Live data from Hacker News

Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

bbc.com

121–130 of 179 posts

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

#121

Beepity-boop beep! Emotional state detected: Depressed! Suggesting playlist: 1. Nine Inch Nails – Hurt 2. Michael Andrews – Mad World 3. Klaus Nomi – The Cold Song 4. Johnny Mandel – Suicide is Painless Did You Know: This playlist has been brought to you by analyzing frillions of Spotify users with advanced AI and selecting the optimal songs matching any emotional state. Enjoy! :)

When in reality it'd be arguably best to direct them to MDMA-assisted therapy in therapeutic setting and/or invite them to a medically supervised recreational dance party with MDMA and listing a selection of songs that may be played X/Y/Z DJs; not sure any nation's health system is anywhere nearly understanding or accommodating enough yet to offer our facilitate this, especially due to indoctrination and regulatory capture, for-profit interests, etc.

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

#122

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

How do we make it less scary?

Ban adtech. Keep beating advertising and marketing industries with a regulatory stick, until the only thing allowed is a logo on company building, tradeshows, and publishing honest-to-god feature listings that would-be customers can voluntary search for and peruse at their leisure.

All these recent scary tech inventions? They are all driven by collecting data for targeting ads, fine-tuning marketing strategies, and manipulating people better. Let's go after the root cause.

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

#123
post #50

If I skip a song ten times, do you really need to evaluate my emotions to not feed it to me again? KISS?

Well, the company who owns the rights to that song you skipped certainly has a financial motive to figuring out if there's somehow they can get you listening to it again so they can collect more royalties from it - so they may be willing to pay X for that chance, times X by Y for the number of profit-driven rights owners and that likely adds up to a decent, new revenue stream; industrial complexes are dead, long live industrial complexes!

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start working on your own alternative platform. You, as a hacker, have a responsibility to your community, family, friends, to build an alternative platform for them. If you refuse this responsibility, you are failing your own family and community, and leaving them to suffer all the consequences. You can't realistically tell your family to quit Service X, no matter how fucking bad it is, unless you're willing to prov…

> If you can't build an alternative to Service X, you must start teaching yourself immediately until you are able to do it. How are you going to teach yourself to acquire music licensing agreements that still allow you to run a profitable service at scale? Given the money at stake and the number of people who could technically build such a service, what makes you believe that the problem is a lack of willpower or kno…

scale is not needed, except wrt know.how of setup

profit not needed, only sustainability, is cheap

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

#125

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,…

I've given up even wanting extra features, I just want them to fix the glaring bugs they've had for years. My current favourites: - if you sort a playlist you're playing, then click the album art to find the currently playing song, it will skip to the position of the track in the _unsorted_ list - playlists over a certain length just won't play via Spotify Connect. There's a couple of playlists I just can't play on m…

Yup, my only major gripe is with Spotify matching the volume from my desktop (application level) to my phone (system level) and vice versa. I've seen lots of reports of this "feature" being more of a bug and reporters being told to go through hoops. So many I've not bothered pursuing it myself as I'm sure it's hopeless.

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

#126
post #56
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.

And that's the problem. I wouldn't even care about it, since theoretically "no one forces me to use it" (and I don't), but in 10 years there simply aren't going to be any toasters on the market that don't do this.

Same thing with the dumb TVs. There wont be any in the future anymore.

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

#127
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

So, in your opinion, the world would be better off today if textiles were still manufactured by hand, by highly skilled artisans? I’m not necessarily a fan of Forever 21 throwaway fast fashion, but I like being able to buy a shirt without it costing me more than an hour of labor.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they believe exclusive podcasts will gain them paying subscribers. Of course by fracturing the open ecosystem they may find themselves unable to acquire some podcasts, but given that they are a large player they are well positioned to out bid the competition.

They might also make a cut off of dynamic sponsorship/ad segments within podcasts.

These were quite eery the first time I heard them. I was listening to an episode of Conan O'Brien's podcast from early 2019 and in the middle was an ad (read by Conan) for enjoying Miller lite at home during the covid quarantine.

I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what the hell had just happened until I found a page promoting Spotify's dynamic ad insertion for podcasts.

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

#129
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify has all of their resources focused on podcasts, because that's where they'll be able to become a real aggregator and start making Real Money. It's a damn shame because the open nature of podcasts is one of the most appealing things about them. I get where they're coming from though. If they weren't spending ungodly amounts of cash on podcasts (cough joe rogan) they could probably buy pandora (just guessing, n…

I don't understand this business model. How does taking podcasts (something people are used to getting for free with few or no ads) and breaking the currently open ecosystem there is around them benefit anyone, least of all Spotify themselves?

"something people are used to getting for free with few or no ads"

This is why they need some exclusives, so people can't get the same for free elsewhere.

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

#130
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

So, in your opinion, the world would be better off today if textiles were still manufactured by hand, by highly skilled artisans? I’m not necessarily a fan of Forever 21 throwaway fast fashion, but I like being able to buy a shirt without it costing me more than an hour of labor.

No. Luddites were not against technology! Quoting again from my previous [1]:

> the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines" ... “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods [...] 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.”

They simply wanted to be included in reaping the benefits of technology. The popular belief that misrepresents Luddites as anti-technology instead of fighting against abusive labor practices is a good example of anti-labor propaganda.

Post reply on HN