91–100 of 198 posts
"You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." What do you mean, "app"? There's no "app" there. If anyone constructed a PDF, which was itself blank but, via embedded JavaScript, loaded parts of itself from a remote server, people would rightly balk and wonder what on earth the creator of this PDF was thinking — yet this is precisely the design of many “websites” [1] [1] https://www.devever.net/%7Ehl/xhtml2
The two issues I've had with every discovery algorithm: "We have [favorite band] at home" - it picks things you like from your favorite band - instruments, tempo, etc then finds bad knockoffs that are superficially similar but painful to listen to. The "Iron and Wine" problem - some bands are so generic that they tick every single similar box and flood your recommendations. For years, it didn't matter what band/genre…
So I've been using Tidal for 5 years now, and feel they run circles around Spotify in terms of curation. Their algorithms and curated tracks are better, and they steer away from the social/gamification features and lean in to artist-centric features. For example, they've had a "credits" feature since day one - you can look up the producer, guitarist, oboeist, etc of any song, and see what other work they've done. In…
In my experience, and the reason I left Tidal several years ago, is that they lean heavily into modern hip-hop, compromising relevancy for the sake of promoting "friends of the company" (Jay-Z, Beyonce, etc).
So I've been using Tidal for 5 years now, and feel they run circles around Spotify in terms of curation. Their algorithms and curated tracks are better, and they steer away from the social/gamification features and lean in to artist-centric features. For example, they've had a "credits" feature since day one - you can look up the producer, guitarist, oboeist, etc of any song, and see what other work they've done. In…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure how the Spotify recommendation algorithm works at all, but for some reason I imagined them doing fancier things than looking at my liked songs and finding similar ones. I would've thought they'd build a profile of you, and then find similar user profiles and show you songs those folks liked that you hadn't found yet. That's gotta be how they do it, right? I'm probably wrong.
I have no specific insider knowledge, but a decade+ ago they bought a company called the Echo Nest that was developing some of the best audio signal analysis algorithms around, I assume much of that influenced their recommender system. Nowadays, they have a quite busy research department so I would imagine that recommendation is quite fancy indeed: https://research.atspotify.com
https://www.canburypress.com/products/you-have-not-yet-heard...
In the age of internet, engagement optimization and recommendation algorithms create a new way that we are affected by the behaviour of others. That annoying dark pattern on a piece of software you use? Because there are people who fall to it, clicking on an ad or "engaging" more. That stupid show that keeps being recommended to you? Because a lot of people just sit on the couch, watching something on the list that d…
Maybe these music services should ask you for music you hate, and start from there instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel those are how Pandora and Last.fm (used to?) work respectively. Nowadays everything seems to just put a bunch of tags on a track and suggest you things with the same tags to the tracks you liked. Doesn't even need to match the same combination of tags, just some number of them. The problem is, you probably care about the small, specific tags, and the system cares about wide "popular" tags. If you like a couple…
I wish I had a music recommendation service built on Pandora's immense dataset of music tags that could build me a playlist that I could link back to whichever music service I happen to be using at the time. I could have it do things like require at least 3 tags in common between adjacent tracks such that it could jump around between 2 dozen genres but the transaction between any 2 given tracks isn't too jarring. It'…
So I've been using Tidal for 5 years now, and feel they run circles around Spotify in terms of curation. Their algorithms and curated tracks are better, and they steer away from the social/gamification features and lean in to artist-centric features. For example, they've had a "credits" feature since day one - you can look up the producer, guitarist, oboeist, etc of any song, and see what other work they've done. In…
Oboeist? That is oddly specific. Why that example?
I’ve used everything, new and old media: Spotify, Napster, CMJ, pitchfork, bandcamp, allmusic, mojo, SoundCloud, beatport, last.fm, Apple Music… Nothing beats that one friend who used to DJ and still obsessively digs crates.
I really wish Spotify or Apple offered the ability for the listener to simply listen all of the songs released on their platform on a day or a week, good or bad, and directly pay the artists for the songs listeners enjoy. Spotify's "New Releases" for example, tracks only music that major labels promote, or that fit a predetermined genre, or are similar to the songs and artists that you already listen to. There are sm…