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Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

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Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure they are but the significant difference for the consumer is that Apple has way more than one product.

That's very silly reasoning imo. You're making decisions on believed future indicators and ignoring the actual present facts.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also not clear that your opinion is grounded in reality. Not sure what more to say.

It is a no-brainer to use the collected data points instead of user feedback in this case. Only a small set of users would down vote enough to make it relevant. Also hard to measure the quality of the votes and how they age.

Well, no surprise this was down voted since most people in this thread never seems to have worked in this field. I have worked with recommendations on a service with millions of users. We do not guess. We look at things like conversion rates to tell us what works. If one think down votes would play a significant part in training a model you simple does not understand the amount of metrics a modern service collects and what impact different variables have.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#603
post #298

First, Spotify likes have been broken since forever, things you not liked end up as liked tracks. Second, it is obvious that the recommendations are mostly based on what you previously listen to. Hence, all parents are spammed with kids songs. I think they made a fix for that now though. People does not act according to there believes and I have a hard time thinking that votes would beat history when it comes to mass…

I am curious, what was the fix for parent's profile being spammed with kids songs? I hate to pay for a family plan just to maintain individual profiles when I never plan to listen on more than one device concurrently.

Backtracked and it was from an ad. The family plan was the solution I am afraid.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm ok now, thanks.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I still use it for listening to my own music, but I'd love to have the same thing for streaming. (Maybe Apple Music supports that?)

I rate songs from Apple Music (that I’ve never downloaded to my library) and they do appear in my rankings-based smart playlist.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#606

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…

I'll add some other asks:

1, Give me a way to mark a period of time or specific songs in my history as not to be used to inform my recommendation model signals. I might want to put on some special themed dinner music or listen to a song a few times for a certain reason but otherwise not want future recommendations informed by this.

2. Give me a a genre or other filter. Sometimes recommendations will be great but are a mix of soothing guitar and hard trance. I don't necessarily want both at once.

3. Give me a way to use one song in my weekly discovery and say "remove all songs in the current list that are like this and don't give me any more ever again." Like, I put on classical once, and for months now most of my discover weekly is stuff I have zero interest in. I can go one by one but really I need a "dislike type/genre" button.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're all asking for All is the flaw in your comment. One person does not imply all and data speaks for itself.

If x number of people are asking for something, all of those people are asking for it. I think it was pretty obvious I wasn't claiming all spotify users are asking for this. I'm a PO so feel sufficiently qualified to state that user analytics data is completely redundant for looking at small use high value features & undervaluing direct user feedback from your 'power users' is generally a bad move. Again, just becaus…

> Data doesn't tell you how useful a feature is, it tells you how frequently it's used & how many people use it. They are not the same things.

That entirely depends on the the data set. On one hand you are claiming to be an expert and on the other making generalizations about what data can be used for. In reality you know that data is contextual and depending on the data set is what determines what conclusions and how confident you can be in those conclusions.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're all asking for All is the flaw in your comment. One person does not imply all and data speaks for itself.

The data does not speak at all. You are drawing inferences based on the data, inferences of a type that are pretty easy to poke holes in by looking at the pretty large class of things rarely used but situationaly useful (often life saving). This type of bizarre logic makes me feel like I have to habitually use features even when they are not useful in order to protect them from UX designers in case I'm subject to som…

> The data does not speak at all.

What data are you referencing? I'm drawing conclusions based on data I have but I don't think you work for the same company as me so I'm not sure how you can speak to confidently about how wrong I am.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#609
post #343

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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…

That is a great point about loss-leading a future monopoly and of course a factor.

This isn't a hill I will die on by any means, but if you read Spotify's write up on royalties[0], they pay out based on stream share of the overall platform, on a monthly basis. E.g. If Columbia Records gets 10% of streams for a month, they get 10% of the pool of $ Spotify distributes. Now, like you said they likely have some shady practices - I would imagine Spotify has an incentive to create music like study and sleep beats themselves as those playlists get hit for 8 hrs at a time and it doesn't really matter who created the beat as long as it helps you study or sleep.

They do not indicate in [0] that podcasts are excluded from stream share. Even if they aren't included in stream share now, I'd imagine long term they very much intend for podcasts and music to be lumped into the same stream share model to drive payouts down.

[0] https://artists.spotify.com/help/article/royalties

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#610
post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious: how repetitive is your listening history? I also notice that my Discover Weekly and Daily 1-5 playlists are recycling much of the same material. But I also frequently listen to my Liked Songs ( Otherwise, a fun experiment I tried last year: deleted all liked songs, all playlists, etc. to refresh my recommendations. I didn't pay close attention to how new suggestions compared to old, but it was one sort of tr…

I listen to a workout playlist on shuffle frequently while training, while slowly adding new music to it throughout the year. Like others have mentioned, Spotify has completely stopped recommending new music for years now. Even if I start a song radio from a song I've never listened to before, Spotify immediately just starts playing songs from my current year's workout playlist. That is not the behavior I want. Yes,…

This has a lot to do with your present listening habits, unfortunately. 7 years in, I still get new stuff in discover weekly, though there are also a good deal of repeats which are frankly "discoveries" as far as Spotify is concerned, but nothing new from my perspective. Basically, Spotify is also recommending I listen to stuff I used to listen to a lot before I started using it (and could therefore afford to listen to more than just whatever was loaded on my phone at the time)...
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