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Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

bbc.com

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Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#71

Post by Forge36 »

airstrike wrote: post #9
millstone wrote: post #7

Here is the referenced July paper [1]. Spotify has a very cool feature called Community [2] where users can talk about what they want Spotify to do. The most upvoted ideas are things like "change my username" or "filter explicit songs." My personal wishlist is a "don't play this song again" button [3] and native Homepod support [4]. The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state,…

> The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state, they just want rather basic features to work. Obligatory “If I’d asked customers what they want, they would have told me a faster horse.” People may not realize the value of this new feature because they have not even imagined it.

Ford was being honest. The degree to which anyone at the time had a car it was a sign of luxury or great expense. Ford made it cheap.

What the people wanted was to go from A to B faster. How they did was "via a horse". Logically "faster horse" is their solution (of which I'm certain there were varying qualities of horses, some of which you wouldn't want to trust your life with).

What Ford did was focus on a problem "transportation is slow" (and horses make a lot of manure).

The Model T

>prized for its low cost, durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance

This was 5 years after the first car (Model A) in 1903. Which was 7 years after the prototype in 1896.

From: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas

1. Add support for Apple Silicon (run on my computer)

2. Update the Spotify app icon for macOS Big Sur (fit the theme of computer/life)

3. Please bring back the Hide this Song Option and I dont like this song/ artist (listening to this puts me in a mood I don't like, don't play it)

- This is arguably the same thing as "detect emotional state": "wrong mood do not want". Ignoring that data signal suggests misaligned incentives/goals. While I'm certain many songs share common emotions between people, the degree to which we react to an individual song or genre varies. I'm not sure how they'd hope to accurately tune an emotional scale while also refusing to block songs/artists.

4. Emotes and user reactions - again: gather the data surrounding how a song makes you feel. The ability to gather and train on this data should be crucial, without it how could they capture users emotions? (I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just clear to me this is aligned with the patent)

5. Globe Learning - a suggestion to visualize music globally by artist home country/state/city

I wouldn't consider "inquisitive" or "learning" an emotion, but perhaps it's a higher order grouper "what state is the listener in". There's an emotional component to the process of learning and ignoring "confused", "curious" exploration of something foreign could lead to an better overall "fulfilled emotional state"

To rephrase your last sentence: People (including companies) may not realize the value of a new feature because it has been neither _implemented_ nor _measured_.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#72

Post by pdkl95 »

eloisius wrote: post #23
geofft wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Luddites were right, and we tend to reject that conclusion today more because we have no idea what to do if it's true than because we really think it's false. (The Luddites were also not blanket opposed to technology, just technology that for absolutely no good reason made their lives worse instead of better.)

Luddites were opposed to advances in the textile industry, like automated looms. This does not strike me as a technology that made life worse in the long run. Affordable access to decent quality clothing for most of the worlds population sounds like a win. Especially for women who were freed from The responsibilities of manufacturing clothing for their families and could later pursue careers.

Luddites were opposed to advances in the textile industry that were taking their jobs. They were an early, imperfect attempt at forming a labor union.

Making textiles was a job that require a lot of investment (apprenticeship) in learning the necessary skills. Automated looms put a lot of skilled labor out of work, while concentrating wealth into the people that owned the automated looms, which only required much cheaper unskilled labor.

Luddites were not opposed to technology! They were opposed to businesses using new technologies to destroy their livelihood. If they had been included in sharing the benefits of the new technologies, the Luddite movement wouldn't exist.

> This does not strike me as a technology that made life worse in the long run.

The luddites would have agreed. From [1]:

>> As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”

> Especially for women who were freed from The responsibilities of manufacturing clothing for their families and could later pursue careers.

WTF? Luddites were highly skilled artisans that were being forced to abandon their careers.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#73

Post by dntrkv »

designatedtruth wrote: post #2

Future looks scary my friend.... future of tech is scary.

