Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations • Hacker News Board

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#391

Post by squeaky-clean » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 5:54 AM UTC

moneywoes wrote: post #370

elamje wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Spotify plasters your home page with Podcasts: Short answer is $$$$. Longer answer is: Spotify must pay royalties for each song played. Imagine if there was a completely free (for Spotify) form of content that filled users ears for hours, thus removing the need for Spotify to pay royalties. Ahem podcasts. Now imagine if Spotify started injecting ads into said media form to grow their revenue beyond subscriptions.…

Does Spotify inject ads in free podcasts? Don’t all commodities not do that

Spotify dynamically injects ads into podcasts. I was listening to an episode of the Conan O'Brien podcast from 2018 and got an advertisement to be safe from Covid by enjoying an ice cold Miller Lite at home.

It was extremely unsettling until I realized what they were doing.

They replace the ad breaks that would normally be in a podcast. (Like when the hosts say "we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this episode"). It's not an unskippable ad like you get when listening to music using the free tier. It's inserted directly into the audio stream.

Edit: I guess it's possible the Conan podcast is doing that somehow and not Spotify, but I've never had something like that happen when using the Apple podcast app.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#392

Post by marsven_422 » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

People would dislike "woke" music and podcast, we can not have that.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#393

Post by Agentlien » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 5:58 AM UTC

It's not just a matter of recommending songs I don't like. While Spotify does this a lot it wouldn't solve two more subtle issues with its daily playlists and random play:

1. Even for artists I really like it tends to always choose the same few songs. It's especially annoying for artists with a huge discography.

2. There seem to be some categories which Spotify uses for its daily mixes which don't make for good playlists. As an example I mostly listen to metal but also a fair bit of softer Swedish music (Lars Winnerbäck, Peter LeMarc, ...). For a few months now the one of my daily mixes based on this type of music has also had a few Swedish hard rock artists that really don't fit. Mainly Mustasch, which is a great band, but I don't want to hear them in this context.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#394

Post by musesum » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:01 AM UTC

Hmmm, there is a dislike (Song | Artist) feature on the Desktop version -- as least for the Discover Weekly channel.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#395

Post by speedgoose » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:01 AM UTC

n8ta wrote: post #214

oriolid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do lump unrelated acts together. It's somewhat obvious when one of them is a current young musician and other had their career in 60s.

You can email them and they'll fix it. I've done this twice. It takes about a month but they do get to it.

I have done it too, they have a standard procedure in their support platform.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#396

Post by sparky_z » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #391

moneywoes wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Spotify inject ads in free podcasts? Don’t all commodities not do that

Spotify dynamically injects ads into podcasts. I was listening to an episode of the Conan O'Brien podcast from 2018 and got an advertisement to be safe from Covid by enjoying an ice cold Miller Lite at home. It was extremely unsettling until I realized what they were doing. They replace the ad breaks that would normally be in a podcast. (Like when the hosts say "we're going to take a quick break to talk about our spo…

Are you certain it was Spotify that did that? Unless you downloaded the episode in 2018, it could have easily been the Conan podcast. Podcast episodes aren't immutable, they're just a url. I've seen podcasts that update the ads in their back catalogue to whoever is paying them at the time the episode is downloaded.

I've also noticed some location specific ads, which isn't that surprising if you think about. There's nothing stopping them from serving you a different mp3 file depending on your IP geolocation.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#397

Post by alex_young » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #385

Things I want from Spotify: - Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom. - Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists. - Hide th…

- Allow listening from more than one device at the same time on a family plan.

Use case: I listen to something at home and then get in my car. People at home should still be able to listen to what they want, and I should also be able to listen to something else. At the same time.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#398

Post by d21d3q » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

01100011 wrote: post #385

Things I want from Spotify: - Fix the damn album artwork in the browser. A big part of enjoying an album is viewing the cover and liner art. Let me do that full-screen with zoom. - Let me create genre-limited radio stations from my likes. Don't just play songs from my likes. If I'm in the mood for , say, 80s hip-hop, I want a radio station based off my liked 80s hip-hop songs which includes related artists. - Hide th…

Haven't tried it yet, but looks like it can address some points: https://github.com/khanhas/spicetify-cli

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#399

Post by xvector » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #326

campground wrote: post #200

I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music. I think you do have to prime the engine a bit. I "like" a lot of albums and songs. Every time I hear something new that I like I press the little heart button. Same when I discover music outside of Spotify (I listen to WFMU a lo…

I'm genuinely confused by people who complain about Spotify's recommendation algorithm. I have eclectic, often obscure tastes, and I've found it to be an incredible way to discover new music. I too have "eclectic, obscure" tastes and I couldn't get anything from the recommendation algorithm and canceled after a month. I don't remember the thing recommending anything that seemed more obscure than what I searched for.…

It definitely took a couple of months before Spotify honed in on my tastes, but it was definitely worth the wait.

Re: Dislike button would improve Spotify's recommendations

#400

Post by tempestn » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 6:14 AM UTC

I'm apparently in the minority, but I long for a return of the 5-star ranking. I really miss that about itunes, being able to rank each song, and set up smart playlists based on genre and how much variety (how deep in the star rankings) I wanted.

I'd have to think an intelligent recommendation engine could do a ton more with star rankings than a simple up/down too. 5=love, 4=like, 3=ok, 2=dislike, 1=hate. It could even be optional; they could just treat like and dislike as 4 and 2 or something, and let people who want more precision use them.