271–280 of 585 posts
I listened to a lot of Apple Music recommendations while getting my three kids to sleep over the years. I would say that in my 40s I’m discovering more new music, and music I genuinely love, than I did in all my teens. I don’t get to go to a lot of gigs, but I go to one big festival a year and it’s the bands in a tiny font that I get excited about. Yeah most stuff is shit, but there’s just so much of everything.
I still don't get why after all this investment in AI Spotify can't just give me a seamless never ending stream of music. I need to keep selecting from playlists they generate which often repeat some songs extremely often. All I want from a Spotify interface is play/pause/skip/like/dislike. Then use those to continuously adapt the selection of the next song. If you want to be fancy add a warmup mode where you ask me…
One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/…
I'm sorry, but wanting your music algorithm to key in on the composer's skin color is a ridiculous expectation. Listen to albums or make a playlist.
Nobody finds separating French electronic music into its own subgenre ridiculous. Same with Italian Disco.
Such distinct movements are quite usual, so dissatisfaction about Black Swing on streaming services is understandable.
I must be some sort of freak. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s listening to classic rock, and a lot of it I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use. In my 20’s I started listening to a lot of classical and then jazz. In the 90’s a lot of grunge which’s I still love. After that was trance in the 2000’s, then ambient, techno and IDM after that. I still listen to…
Since I went to digital music, I've had the same problem with practically every bit of software and streaming service. They all seem to have some mode where it wants to just mix stuff between genres and it drives me nuts.
My current service is Google Music, and the (auto-generated) "likes" playlist, which really contains only songs that I genuinely really like, even annoys me due to the mixing of genres.
I've found what works best for discovery is to make playlists (by genre, of course) and then from there pick "Start Radio". That is my main way of discovering new music, and when I find songs I enjoy I try to add them to the playlist, too, and "Like" them if they're especially great.
But I do always feel like I'm against the grain, wondering how anyone can ever use any of the auto-generated playlists that aren't constrained by genre, and why anyone would ever build such a thing.
I listened to a lot of Apple Music recommendations while getting my three kids to sleep over the years. I would say that in my 40s I’m discovering more new music, and music I genuinely love, than I did in all my teens. I don’t get to go to a lot of gigs, but I go to one big festival a year and it’s the bands in a tiny font that I get excited about. Yeah most stuff is shit, but there’s just so much of everything.
I got stuck with apple music on a road trip. It was really bad IMO.
I find it interesting that GenZ and Millennials show a much smaller preference for their own decade's music. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr... The 1980s are still doing quite well among all but the oldest generation. Is it possible that music may actually be getting worse? Corporatized, consolidated, computerized. Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot…
> Look at Hollywood now too: everything is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or adaptation. There’s hardly anything original anymore. Vs: > This may surprise some, but since 2000, just over half of all movies released have been original screenplays. https://stephenfollows.com/are-movies-becoming-more-derivati... The problem is they aren't blockbusters, so you don't remember them. From the same link: > While the numb…
One problem I've run into with the music services is with older styles. For example, I'm specifically into black musicians from the 1930s-1950s who played swing style music. I have yet to find a service that actually will play more than 2-3 songs in that style before deciding that what I really want to hear is rat pack or swing by white musicians. No matter how much I thumbs down it, I get Glenn Miller/Frank Sinatra/…
If you have Discord, I've been curating a musicbot with a similar music rotation since I've also been completely fed up with streaming services pushing more Glenn Miller/similar straight bands, not the hip ones :) If you are interested, join my server, the bot is running 24/7: https://discord.gg/wjsC2TUZPK
I must be some sort of freak. I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s listening to classic rock, and a lot of it I can’t even stand any more due to the incredibly small playlists that most classic rock stations use. In my 20’s I started listening to a lot of classical and then jazz. In the 90’s a lot of grunge which’s I still love. After that was trance in the 2000’s, then ambient, techno and IDM after that. I still listen to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technical reason for this is just that the algorithm fails to distinguish between these two groups. Probably its just a hard problem to solve from a sample of what people listen to. I suspect a significant fraction of people that like black swing also like white swing and that results in the algorithm being unable to resolve that there are two features there and not one. You really need a level of manual curation…
What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I find curious about it though is that it's obviously recognizing the style - it plays 1-2 musicians from the "black" group, then circles into only playing Miller/Goodman/Rat pack and never comes back around to playing the music that I originally was trying to play. If it was behaving the way you are thinking, I'd expect it to mix the two styles.
I think the problem is that the algorithms are based on statistical probabilities from other users. I.e users who listen to X also like to listen to Y. So we’ll add Y to the queue. Then Y becomes the new reference point. I mean that is a gross simplification but essentially if your musical taste is outside of 2 standard deviations of the norm all the algorithms are gonna suck. For me they do.