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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#531
As someone who listens to numerous genres but is also selective with what I listen to, I am confident that spotify simply doesn't cater to my demographic. They are really about scaling to the masses, as is evident by their move into podcasts and constants frontpage ads on new releases, as well as aggressive song caching. From a business perspective, I believe its simply not worth the compute/development effort from their side to have a recommendation engine on par with say Pandora.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#532
post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't really follow. If we're talking about something so specific as "what songs would a band play on their own set list" that should be manually curated, and in a very short amount of time.

If it's just general vibes... spotify already does this for you. They have an entire section called "Made for you" which seems to cluster your tastes and generate playlists of them.

Perhaps you just want to generate a cluster off of your own chosen centroid of song profiles. That could be cool I guess. I vastly prefer to just play albums.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With YouTube you can mark them as ‘not interested’ and poof, they’re gone.

I mostly use the YouTube app on my google TV which is notoriously... behind the times. I will look for that thank you!

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#534
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

I have good and bad experiences with Pandora. The biggest issue was telling it I didn't like a song and having it recommend another mix of the same song. Dislike that one and get yet another mix of the same song

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#535

I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted. I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could ev…

Itunes (well I guess it’s Apple Music now) does still support 5-star rankings, it’s just hidden behind a context menu. I still have a Smart Playlist (can you even make those anymore?) of my 4-star and 5-star songs that serves as my daily shuffle rotation.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#536
post #432

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…

While YouTube Music is still a clear regression from GPM, it's slowly catching up. Any year now it'll be good... But it seems it might already annoy you less than Spotify? Which is interesting, most people seem to believe Spotify is superior.

Did it stop mixing YouTube likes with music likes? Destroying my 'liked' music playlist was an unforgivable sin in my book. Fortunately I was able to get my old GPM info with Google Takeout before it went away, so I just scripted up a solution to recreate those likes on Spotify.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#537
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they don't have to pay rights for the podcasts, so for them it's a win/win if you spend your attention on their app listening to free content.

It's probably that they can get exclusive podcasts, but not exclusive music. They want podcasts to be something that locks you into Spotify.

Very good point.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#538
post #119

I feel like I'm the only one that doesn't really care about recommendation engines because I still don't use them. I get music recommendations from friends or music journalism the way I did pre-Pandora and it still works for me. Maybe I'm missing out on some sick bands though.

I expect to be an outlier here, I also never use recommendation because I listen to the same stuff since 15+ years, and I couldn’t be happier :) Elder Scrolls and Castlevania OSTs (Symphony of the Night and Super Castlevania mostly) represent at least 90% of what I listened to during the past decade. The other 10% is Shpongle and other soundtrack from games I enjoyed.

At the risk of wildly upheaving your music listening habits — give the Starbound soundtrack a try. I like the soundtracks you enjoy a lot and Starbound definitely makes my heavy rotation.

And Stardew Valley, but that has the addedcool factor of being made entirely by one guy.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#539

I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted. I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could ev…

I've thought about this in the past and figured something geometric could better capture engagement -1 -> dislike, +1 -> like, +2 -> favourite, +4 -> heart Labels are arbitrary. How might this weighting affect learning?

There is something I've never seen in a voting system before, but I'd love for it to take off.

Slice open an orange along its equator. Looking at this slice you have a shape kind of like an *

Each of these wedges can have a different tag. Those wedges facing up would have a positive value, and down a negative.

The site the orange slice voting system is used on can easily decide the number of wedges that make sense and the tags associated.

Instead we get binary or unitary choices that don't really mean much.

Edit: Image for example

https://i.imgur.com/0uVQl3s.jpg

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix, Youtube and reddit aren't the same medium as short lived music streaming is. Streaming music is a show lived precision game of guessing what's relevant. There is a lot of it depends scenarios, are we showing recommendations on a landing page, are we sequencing songs in a station or are we ordering results on a search page. The CX context is a big part of how you can use signals to benefit the customer. My ar…

Form should follow function. CX used to mean customer experience, and when your customers are telling you they want this feature back then you should reinterperate your data, not tell them they're wrong.

It amazes me how tech savvy users think they know what the entire population of users want. I'm not telling anyone they are wrong, I'm simply sharing real world data that counters the idea that users actually want a downvote button for music streaming. The fact that most people in this thread have really strong opinions but don't work in music streaming baffles my brain.
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