Scary? Hardly. Most of the time Spotify's recommended music is just other songs by my favorite artists that I've already listened to 100x, on their platform. If they can't predict what I will like outside of the artists/genres I already listen to, I doubt they can make any predictions based on infinitely more noisy data points.

They can't even differentiate artists with the same fucking name.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#74

Post by Forge36 »

bombela wrote: post #70
dukeofdoom wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always amazed how badly designed software is. To the point that anyone trying to use the damn thing could point out problems within 10 seconds. I was shopping for a replacement bathroom fan on home depot website. I just want to find one that will fit in the old hole. You would think I would be able to filter by the actual size of the box. But no, its not apparent at all what their listed measurements refer to. Ju…

This is so painfully true. Try sorting screws by size next...

https://www.mcmaster.com/

Or even

https://www.grainger.com/category/fasteners/screws/machine-s...

Specialty stores? I wouldn't want to do this at scale with Amazon.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#75

Post by jimmySixDOF »

This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity into a cluster of data points to be used against us by marketing and political campaigns - this is just gasoline on the flames of Silicon Valley techno backlash.

People like Affevtiva running facial micro expression algorithms etc. What happens when all this data is complied by your friendly neighborhood Data Broker in the name of a "Better Customer Experience" with realtime FitBit heartrates/sleep quality from Google with Amazon applying tone of voice stress analytics with Apple Pay's recent purchase history on top of .........

I am writing this inside a Facebook VR headset with eyetracking hardware and can't be sure my 'gaze' is not something I have agreed to have monitored in some EULA.

If they get these neuro brain machine interfaces to the point they work - I can only imagine the outcome without any established boundaries.

And just how can this industry establish boundaries ? Who decides and who decides who decides ?

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#76

Post by sergiotapia »

titzer wrote: post #45

Outrage now. In 2 years we'll have forgotten what it was like before every website in the world did this. In 5 years your toaster will have people personality and you will fucking hate it.

In Transmetropolitan, the protagonist's matter converter (his oven so to speak) has a drug addiction problem. Like Spider Jerusalem, I may have to move to the sticks.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#77

Post by millstone »

falcolas wrote: post #11
airstrike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state, they just want rather basic features to work. Obligatory “If I’d asked customers what they want, they would have told me a faster horse.” People may not realize the value of this new feature because they have not even imagined it.

What value does mining emotions provide for the customer?

I think Spotify envisions a speaker which always plays exactly the right music at all times, reflecting the current mood and anticipating what's next, like a film score. That would indeed be incredible if it worked.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#78

Post by numpad0 »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #51
airstrike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state, they just want rather basic features to work. Obligatory “If I’d asked customers what they want, they would have told me a faster horse.” People may not realize the value of this new feature because they have not even imagined it.

I'm always amazed how badly designed software is. To the point that anyone trying to use the damn thing could point out problems within 10 seconds. I was shopping for a replacement bathroom fan on home depot website. I just want to find one that will fit in the old hole. You would think I would be able to filter by the actual size of the box. But no, its not apparent at all what their listed measurements refer to. Ju…

Shops like you described for B2C markets existed in the past. All voted out by wallets.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#79

Post by dang »

owl_troupe wrote: post #54

A quick comparison of the WHOIS results for each and this verbatim copy of the article seems to suggest the "San Francisco Telegraph" is a thinly veiled extension of RT: https://www.rt.com/news/513966-spotify-monitor-emotions-pate... It isn't directly relevant to the subject of this article, but a search for this headline/copy shows it has permeated a lot of right-wing and other questionable sources of info, but appe…

Ok, since the rt.com article appears to be the canonical source, we changed the URL from https://www.thesanfranciscotelegraph.com/technology/3678/in-... to that.

Edit: actually there are lots of media articles about this story. I've changed the URL from https://www.rt.com/news/513966-spotify-monitor-emotions-pate..., to https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-55839655, which is one of the more substantial ones.

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