Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 179 posts

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#131

Post by IndySun »

peteretep wrote: post #37
dv_dt wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify would do better to get back to basics on song suggestion instead of trying to guess emotional state - Pandora still finds similar songs by musical elements better than Spotify. A good example to try is to select a song that is out of genre for an artist - an acoustic version of a song that usually doesn't do acoustic for example. The suggestions for similar songs from Spotify all have to do with the artist ge…

My Spotify Most Hated Bug is that I have to be careful what I name playlists now as it’ll completely fuck over the recommend songs if you’ve named it something it thinks it knows about

This playlist name thing I've also noticed.

More widely, many, if not all, of any recommendation algorithm in any field (music and beyond) are not 'intelligent' (meaning smarter than the right human) in any way whatsoever; as noted, usually some tag sorting going on - and where items have been auto-tagged vs manual makes no difference to the quality; you're still dealing with a programmed personality when auto-tagged.

However, they do (appear to) 'work' (exhibit intelligence) when it's performed on a topic of which you know little; there they offer a helping hand.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#132

Post by tda »

millstone wrote: post #7

Here is the referenced July paper [1]. Spotify has a very cool feature called Community [2] where users can talk about what they want Spotify to do. The most upvoted ideas are things like "change my username" or "filter explicit songs." My personal wishlist is a "don't play this song again" button [3] and native Homepod support [4]. The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state,…

How about this very reasonable request to "Remove current Song from Playlist" [1]? Filed in 2012, status shows as "Not Right Now", has collected 1343 votes and counting... They're even worse than Atlassian.

I really hate Spotify for everything except their pretty complete library and reasonable pricing. Discovery, searching, UI, everything just plain sucks, I miss 8tracks.

1: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Mobile-Remove-cu...

Edit: I've been hoping for years 8tracks would be back, and low and behold, they have relaunched: https://blog.8tracks.com/2020/04/19/welcome-back-8tracks/

Edit2: not really, still not available outside of USA/Canada

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#133

Post by Kaze404 »

dntrkv wrote: post #69
Kaze404 wrote: post #47

This is insanity. I'm glad I gave up on this streaming nonsense a while ago when I realized it made me listen to music the platform wants me to listen, instead of music I want to listen.

How does Spotify prevent you from listening to music you want to?

I find that streaming services push me to this weird loop that I never feel like I have to go out of my way to discover music, because it's always pushing me music the platform wants to promote.

Of course they're not literally preventing me from doing anything, after all I can just search for the music I want, but often times I would find myself hours into music I've never heard of because the platform decided to play it after what I chose to listen to was over.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just not the way I enjoy listening to music. For me the process of discovering a new album is part of the experience, and i missed doing it when it was so convenient for me not to.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#134

Post by mjburgess »

jimmySixDOF wrote: post #75

This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity into a cluster of data points to be used against us by marketing and political campaigns - this is just gasoline on the flames of Silicon Valley techno backlash. People like Affevtiva running facial micro expression algorithms etc. What happens when all this dat…

The 'redeeming' aspect of this is that it is doomed to fail.

The machine learning systems here are just 'automation by averages' -- they are incapable of measuring any variables which could actually estimate your emotion.

Emotions are 'conceptualized bodily states' that the brain adopts in order to atune our motivation/etc. to our environment.

Indeed it isn't clear there are any devices we can attach to computer to even take measurements. At best, something like a continuous webcam feed would improve accuracy a little from "almost coinflip", and only for quite extreme emotions.

The problem with these systems is precisely that we are fed 'averages'. NOT that they are 'capturing sentiment' (ad-tech propaganda to sell their apps and ads).

My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#137

Post by ethanwillis »

bombela wrote: post #90
numpad0 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shops like you described for B2C markets existed in the past. All voted out by wallets.

I have trouble understanding how much cheaper it is to simply not sort objects into the right categories. I guess it must be significantly cheaper at scale. But it's such a waste of time for everybody it's infuriating.

Cheaper for who is the question. Businesses now increase profits by externalizing costs.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#138

Post by OJFord »

ssss11 wrote: post #87
millstone wrote: post #7

Here is the referenced July paper [1]. Spotify has a very cool feature called Community [2] where users can talk about what they want Spotify to do. The most upvoted ideas are things like "change my username" or "filter explicit songs." My personal wishlist is a "don't play this song again" button [3] and native Homepod support [4]. The point is that users aren't asking for Spotify to interpret their emotional state,…

Agreed. I dont need Spotify to try to understand my mood, I actively dont want them to. I DO need them to understand (or give me a manual way to tell them) which playist is for my 4yo and stop trying to play me their songs when I’ve selected a playlist for me. Drives me nuts.

While I understand it not being worth it to you/making sense (them not having their own device, presumably) yet for a 4yo, there's not much incentive for Spotify because in most cases like that they want to sell you a multi-account plan.

Re: Spotify patent would suggest songs based on users' emotions

#140

Post by lm28469 »

mjburgess wrote: post #134
jimmySixDOF wrote: post #75

This trend towards Emotional and Sentiment based Analytics - the acquisition and monetizing every snapshot of our personality. This reduction of our humanity into a cluster of data points to be used against us by marketing and political campaigns - this is just gasoline on the flames of Silicon Valley techno backlash. People like Affevtiva running facial micro expression algorithms etc. What happens when all this dat…

The 'redeeming' aspect of this is that it is doomed to fail. The machine learning systems here are just 'automation by averages' -- they are incapable of measuring any variables which could actually estimate your emotion. Emotions are 'conceptualized bodily states' that the brain adopts in order to atune our motivation/etc. to our environment. Indeed it isn't clear there are any devices we can attach to computer to e…

> My concern is that this propaganda is leading to people changing their behaviour: unaware they are being fed 'generic content' for some accidental, meaningless 'singanal' they sent, their habits/emotions/self-perception is being distorted to fit the stupidity of the average.

This is definitely happening on a global scale already.

It doesn't matter if a movie is "good", if netflix decides to feed it to everyone it will become #1. It doesn't matter is a song is "good", if spotify decides it's the next hit it will become one. &c.

It's like TV or radio on steroids, everyone listen to the same thing, read the same articles, watch the same netflix shows. Anecdata: a lot of my friends started to play chess seemingly out of nowhere, I really didn't get it until I learned there was a new netflix show about chess that made the game hype again

Post reply on HN