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An odd discovery on Spotify

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Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#411

Post by thyrsus »

folkrav wrote: post #384
philsnow wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also the only way I can make sense of twitter, skip the 'feed' or whatever it's called[0] and go right to my curated lists. [0] as an aside, I only just made the connection that 'feed' is likely an abbreviation of 'newsfeed' but also brings a strong and stark connotation that I'm livestock to be fed

Funny, maybe it's a language thing (French speaking) but to me the first thing that comes to mind when speaking about feeds is "RSS", so I genuinely never made the connection.

It probably is: English has "eat" vs. "feed", German has "essen" vs. "fressen", but duckduckgo.com translates both to French "manger".

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#412

Post by musictubes »

chewz wrote: post #184
midasz wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Play music had that feature. I really miss it.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#413

Post by jklm »

kennend3 wrote: post #391
cycomanic wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would wish you great success trying to frame an argument that the "vast majority" of people are not primary concerned with language. It is a bit hard to listen to/enjoy music when you cant understand a single word. Sure they had "gangnam style" but that was really a more a "one off". > I certainly would not want it too. I'd love to know if the majority feel this way. given there are countless articles such as this:…

Are you American by chance? Feel free not to answer, but living in the US I was surprised to learn friends in other countries commonly listen to music they can’t understand (most commonly English, sometimes German).

Put things in perspective for me - we really live in a bubble here. I guess Spotify could help reinforce that if that’s what the market wants.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#414

Post by NCC1701DEngage »

nosianu wrote: post #131
usednet wrote: 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.…

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. 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% militaria fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It finally stopped but it took well over half a year.

>That's why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time.

This kind of problem is exactly why we are building alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to find more channels making similar content:

https://channelgalaxy.com

Click on icons in the lists to go to that channel's list. You can "surf" along that way to discover new content.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#415

Post by exikyut »

vintermann wrote: post #398
exikyut wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW this is all I see, not logged in (never had an account), from AU: https://imgur.com/a/HXpn9JG Not sure if I'm seeing something different to you...?

Yes. I see a screen full of your second to last result: https://twitter.com/HaraldKml/status/1562137336409985025/pho...

Huh... this is pretty interesting. My screenshot shows "15 results" at the top, which a reload of the page just now is still showing.

But when I go to load the site through my VPS in Germany... I see the "292 albums" you're talking about! And yep, umpteen copies of the same album art just like in your screenshot.

Wow. I think this might be due to Australian consumer protection laws dictating that faulty products MUST be returnable. (Buying stuff in Australia is actually kind of cool because if I don't get exactly what I paid for I don't generally have to make very much effort to get a refund.) IIUC this policy has taken impressive chunks out of pretty big players.

...And so it would seem I'm simply not seeing anything I might reasonably and correctly regard as faulty.

Well that's an interesting database column then.

(I unfortunately have less familiarity than I probably should about this status quo (given I live here :D), but I can at least offer the "Consumers" and "Business" headings (and all the individual sections in the associated dropdowns) at the top of https://www.accc.gov.au/ as a cursory indication of the level of pedantry and protection involved.)

It's entirely possible I have the wrong end of the stick here and something else is the axis point. I wonder what would happen if you loaded the site through an AU proxy/VPN. I'm also curious if any other countries cause this... different presentation.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#416

Post by folkrav »

thyrsus wrote: post #411
folkrav wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, maybe it's a language thing (French speaking) but to me the first thing that comes to mind when speaking about feeds is "RSS", so I genuinely never made the connection.

It probably is: English has "eat" vs. "feed", German has "essen" vs. "fressen", but duckduckgo.com translates both to French "manger".

Interesting. I'd have translated "feed" to "nourrir", not "manger", but they're loosely synonyms.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#417

Post by lionelw »

dominotw wrote: post #280
pelario wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify is missing user profiles, in the Netflix fashion.

spotify is usually on people's personal device like a phone not on communal device at home like a TV.

For young kids with no personal devices of their own, they would only get Spotify from their parents' devices.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#418

Post by InitialLastName »

ihaveajob wrote: post #302
wartijn_ wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can start a private session next time you have a birthday party, to prevent even more birthday songs being recommended. https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/What-is-Private-Sessio...

It sounds like a nightmare. Much like my YouTube suggestions, which now are mostly my kids' planet videos, and my wife's workout ones.

I set up the browser session we use as a TV with profiles entirely to prevent any more of my spouse's yoga videos from leaking into my carefully curated feed of machine shop footage and construction videos.

Re: An odd discovery on Spotify

#420

Post by sushid »

klabb3 wrote: post #272
SantiagoElf wrote: post #211

Let's not forget the reverse scam: Music Business Worldwide’s story explains how the moneymaking trick worked. “Soulful Music” had 467 songs by virtually unknown artists — which is to say, artists who may have been created for the purpose of this alleged scheme. The vast majority of songs were about 30 seconds long, which is the minimum length a song needs to be to count as a monetized play on the service. The most p…

Yes, it's very important piece of Spotify's rev share model, it has arbitrage built in(!), most people are not aware of this. Spotify pays PER STREAM, meaning that a bot account can funnel a massively disproportionate amount of revenue compared to a human one. In fact, you can generate more revenue than your subscription costs. Artists have complained about this forever, because 24/7 playlists at the gym with Justin…

> If I use my account to listen to one band only, my $10 contribution should go to them (modulo taxes, margins etc).

I'd argue that pooling the funds and divvying it up evenly across all played songs is actually the most fair. If anything, your implementation would be more prone to scammy content farmers (e.g. spammers using trials/locale pricing arbitrage to play only one $SCAM_ARTIST song per account).

Most importantly, however, your model is just not how memberships work in the real world. HBO doesn't (and shouldn't) reward a TV show with more budget because you only binged one TV show despite having access to all the show. Nor do gym memberships. Do you think Costco shouldn't allocate your membership funds for their gas stations because you have an EV? What about cable TV? What about your local/state/federal taxes?

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