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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#151

Post by alkonaut »

This is the TikTok-ification of music. The required response is the same here, as it is to the consumption of any other media, which is the same as when ordering food.

Don't order food out of a random dark kitchen. Order from a brick and mortar restaurant you know.

Don't use algorithmic feeds to discover video. Find a channel/producer you like and watch that.

The same applies to music. Assume everything fed to you is a tiktok style snippet of short term gratification that has no real value other than keeping you around for a few more seconds until the next snippet, while costing as little as possible for both producer and delivery platform.

Don't waste time being upset that everything is TikTok. If you scroll the TikTok feed, Watch Instagram reels, Order Dark Kitchen food, or listen to generated Spotify playlists, you are part of the problem.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#152

Post by Kiro »

duped wrote: post #95
caseyross wrote: post #20

With the success of AI content generation for text (GPT-3 etc.) and images (DALL-E etc.), it seems inevitable that music will soon be targeted as well, if not already. What's particularly interesting in the music sphere is that there are already well-established trends towards building a sort of ambient, atmospheric, generated soundscape. (For example, the famous "Lo-Fi girl" stream.) AI-generated content is a very n…

They always have relied on live performance (and to a greater extent, education). Talk to some professionals in the industry some time, they're not going to talk about records as a source of income. I could write a ten page rant on why AI and automation aren't a threat to musicians but it basically boils down to the fact that music is a human spectacle and we will continue to grow the industry through performing live…

Your comment ignores 99% of genres.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#153

Post by bpye »

LelouBil wrote: post #136
macNchz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has actually been a lot of that showing up in my google search results for the past few years… there are thousands of sites out there that were created by scraping news articles and blog posts and replacing random words with thesaurus alternatives. The results vary from incomprehensible to some kind of uncanny valley “is this just…really terrible writing or am I having a brain problem?” territory. I’ve actually…

Websites that scrape StackOverflow are the WORST! It's always giving me false hopes that my problem got resolved until I notice that I've alrezdy read the question before.

There's one site that scrapes GitHub as well - it does at least have a link to the original page, but I've only ever opened it by mistake...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#154

Post by djmips »

zone411 wrote: post #43
caseyross wrote: post #20

With the success of AI content generation for text (GPT-3 etc.) and images (DALL-E etc.), it seems inevitable that music will soon be targeted as well, if not already. What's particularly interesting in the music sphere is that there are already well-established trends towards building a sort of ambient, atmospheric, generated soundscape. (For example, the famous "Lo-Fi girl" stream.) AI-generated content is a very n…

Yes, it's inevitable. Some parts of this process are harder than than others, though. I think I've handled the hardest part, which is making catchy melodies ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578Y... ). Live music is already over 50% of music industry revenue, so the transition could be a bit easier for musicians than for visual artists.

Didn't find the melodies catchy. Sorry to tell you that.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#156

Post by SethMurphy »

Music has always confirmed to the medium. The standard song structure of pop no longer serves the medium's purpose. I wholly expect pop songs to get shorter on average and take advantage of what social media has trained our brains to consume.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#157

Post by bpye »

vintermann wrote: post #143
ford wrote: post #23

This feels like the Spotify version of the websites you find on Google that just scrape Stack Overflow As Spotify's recommendations become more ingrained in how people listen to music they'll have to think about how to treat "song spam"

Oh, they have been aware of it for a long time. https://blog.echonest.com/post/48943428838/how-we-cope-with-... Spotify is actually half-decent here. The other streaming services seem to mainly compete on cutting costs, and many are little more than frontends over 7digital's services (who, surprise, also do virtually nothing to prevent spam). To take an example: https://www.deezer.com/search/%22From%20the%20box%22/al…

I guess Apple have some sort of curation, or maybe don't use 7digital at all, because Apple Music shows no results for "From the box".

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#158

Post by ChrisRR »

My account once got taken over by one of those hackers that will play the same song over and over to boost its rating

I mostly listen to metal, but one day I noticed that on my last.fm my most listened to track was suddenly "The 1975 - Chocolate". A song that I'd never heard before or since. The track was played at completely random times, often multiple times in a row or when I wasn't awake.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#159

Post by somebodythere »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #26
dangrossman wrote: post #6

> A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come. I find this infuriating. There's one dominican restaurant in my city that's listed on DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats under over 20 different names with different subsets of their menu. All of these duplicate listings for the same place make it harder to search or browse the actual restaurant opti…

(Shrug) This is how hotel restaurants, including some very good ones, have always worked. What difference does it make what other ethnicities/varieties of food the restaurant delivers?

Virtual restaurants don't have the reputation to burn like a brick-and-mortar with a well-known brand does. Normally if a restaurant presents itself as primarily selling one menu item (common examples: pizza, wings, milkshakes) you expect them do do it really well. But with virtual restaurants there's no need to build up a good reputation by serving quality food since your strategy is to drown out competitors by putting up dozens of fake brands, each with a supposed "specialty". If one of your identities is tarnished it is trivial to spin up a new one.

I remember the first time I got caught by this, I excitedly ordered from a "Korean fried chicken" place on Uber eats, and when the food arrived it was heat-from-frozen chicken tenders drowned in unappetizing sauce. I felt scammed, and the food was so bad, I didn't even manage to finish what I had ordered. Later I looked up the restaurant and discovered it shared an address with an unremarkable local burger chain. I had a similar experience with another virtual restaurant and at this point I always check if it's a VR before ordering delivery from an app and treat it as a strong negative signal to the quality of food.

This is obviously a lot different from your hotel example because the hotel restaurant's reputation is inextricable from the hotel itself; not only do patrons always know where their room service is coming from, bad food/service reflects poorly on the hotel as well. The hotel has a lot more to lose than the virtual restaurant.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#160

Post by midasz »

merijnv wrote: post #146
nosianu wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really interesting - although when I read that story I thought the point was the broken recommendation system. Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing . Or Facebook/Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% milit…

> Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing. Spotify's recommendation system is much better than youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better. Having been following Spotify's "Discover Weekly" for several years now, I'm actually real…

As a father of a young child, Spotify's algo's are completely useless to me. If their ML is so smart it should be able to determine that Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax. Wish I'd be able to toggle 'don't recommend kids music' somewhere.
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