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Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

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Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#111

Post by tormeh »

jon-wood wrote: post #75
Systemic33 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicit and implicit rating systems will never fit everyone. But I will go as far and say that implicit rating fits a lot more than explicit, because it doesn't require the user to do extra work on top of the base goal of listing to "good" music. I feel like explicit rating scales very poorly with catalogue size. So when you have music, and as much music as Spotify has, then the work effort of explicitly rating your…

There's no reason that I can see not to combine both explicit and implicit rating. If I really love a song let me mark it as such, but also feed things that I've chosen to listen to/skip/add to my library into that algorithm (possibly with a lower weight).

You already can 'save' songs in Spotify. I would hope they take that into account.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#112

Post by mskullcap »

Rdio worked the best because I could befriend people with similar tastes. I don't understand why this social aspect isn't being used explicitly on Spotify. Rdio knew I had some eclectic musical tastes and yet could find me other people with similar tastes - I found my best music by browsing through other people's collections of music.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#113

Post by mtremsal »

Asdfbla wrote: post #29

Sometimes I wish Spotify added a bit more 'noise' to their recommendations, so to speak. If I don't listen to much music except Discover Weekly for a few weeks, I (subjectively) find that what's recommended to me more or less sounds the same after a while. Either they are afraid to insert new things that stray too far from an optimal recommendation or they forget too much of my listening history.

I'm a former Last.FM user. They'd play a mix of past favorites and related recommendations, then adjust based on feedback (e.g. likes). There was a noise slider that would influence the ratio of new songs (and indirectly bring in recommendations from farther away from your core tastes). When I first found out I could be more adventurous, I was very excited, as I (like most people) pride myself on being curious. As it turns out, constantly discovering new songs from unusual genres is exhausting. This turned out to be a feature I very much wanted, but felt unhappy using and disappointed in me not using. Maybe this is common enough that the Spotify PM for Discover Weekly experimented and decided not to ship it.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#114

Post by mtremsal »

lewapkon wrote: post #73
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do have a dislike button though, the thumbs down icon next to the play controls (on the desktop version of Spotify).

It's there only if you listen to a radio, not to a playlist.

There's a way to consume Discover Weekly as a station instead of a playlist. ;)

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#115

Post by Cakez0r »

Fabled wrote: post #57

In case you didn't know, Spotify categorizes music into genres behind the scenes. You can use this site to find out what genres your favorite artists are categorized as: http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html You can use this information to then check out Spotify's auto-generated playlists for each genre. They have at least three types for each one: "The Sound of ", containing definitive representation of the genre, "…

I gave this trick a try, but only "The Sound of ..." playlists appear in my searches.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#116

Post by mason55 »

ikornaselur wrote: post #90
arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #80

If there is at least one song that I like in Discover Weekly, then I consider it to be a good mix. However, this happens once a month at best. After reading the article and all three methods for recommendations, I cannot understand how on Earth it comes up with its suggestions. Do I feed it bad data? Does it not take into account the relative "weight" of a particular track, i.e. my preference to listen to it multiple…

Yeah, I was surprised when I read the start of the article. On Mondays, I will start the day by playing my discover weekly playlist and I'll usually have it running throughout the day, saving 1-4 songs from it to my library. Sometimes none. I just checked and this week I didn't even save a single song for example. I guess it doesn't help that I do listen to really different types of music depending on what I'm doing.…

I think that one reason Spotify Discovery works so well for me is that I really only use Spotify to listen to one genre of music (however you want to describe it, but it ranges from trap to alternative R&B). Otherwise I'm listening to EDM on Soundcloud. So I end up with a pretty "pure" Discover Weekly playlist.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#117

Post by graphitezepp »

ikornaselur wrote: post #90
arkadiytehgraet wrote: post #80

If there is at least one song that I like in Discover Weekly, then I consider it to be a good mix. However, this happens once a month at best. After reading the article and all three methods for recommendations, I cannot understand how on Earth it comes up with its suggestions. Do I feed it bad data? Does it not take into account the relative "weight" of a particular track, i.e. my preference to listen to it multiple…

Yeah, I was surprised when I read the start of the article. On Mondays, I will start the day by playing my discover weekly playlist and I'll usually have it running throughout the day, saving 1-4 songs from it to my library. Sometimes none. I just checked and this week I didn't even save a single song for example. I guess it doesn't help that I do listen to really different types of music depending on what I'm doing.…

Listening to sufficiently different types of music destroys discovery functionality for me. My weekly discovery is almost always filled with music that spans from 'boring and unoriginal' to 'heard this before'. I want some novelty damnit.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#118

Post by 1_player »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #82
fori1to10 wrote: post #4

Google Music's "I'm feeling lucky" is awesome. This is very subjective, but I feel it makes much better predictions as to what I'll like than Spotify. Maybe someone else has a different experience?

Google Music was, in my opinion, the industry's greatest music discovery service back when it used to have the "Explore" tab where you could drill down through genres and sub-genres to find popular or classic albums within that genre. It also used to give me much better recommendations on the homepage for new albums that I might like. It's all gone down hill since they switched everything to mood-based radios. I feel…

> I don't know how to find new (new to me, not the world) music anymore. Are there any good services that anyone recommends?

I have the same problem. Usually I find new stuff on the various music subreddits and last.fm's Similar Artists page. Even though I have tons of playlists and saved songs on Spotify, their recommendations usually suck (probably because I listen to just about every music genre under the sun.)

Their radio feature rehashes the same songs I've heard dozens of times, and Discover Weekly is usually so awful I never listen to it.

Re: Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

#119

Post by slhck »

mtremsal wrote: post #114
lewapkon wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's there only if you listen to a radio, not to a playlist.

There's a way to consume Discover Weekly as a station instead of a playlist. ;)

How exactly? — Ah, figured it out:

- Go to the DW playlist

- Click the "..." options button

- Then to "Go to Playlist Radio"

- "Follow" the DW playlist radio

- You can now up/downvote songs

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