I pick the albums and make my own playlists.
Do others generally find that auto play (or whatever it’s called) works well? Or does it just feel like payola radio?
"Discover Weekly" tends to be one of my primary sources of new content discovery. I tend to listen to a significant amount of Death Metal, Doom Metal, Folk Metal, German metal and rock, random music in languages I don't understand because the sound is cool to me, and various other never-been-pop subgenres. Discover Weekly has been pretty on point for me to find new and interesting stuff in a way that hasn't felt like them pushing a message or some corporate catalog.
I don't tend to listen to the genres that are full of artists who are trying to push politics through their music (at least that I've consciously recognized) (except maybe System of a Down). Not because I'm necessarily against their messages, it just the sets haven't overlapped much for me at this point. It could also be that music isn't much about lyrics for me, it's about if it's something that sounds good to me.
I have a bunch of playlists and saved albums, but I do listen to discover weekly in the first few days of the week. Sometimes it's meh and I just go choose what I want to listen to, sometimes it's really good and it's on loop through the week.
Their "Daily Mix" playlists seem to be 90% stuff I've clicked "like" on in the past, so I listen to those as well.
Why would you let a streaming service choose what you want to listen too or a premade playlist by someone else? Then you might as well just listen to the radio. All these on any service are always rubbish. I make my own playlists and I only listen to them, sometimes I search others for some inspiration to see what songs I forgot etc, but most of them include a lot of trash so I make my own.
The only 'auto' feature I use, is my release radar playlist which I check every Friday to find new songs from Artists I like and then add those to my playlist titled for the current year.
I think it is sad that there isn’t a way to recognize the development of competence in music listening— with an achievement motivation. Like, mastering genres with a music collection. Aesthetic pleasure in pleasant recommendations without any principles makes me feel vacant after a time.
With respect, your comment illustrates the issue - a burden to reeducate people by shaping their culture. Music can make a statement, sure, but a world where people are force-fed curated playlists designed to mold them into some Standard Issue set of beliefs, this is a dystopian vision.
I think that people bristle at it in the same way that people used to bristle at having Christian-normative culture pushed on them. Not everyone enjoys cultural imperialism.
Sarcasm and belittlement are a terrible way to engage in conversation. You seem more interested in aggrandizing yourself than to actually make a point or bring some food for thought.
So 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).
It's possible that the recommendations are both good for users and good for corporate interests. They might not work for you, but for millions of Spotify users they seem to work. People listen to them a lot.
I listen to my recommended "Discover" playlists occasionally. They're decent. They include things I haven't heard and quite like. Maybe record labels are paying to be on them. Oh well.
I’ve never really understood what variations of the rejoinder “you are not the target user” are intended to accomplish, at least in conversations like this.
When discussing things like product strategy it makes some (more than a little) sense. But in a conversation about personal preference, what do you expect the reader to take away from it? “Oh okay, sorry, I didn’t realize I wasn’t meant to like this. I guess my opinion’s invalid.”
Who cares who the average user is, when someone is saying something doesn’t appeal to them? Is the sentiment some kind of scolding for not liking it? I sincerely don’t understand.
I think the remark is meant to address internet comments' tendency to jump from "this product doesn't meet my needs", to "consequently it is a bad / mismanaged product".
From the original comment: "The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user)." That is an opinion about 'product strategy'. The answers, in this context, are confirming that 'not for the user' part. I find relevant to highlight that HN may not be the most representative crowd in this situation.
I do not use Spotify, nor I had for years. And I do not like the level of influence that all those algorithms have on the population decisions. So, it's not about protecting Spotify but an observation to try to add another point of view to the discussion.
I’ve never really understood what variations of the rejoinder “you are not the target user” are intended to accomplish, at least in conversations like this.
It's simply a reminder that when you work at scale you can't please everyone. Someone complaining that a feature doesn't work for them is not the same as saying it doesn't work.
On a site like HN the conversation is usually about the broader picture rather than individual complaints unless someone is responding directly to the CEO of a company. I think the CEO of Spotify posts here occasionally, so maybe he'll reply. The rest of us are talking about it in more general terms.
That’s just the appeal to the majority fallacy. People may just use Spotify because it’s free with ads and they have the hook of personal libraries to keep you stuck on the service as a paying member.
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.