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Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

stevebenjamins.com

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Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#171

Post by Alupis »

deminature wrote: post #167
Alupis wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify's awful discovery, and shuffle features for playlists are what keeps me firmly with Pandora. Now that Pandora lets you make your own playlists, or listen to individual songs, and download for offline playback (on airplanes for example), I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Spotify these days.

Anecdotal, but Spotify's Discover Weekly feature has ridiculously good recommendations for me and I usually end up adding half of each week's playlist to my library. The recommended music is fantastic, obscure stuff I would never have known about otherwise. My experience with Spotify recommendations couldn't be more different to yours.

Fair enough. Have you tried Pandora's for an extended period and are able to compare?

For me, Spotify ended up just playing the same artist, same album even, over and over. Same problem with their Shuffle feature - I could have a playlist with 500 songs from various artists, albums, genres and more... but I'd get the same artist, same album back to back to back far too often. So often, it didn't feel random at all. Just anecdotal though.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#172

Post by coronadisaster »

volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

What Netflix does for that is that it lets you create sub-accounts... IE one for you, one for the kids, etc

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#173

Post by yowlingcat »

volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

I recommend a playlist centric approach as a workaround. Seed the playlist with some of your favorite songs, and start listening to things from that playlist. Recommendations for that playlist will be context local to that playlist rather than global. Here's the part I'm not sure about -- is the fact that you made a playlist with recommendations then a stronger signal for what the discovery playlist pulls? Is there a time decay involved (which I imagine there is) based on your listening history -- does it passively (so you'd just have to wait) or actively (so you'd have to actively listen to other songs to clear its presumptions) reset?

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#174

Post by asciimo »

Alupis wrote: post #163
volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

Spotify's awful discovery, and shuffle features for playlists are what keeps me firmly with Pandora. Now that Pandora lets you make your own playlists, or listen to individual songs, and download for offline playback (on airplanes for example), I don't see any compelling reason to switch to Spotify these days.

I think that Pandora's recommendation results are far superior to Spotify's, thanks to the Music Genome Project. I think Spotify does some basic "A likes X and B likes X, so if A likes Y, B will like Y" processing. My ideal-new music-discovery workflow gets the best of both worlds: find stuff on Pandora, and use the results to create playlists on Spotify.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#175

Post by Spivak »

Alupis wrote: post #171
deminature wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal, but Spotify's Discover Weekly feature has ridiculously good recommendations for me and I usually end up adding half of each week's playlist to my library. The recommended music is fantastic, obscure stuff I would never have known about otherwise. My experience with Spotify recommendations couldn't be more different to yours.

Fair enough. Have you tried Pandora's for an extended period and are able to compare? For me, Spotify ended up just playing the same artist, same album even, over and over. Same problem with their Shuffle feature - I could have a playlist with 500 songs from various artists, albums, genres and more... but I'd get the same artist, same album back to back to back far too often. So often, it didn't feel random at all. J…

They are random! It's just that what is random in a mathematical sense isn't random to a human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clustering_illusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_clumping

The best song randomizer I've seen described generates a permutation of songs, then "plots" them in n dimensional space with closeness being closeness being a weighted distance of closeness in the playlist and whatever metadata you have about them. (artist, genre, year, mood). Then you iteratively break the clumps until you can't find any or the number stops decreasing. If you still have clumps then you raise the bar for what is considered a clump and repeat until you hit zero.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#176

Post by vmception »

dawnerd wrote: post #139
njovin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unfortunately a common problem and the only way to beat the algorithm is to turn it against itself. Create few playlists and add songs you like to them and also be diligent about liking and unliking songs. These will heavily influence your recommendations and you should be able to get back on track.

Spotify needs to enable dislike on any song playing, not just in discovery playlists.

oooooh I thought Spotify just had a schizophrenic A/B test started every other quarter, I didn't realize the UI changes are contingent on what kind of song list you were listening to.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#178

Post by vmception »

knappe wrote: post #166
faramarz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL! Same shoe; I cannot escape the piano and other instrumentals I played during my wife's pregnancy months. I'm almost at a point of surrender that maybe my time with Deep House and Electronic music has reached an end. The Discovery Weekly was my only way of finding hot indie talent in the electronics world.

Soundcloud is still the place for finding EDM in general. The community sure has slowed down, especially with spotify being such a huge force in the music world, but I still find tons of great content there. Bonus, you don't have the same recommendation issues that spotify has (I'm in the same boat with non-sensical recommendations, or the same tired songs getting recommended over and over again).

Soundcloud's mobile app has chronic issues. The full screen UI for playing music is beautiful, but the complete lack of discovery, or neglected sorting on an artist's profile is just ridiculous.

I will never subscribe even the paid experience is better.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#179

Post by Aeolun »

volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

Changing what I listen to for a week gives me more of the stuff I listened to last week (at least it seems like that).

If not I’d still get baby sleeping songs.

Re: Carving out a niche as a small artist on Spotify

#180

Post by sevencolors »

volkk wrote: post #34

Spotify's discovery playlist is a double edged sword. My account is permanently screwed because I decided to listen to a lot of rain sounds when going to sleep for a few months while I had a puppy. Now ALL I get for recommendations are calm sounds. I don't actually listen to these during the day, I want my old stuff. I hate it and want to reset the discovery playlist, but seems I have no way of doing so aside from ge…

My #1 listened to album last year was >Tropical Rain Storm Sounds

To fix this i started using the mediation apps that have these sorts of sounds. I also ahem downloaded a few albums i really liked

I wish there was a way to tell the algorithm to ignore a specific album, song or genre

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