Live data from Hacker News

Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

news.cornell.edu

581–590 of 660 posts

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#581
post #343
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.…

You aren't wrong, but you would think they would then create an excellent podcast player, yet they can't even get simple things like the order of the episodes correctly, and I still haven't figured out how to setup a next queue.

Not to mention that I might listen to podcasts at home and one the way to work, but at work I won't want to listen to anything spoken, but half the time I end up accidentally starting the podcast anyway. That now means I am not using Spotify for podcasts.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#582
I’m pretty sure hitting “skip” while listening to a catered playlist tells Spotify way more than a dislike button would.

That said, I would love a dislike button just so certain songs don’t appear again. Not interested in hearing the latest tween pop track.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the migration last night with tune my music[1] and it worked flawlessly. Also, they didn’t want yet another account to spam mail me for months. [1] https://www.tunemymusic.com/

whoa thanks for the heads-up! I've always wanted to try other platforms but I've thought it impossible since I have so much data in Spotify. Any gotchas here?

Didn’t encounter any gotchas. Worked just fine! Couldn’t find one song in my decent amount of playlists with fairly known and more obscure stuff.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the migration last night with tune my music[1] and it worked flawlessly. Also, they didn’t want yet another account to spam mail me for months. [1] https://www.tunemymusic.com/

whoa thanks for the heads-up! I've always wanted to try other platforms but I've thought it impossible since I have so much data in Spotify. Any gotchas here?

You will have to share access to your data, so expect them to sniff a lot about you and your friends from Spotify. Highly recommended to remove access once the migration is complete. The free version transfers only 1000 tracks, about 1-2 songs per second, and some might be missing in the destination, e.g. when moving from Spotify to Apple. Favorite artists cannot be transferred to Apple Music.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two issues with 5 star ranking. One the more thought required to give feedback the less likely users give feedback. More interactions is very helpful for ml so minimizing the decisions needed by a user helps a lot. Great ui/ux for engagement aims for signals to require as little action from the user as possible. As a side effect short content is very nice as finish/playtime become strong signals that requir…

I think these issues are more significant for public rankings. When I'm ranking songs, it's to curate my own listening. So if I only want to use 1 and 5 stars, fine—no worse off than a thumbs up/down system. But for those of us who do want to be more precise, it just gives more flexibility.

The systems I worked on were mainly for user curated recommendations and not public rankings. Your rating is only small part of your recommendation. A large amount of your recommendation is finding other users with similar ratings on similar content to you. If 1/5 star system leads to less ratings from other users, then system's ability to find similar users/similar ratings become worse and can negatively impact your recommendations.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#587

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.

Like some others have said, I've found Deezer's flow (shuffle algorithm) to give the best results. I've been using it for a few years now, so I have no idea how fast it could learn for a newcomer.

They just added a "moods" choice to flow a few days ago: focus, sport, party... I think there are 6 of them. But they added it only to the mobile app and not the webapp which is the one I use the most, so I can't really say how good they are.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#588

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…

Good fit/bad fit would be genius. My musical tastes can be all over the map. From 80s pop to jazz and swing. Sprinkle in some Icelandic metal and rap and hip/hop. Don't leave out the occasional polka or Taylor Swift. My moods can change day to day and a more accurate playlist would be a Godsend.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#589
post #343
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.…

I'm sure it boils down to money ultimately, but it can't be the way you suggest here.

The thing is that Spotify does not pay per play! The royalties lobby love to give the impression that they do, because it makes it look like Spotify is fleecing them.

Spotify pays percentages of what it itself collects in subscription fees. If a record company owned 10% of everything that was listened to on Spotify this month, they would make _the same_, regardless of how many absolute seconds their stuff was listened to.

So, more listening to podcasts does not mean Spotify has to pay out less. How much they have to pay out in total is fixed as a share of their subscription (and ad) revenue anyway, in multi-year, industry wide contracts with copyright owners.

There are ways Spotify could circumvent this, such as promoting content they covertly owned themselves, or content whose owners gave them kickbacks of some sort. There's some indication they do such shady things. But podcasts don't change this equation much.

I think Spotify's promotion of podcasts is simply good old fashioned loss-leading monopoly building. They're hoping that Spotify will become where listeners go for podcasts since that's where all the podcasts are, and also the place podcasters go because that's where all the listeners are.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#590

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.

I once didn't properly unlink Spotify when I returned my car to the leasing company. The driver taking it back played bhangra for about half an hour using my account before I noticed. Changing the password, unlinking devices nothing worked. I eventually got him to stop by constantly switching it to the Barbie Girl by Aqua and then finally Spotify support was able to unlink it. I was then recommended bhangra for month…

Sorry it happened to you, but that's hilarious.
Post reply on HN