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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#51

I work in this industry and actually we’ve found from online experimentation customers generally don’t want to tell you they dislike something. The expectation is customers get what they like (relevant) and sometimes they want to express stronger affinity for specific things. The converse hasn’t shown to be true. Generally customers don’t have a clear picture of how their explicit signals impact recommendations. Thou…

Yesterday I tried to book a plane ticket on eDreams and no matter which card/bank I used I got a bank authorization error.

So I tried to contact eDreams, which requires a trip reference number.

Since I couldn't pay them for a plane ticket, I didn't have a trip reference number. So all their ticketing and phone tree systems would hang up on me.

eDreams customers, evidently, don't want to contact them without having a trip reference number. And they know this for sure because they've never had a customer contact them without one.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#52

I'll never use Spotify again. My account was hacked by a latino and now my recommendations is 100% latin music. They told me there is nothing they can do to fix this. My recommendations are broken and my only option is to create another account, cancel my subscription, buy it again... Not gonna happen.

Hmm, I had a similar situation with an ex-partner contaminating my recommendations. I emailed support and it was pretty easy to reset my recs to a blank slate.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#54
I cancelled spotify recently when I had a guest in my car who proceeded to play all her favorite music on my account. I wanted to remove her music from my history so spotify would hopefully not recommend her music to me but there is no way to delete your history

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/2021-how-do-we...

Account deleted. I know I'm not the norm but Spotify has never done a good job for me recommending music, ever

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#55

So basically they’re developing a product marketed to streaming platforms to identify what’s “more attractive” to consumers. The algorithms are still optimized for increasing sales and engagement, not improving recommendations (for the user). That’s exactly why I’m unhappy with Spotify lately. I feel I’m being sold a bunch of corporate portfolios on what’s currently in vogue, and not just artistically but politically…

Crap like this is why, to this day, my collection is digital files, cds, vinyl and streaming only for radio - like pandora

I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc.

I want the ability to rate music across multiple user-configurable dimensions. Add tags. Create smart playlists that interpolate between these.

I want to be able to pay a fee to subscribe to music discovery, then be able to mix these with my own library. If I really like a track, I'd like to buy it and add it to my collection.

I want an open API so desktop apps can be written to use it. Also, let me export my annotations and music library on demand.

Music for power users. Don't give me a single button. Give me hundreds of them.

I'd pay $30/mo or more for this.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, or at least a "forget everything you think you know about me"-button. Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of…

I keep hearing from people how good is Spotify "Discovery" playlist. I've been a paid customer for 5+ years and their recommendations have a hit rate of 2%. I listen to a lot of different genres, artists, mostly dictated by my mood. Today it was some easy Dire Straits song, yesterday QOTSA, the other day some psytrance. So Spotify recommends all genres in the same playlist, creating an awful cacophony of songs that d…

I listen to a LOT of different genres of music and their Discover reccomendations (not the playlists, the actual you like X artist you might like X) are absolutely brilliant. Got to be approx 50-60% hit rate.

It seems to differ wildly between people - I've heard plenty of people making the same case as you, but many that have the same as me. It never appears to be 'its ok', its either 'brilliant' or 'terrible'. I've been using Spotify for 10+ years at this point, so maybe that makes a difference?

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#57
post #40

I just wish they fixed the problem with the bands disambiguation. I just hate everytime I get a recommendation in the release radar for a band that happens to have the same name as the one I like but stylewise they have nothing to do with the music I usually listen.

I'm still stuck wondering if one artist I found recently had a very different style originally, or if it lumped two unrelated acts together.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#58
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, or at least a "forget everything you think you know about me"-button. Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of…

Yes that's very frustrating. I'm scared to even listen to new music on it because I'd try to use it for discovery but it would mistake what I listen to for what I like. Besides that it hardly recommends me any new music anyway. I now just use youtube for discovery.

They should add an incognito mode or something.

You could even do this maliciously. Send someone a Spotify link to a Steely Dan song and a Skrillex song, and now yacht rock and dubstep will follow them around until they delete their account (I'm assuming the intersection between those fan-bases is vanishingly small).

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to keep deleting my Spotify account because my recommendations kept getting contaminated with music genres I didn't like that were impossible to get rid of. Listening to the wrong song two times could irrevocably ruin my recommendations. I would have very much liked a dislike button, or at least a "forget everything you think you know about me"-button. Now it ended up with me getting rid of Spotify, because of…

Without specifics I cannot guess as to your specific case but in general customer's just do not use dislike buttons. So exposing them isn't a value add and usually a UI clutter that most customer's have no use for and won't use. In general, you had to be doing something to be getting recommendations so there is some action that when most customer's do demonstrates a high probability that you will like some genre and…

I absolutely love it when people working on a product tell their customers that they don't need a feature they're all asking for and that would clearly improve the experience, just because not everyone uses it all the time.
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