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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#181
post #61
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be as simple as another piece of metadata on the track.

And on the file level, it is! But then do you as a music player / streaming service display that all the time, when most people are not listening to classical music and do not care about the composer? Do you make the user manage which columns are visible? (Almost every HN user misses when more software did this. Almost every normal user found it confusing/annoying.) What about publishers who do not give a damn that J…

Isn't it principally an industry thing to hide the composer, they don't want us to know that the pop is from a "factory" and picked for the artist, they want the public to believe the myth that the manufactured band sit on mountaintops with their instruments coming up with new grooves (or whatever).

Can't you just let the user decide "artist + track" or "artist + composer(s) + track" or ...

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#182
post #28

People have been noticing this a lot recently but what nobody seems to know is that this is a form of money laundering/“scamming.” I know because I used to be active on crime forums and talked to some of the people who engineered this scheme. People will set up fake Spotify artist accounts with stolen identities and bank accounts, pay a musician for songs that pass as music, and then bot millions of streams on them.…

I'm probably missing something but how is this money laundering?

(In my opinion) Some hacker provides a paid service in which you have either hacked spotify accounts or well generated fakes that can run streams on fake artists accounts. Some random mafia pays these hackers to maintain their bots and to launder their money. You can even pay the hackers with the finally laundered money.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#183

The author seems to be suprised by this, not just founding it on Spotify, but the whole process. E.g.: "I love it, because it’s so strange, so dizzying, and — credit where due–because our mystery producer is truly going with the grain of the medium, in a way that no one merely “making albums” does, at all. What could be more 21st century, more “liquid modernity”, than releasing your music as a haze of variations into…

Both of those are bands making algorithmic music. This is algorithmically created bands with also music

Not that big of a leap. A human also created the "algorithmically created bands", which is far easier than algorithmic music (they'd just register artists with random/generated names and some random choice of an image).

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#184
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about music mood vs time of the day vs activity. Like late evening before sleep being perhaps not a good moment for heavy metal. And running not a right time for slow classical music.

Which is weird in case of Apple Music because Apple knows exactly if I am sleeping, running or driving a car - just from reading my watch.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#185
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That sounds like a great argument for easy profile switching, along with an option in your play history for "move this play history item to this other profile".

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#186

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…

> 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.

I've had the opposite experience with Spotify - I'd say my discovery of new music has withered to almost nil since switching when Google Music shifted to YouTube.

The algorithm just churns stuff I've already listened to, or suggests artists with (consistently) two songs that feel like Spotify's own fake artists - session musicians generated to capture royalties in-house.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#187

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 i…

Doesn’t it come down to „be a critical thinker instead of a mindless consumer“? From that follows that you don’t just scroll through the homepage but should use the search function, in an informed way.

Which in turn already fails at the majority of people being too lazy to type, and not knowing how to search for things they want. They quickly give up, and just take the easy route of consuming what’s served to them.

It’s the modern equivalent of falling on the sofa, switching on the TV, and just watching whatever’s on until they fall asleep.

Getting a majority of people to care about their media consumption is probably a hopeless cause.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#188

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…

[deleted]

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. I've had the opposite experience with Spotify - I'd say my discovery of new music has withered to almost nil since switching when Google Music shifted to YouTube. The algorithm just churns stuff I've already listened to, or…

I have the same problem with Spotify, just the same stuff over and over and over. YouTube Music has a much more diverse recommendation approach than Spotify does in my experience.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#190

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…

Spotify's algorithm works really well until you let someone else use the account. I wish there was a "child mode", "party mode" or whatever to disable updating recommendations.
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