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How bad is your Spotify?

pudding.cool

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Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#481

Post by smcnally »

Alupis wrote: post #471
smcnally wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior IIRC, these algos were part of a project called ~Muse which later forked, and there was a schism between the algos and clickstream data or the personal data and anonymized cohort data. Will have to review / re-search. The trove of our searches, listens, and skips Pandora has / had did a good job informing recommendations and was a…

A big part of the algos was the "Music Genome Project"[1] as well. This allowed their recommendations to be about the music itself instead of just what other people also listened to, leading to some amazing music recommendations/discoveries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project

Thank you this helps -- the "Music Genome Project" was part of this fork & schism. Pandora says little about it[0], and the open portions[1] were last updated in 2014.

At least someone's still at it, and all this helps me find my notes from that time.

https://github.com/LDugar/MusicGenome/raw/master/Decoding-th...

[0]http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp [1]https://github.com/omgDB

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#482

Post by badtuple »

colinmhayes wrote: post #479
Alupis wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-…

Imagine thinking recomendations can be objectively better than others. Personally I don't care for pandora recommendations one bit and love my spotify mixes.

Why can't they?

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#484

Post by bombcar »

badtuple wrote: post #482
colinmhayes wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine thinking recomendations can be objectively better than others. Personally I don't care for pandora recommendations one bit and love my spotify mixes.

Why can't they?

It can easily be proven they can, posit three systems:

1. Spotify

2. Pandora

3. No matter what, rickroll you on the next song

Cleary 3 is far superior to the other two! ;)

So if something can be objectively WORSE, there must be the possibility of something being objectively better.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#485

Post by Tostino »

kingosticks wrote: post #430
rodiger wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, but in the UI you can see what your friends are listening to (if you're added as friends). Example I found online (the right bar is the friends feed): https://miro.medium.com/max/3836/1*C_ImLXQdMOGljMRhLcV-Yw.jp...

And to be clear, this is an optional feature.

Appreciate that clarification. Good to know.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#486

Post by Alupis »

smcnally wrote: post #481
Alupis wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of the algos was the "Music Genome Project"[1] as well. This allowed their recommendations to be about the music itself instead of just what other people also listened to, leading to some amazing music recommendations/discoveries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project

Thank you this helps -- the "Music Genome Project" was part of this fork & schism. Pandora says little about it[0], and the open portions[1] were last updated in 2014. At least someone's still at it, and all this helps me find my notes from that time. https://github.com/LDugar/MusicGenome/raw/master/Decoding-th... [0] http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp [1] https://github.com/omgDB

My guessing is a lot of it went proprietary once competition started popping up trying to also make good music recommendations. "Secret sauce" and all...

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#487

Post by DrSiemer »

Alupis wrote: post #475
mike_d wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify won the same way Dropbox and Slack did. They didn't invent anything magical, they just had a client for every platform that worked when people tried it. Like web apps? Here you go. Linux nerd? Here is a deb repo. Have a smartphone? Cool, we don't care what kind. Even now I googled "Pandora windows app", clicked a few times, and ended up on some Microsoft Store page. Interestingly enough if I add "mac" to my s…

What's wrong with Pandora in the web browser?

The browsers RAM usage and the challenge of finding it among the often many tabs and windows come to mind.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#488

Post by Alupis »

airstrike wrote: post #454
ugh123 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My "philosophy" with listening to music while programming has been that if I can tell I like the song, then i'm probably focusing too much on it rather than the task at hand.

+1 I do something similar. As a general rule, I prefer to listen to songs I don't already know while working. If I'm humming or singing along, I'm doing it wrong.

I've actually discovered some of my favorite bands/songs this way.

Programming along, with background music playing - when suddenly I become "aware" of the song playing and how good it is. That's when I give it the "Thumbs Up" in Pandora, then go back to work. Might happen once a session if I'm lucky.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#489

Post by lazyant »

t0mbstone wrote: post #252

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recom…

This is what I do, except using a general playlist. At ~ 300 songs almost all recommendations I didn't like. At current ~ 400 songs all recommendations I don't like and Spotify gave up with a passive-aggressive message sort of "I give up, add more songs if you want better recommendations". (Note that I have a wide variety of styles in the playlist; too lazy to break up in genres and also I kind of like the "surprise" factor)

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#490

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Alupis wrote: post #437
t0mbstone wrote: post #252

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recom…

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-…

Pandora has good algorithms, but as a product is objectively terrible.

It is literally impossible for you to just sort the list of stations you have created. If you have 120 stations, you have to s l o w l y scroll through them in random order until you find the one you want. And even though there are thumbnails next to them (presumably to make them easier to identify), the thumbnails change. There's a hundred different usability problems, and as far as I can tell, all of them minor features that could have been implemented years ago.

If you don't pay for the premium version, it's a nightmare of pop-ups to prompt you to pay, to the point that you develop reflexes to pass the prompts. Then there's the actual ads, which sometimes seem to disappear for a while, only to barrage you intermittently for a half hour.

The whole thing annoyed me so much, and I complained on their support channels so often, that I dropped them and just started buying music. And of course I then had to pirate the same music I purchased because there's no way to just buy some MP3s so you can move the music around.

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