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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#511

Spotify going IPO was the number one reason I dropped them on the floor. They now officially care only about profits and since they pretty much have just a single product, this means users are fucked. I begrudingly went to Apple Music and am missing my cd-ripped/torrented mp3 collections... Why does the free market have to consistently ruin every service?

Apple music isn't run by a profit motivated public company?

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is a band playing at a music festival queuing their own tunes from spotify?

Upon reading the parent comment, I don't think this is what they were suggesting. They were making an analogy between what a band chooses to play live at a show based on context of the show, and what a streaming service could do to suggest songs based on context of the listening environment.

Isn't that what playlists are for?

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#513
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…

Sometimes your just not in the mood for a specific song or genre. A skip doesn’t imply I’d never want to hear a song again.

It would be nice if when you skipped a song it would do a soft pop up or something to ask why you skipped it. You could ignore it most of the time but if you felt strongly about the recommendation then you could at least vent your frustration on the "I don't like this song" button.

I think the main issue here is, is that users feel a bit powerless to influence the algorithm with thier dislikes as much as thier likes. Even though a song skip may be functionally similar to the dislike button, the user has no "haptic feedback", for lack of better term, when they really feel the need to have their negative opinion on the song heard by the algorithm.

I think most people's gripes with the nature of these recommendation algorithms deciding things, centre around the feeling that the algorithm doesn't listen to them and their opinion as much as it obeys other overriding trends. Giving them tangible and tactile options to deliver their opinions in hard and fast way gives them some more peace of mind that the algorithm is working for them, and not for some other entity.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upon reading the parent comment, I don't think this is what they were suggesting. They were making an analogy between what a band chooses to play live at a show based on context of the show, and what a streaming service could do to suggest songs based on context of the listening environment.

Isn't that what playlists are for?

Yes, if you want to curate an entire playlist. Not everyone does. And if anyone has the enough data to generate these kinds of disparate playlists on their own with minimal user input/direction, it would be Spotify.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#515
post #406

Things I want from Spotify: - Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom. - Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists. - Hide th…

For the people who argue that you cannot hear the difference lossless and compressed: I agree, however the issue is that the lossless versions of the music also received more editing from audio engineers. That is what makes Tidal more enjoyable.

I think Tidal gets better recommendations for me than Spotify used to as well (lots of smaller acts I'd never have come across on my own), although it's rather irritating how the labels keep yanking things from Tidal. I really like Tidal but I'm genuinely tempted to move away because of this problem.

What never seems to penetrate the skulls of the labels is that it's their shitehawk behaviour that drives piracy, not their customer's desire to freeload. This was as true in the '60s when the only good radio content in Britain came from ships in international waters (hence the name "piracy") as it was for things like Napster and remains true today.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#516

A dislike button would be handy. There is that feature on some of the generated playlists, but I don't think they do anything. My two biggest issues with Spotify right now are: 1. Release Radar filled with re-releases and remixes, often from artists who have long since passed away. I want new music as in released for the first time. 2. Name collisions. I'm surprised this is an issue, but I will often get songs from d…

Unfortunately the only thing they seem to do is exclude that song from that playlist. I've had things I disliked on one radio station come up on a different station 30 minutes later.

I just recently switch to Spotify from YouTube Music (as a former diehard Google Play fan) maybe 6 weeks ago. Everyone raved about how great the recommendation system was but I'm certainly not seeing it yet after spending several weeks diligently liking/disliking songs, entering in favorite artists, etc.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#517

Would be great if Spotify had * "good fit"/"bad fit" button — I like a wide variety of music, but it needs to be appropriate to context. If I start a radio from a song, I'd like to teach it to tailor the suggested songs better but that doesn't mean I dislike the songs it _is_ suggesting. * Ability to give the social context — a band playing at a music festival will lean more towards hits in their back catalogue. At t…

There is an opening for this. I would switch streaming service for a better shuffle algorithm.

I haven't used it in a while, but this was a big advantage of Pandora for me. With pandora, you start a 'station' with a few seed songs and as you like/dislike songs, it keeps refining the station.

The downside to Pandora is that you can't choose your music. You can seed a station with a specific song, but that song might not be the first one played.

What I really liked with Pandora was that it was really good at producing endless playlists for me to listen to at work or car rides. I was a paid subscriber when I worked night shifts and drove a lot more. Spotify stations are really hit or miss. Sometimes the Spotify stations dive into foreign music and I can't find a way to specify which language of music I want to hear.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#518

Would be great if Spotify had * "good fit"/"bad fit" button — I like a wide variety of music, but it needs to be appropriate to context. If I start a radio from a song, I'd like to teach it to tailor the suggested songs better but that doesn't mean I dislike the songs it _is_ suggesting. * Ability to give the social context — a band playing at a music festival will lean more towards hits in their back catalogue. At t…

Pandora has filters for it's radios labeled as "deep cuts" or "most popular" that attempts some of this.

On your first thought, it's always been unclear to me which of my music settings in Pandora are global or station specific.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#519
I mostly use playlists generated by this service https://everynoise.com/ (you can get to them with desktop client by pasting playlist links from the site to the spotify client search box.)

From the site: "Every Noise at Once is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 5,646 genre-shaped distinctions by Spotify as of 2021-10-16. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier."

I personally think that an algorithm trying to learn my tastes and recommend music to me is the wrong approach... especially as the algorithm does not actually seem to care anything about the actual waveform content.

I feel I get get this strange "personal echo chamber effect" where I at least think I notice the effect of my past listening habits or the outsized weight of some stuff that was on powerplay some time ago. It gets hard to find new stuff or to learn to like new stuff.

This varies though, sometimes the recommendations are great. Perhaps they work best for me if I don't constantly follow or listen to them, but instead listen to playlists curated by humans or everynoise.com.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want a service where I can upload my own files and easily access them from a player interface in the browser, mobile, etc. Amazon used to provide this service, but they shut it down.

iTunes still has it, I think, as iTunes Match.

But as the name already implies, that one preferentially tries to match your files to the ones already available in Apple's music catalogue, with file upload only serving as a fallback if it can't find any matches.

And from what I've heard, the fingerprinting algorithm is fuzzy enough that it will often match songs/song versions that are very similar, but not actually identical, like censored/uncensored lyrics, different masterings, differing fade ins/outs, alternate takes and live versions, etc. etc.

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