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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#371

Post by bottled_poe »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #368
bombcar wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to McDonalds, home of the Mcadoyble. Now given that burgers cost us money to produce, wouldn’t you rather have a podcast? Does this whole thing not seem insane to anyone else?

Selling a burger is inhernelty profitable for McD, they sell it for more than they spend on manufacturing and shipping and serving it. Each new burger sold adds more profit. Serving music is unprofitable for Spotify. They collect your monthly subscription fee, then every additional song play makes Spotify lose money. They don't want to have zero song plays since then nobody would subscribe, but their goal is sell the…

if that’s true, then podcasts are only a bandaid solution for a fundamental problem with Spotify’s business model.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#372

Post by jolux »

bottled_poe wrote: post #371
the_pwner224 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling a burger is inhernelty profitable for McD, they sell it for more than they spend on manufacturing and shipping and serving it. Each new burger sold adds more profit. Serving music is unprofitable for Spotify. They collect your monthly subscription fee, then every additional song play makes Spotify lose money. They don't want to have zero song plays since then nobody would subscribe, but their goal is sell the…

if that’s true, then podcasts are only a bandaid solution for a fundamental problem with Spotify’s business model.

I mean, they are not currently a profitable company, nor do I think the profit outlook is good for them under their current model.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#373

Post by tshaddox »

bottled_poe wrote: post #371
the_pwner224 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling a burger is inhernelty profitable for McD, they sell it for more than they spend on manufacturing and shipping and serving it. Each new burger sold adds more profit. Serving music is unprofitable for Spotify. They collect your monthly subscription fee, then every additional song play makes Spotify lose money. They don't want to have zero song plays since then nobody would subscribe, but their goal is sell the…

if that’s true, then podcasts are only a bandaid solution for a fundamental problem with Spotify’s business model.

Well, yeah, of course there’s a fundamental problem with Spotify’s business model. They’re a middleman for digital content.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#374

Post by varanauskas »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #368
bombcar wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to McDonalds, home of the Mcadoyble. Now given that burgers cost us money to produce, wouldn’t you rather have a podcast? Does this whole thing not seem insane to anyone else?

Selling a burger is inhernelty profitable for McD, they sell it for more than they spend on manufacturing and shipping and serving it. Each new burger sold adds more profit. Serving music is unprofitable for Spotify. They collect your monthly subscription fee, then every additional song play makes Spotify lose money. They don't want to have zero song plays since then nobody would subscribe, but their goal is sell the…

Just to add to this restaurant based allegory, Spotify is like an all you can eat buffet that tries to serve out lots of sodas so you get bloated and don’t eat the expensive stuff they have

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#375

Post by userbinator »

For brevity and the same length of text, I think it should be called the Nope button. (I thought of Hate, but it's too strong if the existing one is Like and not Love.)

...but whatever happened to rating instead of binary choices? I have a theory that making people think of things in only binary terms intrinsically causes divisiveness.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#376

Post by oceanghost »

cplusplusfellow wrote: post #315
dfdz wrote: post #115

I have seen this article before. The author are so close to understanding why Spotify does NOT need a dislike button >To dislike a song is easy – to like one, you have to actually invest time in it. Likewise, to detect if a user dislikes a song is easy since the user will not invest time listening to it: the skip button is the dislike button. In contrast, detecting if a user likes a song is more difficult: there need…

There are 3 artists that Spotify continually play to me and I preemptively will fast forward them even during the crossover play because I dislike them so much. I’ve submitted requests before to have a “don’t play me this artist” feature. I don’t know why this is so hard for them.

Youtube for me, fixates on a couple of videos-- as in it recommends them every single time I use it-- one is a Marques Brown retrospective on the Gameboy, and one is the TYT (news outlet), story about a woman who had her face bitten off by an ape and is at least 8 years old.

I don't know why these show up in my recommendations every single day. I will never watch them.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#377

Post by [deleted] »

elamje wrote: post #343
klyrs wrote: post #78

An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them. Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I…

Why Spotify plasters your home page with Podcasts: Short answer is $$$$. Longer answer is: Spotify must pay royalties for each song played. Imagine if there was a completely free (for Spotify) form of content that filled users ears for hours, thus removing the need for Spotify to pay royalties. Ahem podcasts. Now imagine if Spotify started injecting ads into said media form to grow their revenue beyond subscriptions.…

[deleted]

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#378

Post by a5aAqU »

klyrs wrote: post #78

An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them. Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I…

Pandora's music recommendations are amazing, and the stations stay within their genre. I've discovered a huge amount of new music that way.

I've never used Spotify, so I can't compare. I don't like podcasts either. I get more out of audiobooks.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#379

Post by mimanning »

MutableLambda wrote: post #367
mimanning wrote: post #312

Does anyone know if the spotify recommendation algorithm analyzes the actual music in order to group songs? Or does it only do clustering based on users' listening habits? It seems like incorporating the former could help with discovering new and potentially less well known music, which is an area I'd like to see spotify improve on.

I'm pretty sure it's done via collaborative filtering (other user preferences), and not the actual music features (like Pandora does, or did before).

That's too bad, I'd love to have the ability to explicitly trade off the recommendation criteria between music features and user preferences. I understand there's no real incentive for spotify to do this though.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#380

Post by 015a »

klyrs wrote: post #78

An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them. Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I…

I don't usually overreact too strongly to big tech making dumb decisions like these, but Spotify's podcast pushing actually did drive me away from the platform.

I beg Spotify to think Logically about it. There is a limited amount of screen real estate available on any display, but especially phones. Q.e.d: pushing podcast-related content actually hurts the music listening experience. Conversely, pushing music content hurts the podcast listening experience. This is (mostly) inarguable; any pixel dedicated to an interface element related to podcast content is a pixel which cannot display music content; its a zero sum game.

I say "mostly" because; there are people who I'm sure love Spotify Podcasts, and having both avenues within one app is a net win. I'd be willing to accept a toggle in settings which could "focus" the app Between Music Music + Podcasts Podcasts. I don't think that's unreasonable, and I also don't feel it would be unreasonable for it to default to Music + Podcasts.

Though it brings up an interesting point: Imagine the experience of someone who does primarily come to Spotify for podcasts. Its among the worst podcast apps in the history of podcast apps! Its littered with music! That's a horrible experience!

The ironic part is, Spotify is probably happy to lose me as a customer. I'm a "Music power user" if there were such a thing. They may end up paying more in royalties for the music I listen to than I pay them, and I can't say I've listened to more than a half-dozen podcasts. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes": Spotify is not incentivized to build an app that benefits people who listen to a lot of music. Their bread and butter is people who listen to a bit of music and podcasts; just enough to keep them paying each month. So, I don't lose too much sleep over their slow decent into mediocrity; I'm far more concerned about the unfortunate reality that there are no longer any great options in this space, for people like me.

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