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An odd discovery on Spotify

robinsloan.com

351–360 of 442 posts

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#351
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. There are some playlists and songs I only listen to in the gym, and similar songs constantly float to the top of Spotify's recommendations for me due to gym being 3x week. I did consider creating another "gym-only" user on our Family plan, but Spotify should really have a way to create named contexts for the one user. e.g. commute, gym, run, working from home, on a plane, etc.

Hell, Spotify should use GPS tagging on your plays and determine "oh look, these songs are only played here, and always skipped elsewhere, hmmmm." But that is too complicated!

I actually watched someone give a presentation at spotify on exactly this when I worked there. This was probably about 5 years or so ago. I have no idea what happened to that project. Probably the biggest issue would be getting people to give you location permissions but they also talked about working around that. It's a big org though they kill off ideas all the time.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#352

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…

https://www.kexp.org/ Eclectic music curated by real DJ’s, you’re welcome.

kexp is the fucking best.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#353
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.

Ha, my life exactly. Ever since my kids used my Spotify account to listen to music my discover weekly list has unbearable amounts of paw patrol, baby shark and others mixed in. Now to be fair it still puts in music that fits my taste as well (and often my kids also like that music too), and considering that this is one profile I don't know what it could do better.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Spotify to play music at a children's party. I am still getting recommendations for "Happy Birthday" months later. According to Spotify, it goes very well with Sheryl Crow and R.E.M.

Almost every monday when the "discover weekly" is rebuilt i get new songs which are not in english. I have no non-english songs in any of my playlists and when they show up on discover weekly i flag them. I would think that recommending me Spanish/Russian music when my entire collection is english should flag a problem with the system? Yet week after week at least one song on discover weekly is in some foreign langua…

I would argue for the vast majority of people language is not the primary indicator of what they consider good or bad music. I would assume it doesn't go into the algorithm at all and I certainly would not want it too. I have discovered some really cool music that I'm not even sure what language they are in this way.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#355

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…

The Youtube algorithm bothers me a lot because they have the subscribe system but as soon as you do subscribe to a channel that channel basically disappears off the recommendations/front page.

Just opened youtube.com and 6/8 of the videos on the top section of my front page are from channels I'm subscribed to. That happens for me every time. Sorry your subscribe button doesn't work.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#356
post #77

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…

Music can be algorithmically generated since it's formulaic, what I think machine learning models will struggle with at first is maintaining those formulas throughout a song. I imagine AI produced songs will/do sound winding and unhinged at first. All the right ingredients but stewed up in a pot.

Like Dall-E. What you'll get is music which apes music tropes really well, but strangely intentionless and disassociated. For genres like ambient where the intention is to be intentionless and disassociated (or can be), the result is like 'oh hey, AI is here!'.

It's weird. You could extrude endless amounts of The Caretaker, "Everywhere At The End Of Time" if you specified the recipe, with a 'deterioration dial' and some coding to determine how you vary the output. But you'd be free-riding on a pre-existing artistic intention that was originally implemented in dramatic, bold manner. To extrude endless amounts of this stuff is both fairly trivial and missing the point completely…

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, Spotify should use GPS tagging on your plays and determine "oh look, these songs are only played here, and always skipped elsewhere, hmmmm." But that is too complicated!

I actually watched someone give a presentation at spotify on exactly this when I worked there. This was probably about 5 years or so ago. I have no idea what happened to that project. Probably the biggest issue would be getting people to give you location permissions but they also talked about working around that. It's a big org though they kill off ideas all the time.

It seems easy enough to "sell" it to people listening. Location, speed based track selection.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#358
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be realistic here. Hatsune Miku was created before 2010. While I dislike the genre, they've completely sold out all tickets to these festivals where "she" "performed". You're really not thinking it through if you think any genre isn't going to fundamentally change once the industry starts to push virtual artists. They can be perfect and relatable to teenagers. You really don't need physical people to pull off a…

Hatsune Miku kind of helps my argument here, because they still needed a personified identity for the music even though none of it's real. So then we ask, if Hatsune Miku could be manifested into the real world, do you not think their fans would be absolutely ecstatic? Behold, humans, the solution to that problem. I know it's possible to get some people excited about an avatar, but I'm going to argue that the vast ma…

You might want to check out a Hatsune Miku concert on YouTube because humans are actually entirely redundant if you can just generate the song. (You'll probably want to mute the audio though, otherwise your ears might start to bleed)

There is a 3d avatar dancing on the floor. The holographic technology in the context of concerts is incredible at this point.

As a matter of fact, its likely going to be in favour of AI if you consider VR headset etc, as the coming generations will be able to interact with the virtual artists, giving the producer am even easier time to get money from the consumers.

I'm not looking forward to that future to be honest.

Example: https://youtu.be/PlQIdq5mv_k

/Edit: After thinking about it some more: I think I agree that the potential music generation isn't going to change anything by itself. It's just another building block that will enable the music industry to eventually remove real humans from the equation. while we're slowly progressing on that path, the music generation alone won't push us to the logical conclusion.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#359

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…

The Youtube algorithm bothers me a lot because they have the subscribe system but as soon as you do subscribe to a channel that channel basically disappears off the recommendations/front page.

I literally ignore the front page 99% of the time and just go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#360
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I listened to the users ... No way! No one ever listens to the users. There's some obvious random word shuffling happening and that gave it away.

I listened to what gave it away and it's definitely the same obvious random word shuffling. Imagine finding users who all have been listened to, but only partially and in the same way, perhaps with slight changes.

I listened to what it gave away and it's definitely the same random obvious word shuffling. Imagine users finding who have all been listened to, but only partially in and the same way, perhaps slightly changed.
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