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How bad is your Spotify?

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Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#591

Post by kevincox »

lkbm wrote: post #583
lambda_obrien wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Google Music until they discontinued it in favor of Youtube Music, and I ditched that crap immediately, the UI was horrible, the recommendations were BAD (Google Music was somewhat good), and I lost about half my playlist items as "not available". It is so bad, that after years of Google Music, I just ditched my playlists (what little there was) and moved to Spotify.

I find the YT Music recs actually pretty good, though the "recommending a song after I thumbed down" behavior blows my mind in its idiocy. Also, the fact that they don't distinguish between me liking a video on Youtube and liking a song in YT Music is also frustrating. The UI is the worst I've seen on any music service or player, but I'd found quite a bit of music I like through their recommendations.

I reported the bug about recommending songs that I had downvoted. Apparently I had more thank 5k downvotes so it didn't consider them all in the filter. The "fix" was bumping the limit.

I used to pay for Google Music and transitioned to YouTube Music but eventually gave up because it has so many issues. I also tried Spotify but didn't like it much so now I don't know what I will use.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#592

Post by mnd999 »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #589
mnd999 wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pandora decided a few years back to block international users. I don’t know if they’ve changed this - I haven’t bothered to go back.

Did they ever allow for international users?

Yeah, way back when (early 2000s?) it was a streaming personalised radio and it worked fine, at least in the UK.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#593

Post by solarkraft »

Alupis wrote: post #437
t0mbstone wrote: post #252

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recom…

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-…

I'm going to check out Pandora, but out of the large ones (Apple Music, Deezer) Spotify has by far the best algorithmic recommendations.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#594

Post by solarkraft »

samename wrote: post #534
humanistbot wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the absolute lack of any privacy statements makes me wary. They get access to my entire music history and personal info, and just say that they won't post anything? Pass.

The privacy policy is here: https://pudding.cool/privacy/

> The Pudding collects your data so that we can:

> Personalize stories > Create content for stories from reader-generated inputs

Is this clear enough to forbid them from long term storage and passing the data on?

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#595

Post by IndySun »

Successful auto-playlisting is going to vary on the demands made.

There is no 100% music (or any creative output) recommender because everyone feels differently about what 'energy', 'easy', 'powerful', 'touching', and 'rock' all mean, and to each person individually. These terms are meant to, and always will be, necessarily ambiguous; and that is how these terms work best.

AI currently cannot 100% give you a track without drums even if you check the 'no drums' box (because along the way one track with drums was put in the no drums box).

Incidentally I've used various searchers (now referred to as) AI for years to try and find tracks requested by clients, it remains somewhat helpful though unable to compete with a human first listening to the human making the request.

AI is improving, but it is going to be beyond our lifetime before it replaces communication, human to human, eye to eye.

Until AI knows what it means to be human, so it shall remain.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#596

Post by IndySun »

solarkraft wrote: post #594
samename wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy policy is here: https://pudding.cool/privacy/

> The Pudding collects your data so that we can: > Personalize stories > Create content for stories from reader-generated inputs Is this clear enough to forbid them from long term storage and passing the data on?

Only if it is law; and even then, tough to police.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#597

Post by sli »

t0mbstone wrote: post #252

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recom…

I mostly use this approach as well but my experience with multiple services is that I eventually (and sooner, rather than later) end up hearing same 100 or so recommended songs. Maybe I'm too picky, but I just don't have great luck with recommendation engines anywhere I go.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#598

Post by chucky »

Alupis wrote: post #437
t0mbstone wrote: post #252

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success: I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs. Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends. If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recom…

I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less. Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-…

Pandora isn't available outside the US, so it doesn't really matter how good it is compared to Spotify I can't use it anyway.

It doesn't matter how good the tech is if business/legal can't keep up with the competition.

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#599

Post by dang »

etherio wrote: post #7

This is hilarious... > You are 26% basic. You're trying to be cool with Kapitan Korsakov, but your favorites are the same as everybody else's.. > Your spotify was please-read-my-manuscript-walmart-hawaiian-shirt-sitting-alone-in-the-cafeteria bad. Ouch. Really interesting project by all means. I hope they release the source - I'm curious about how it was built. Edit: This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://new…

> This same link was posted 11 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513886 here and is not at all getting the same popularity.

HN allows reposts of an article when earlier submissions haven't gotten attention yet. This is our way of mitigating the randomness of what gets traction off /newest.

It makes for a something of a lottery in terms of which submission ends up with all the attention, but it's on our list to implement some kind of karma sharing across multiple submissions. It's been on our list for years, but we'll get to it eventually!

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Re: How bad is your Spotify?

#600

Post by tossthere »

zamalek wrote: post #139
tossthere wrote: post #42

Funny, but I was hoping this might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes. Spotify constantly queues and recommends songs to me that are so bad, I can’t even imagine how there could possibly exist any data indicating that any significant sample of listeners has ever enjoyed hearing them. Spotify has 5+ years of my listening history, and orders of magnitude more data from listeners a…

> might provide some insight into why my Spotify is so bad, even by my own tastes. That's just Spotify. The AI did a better job of figuring out what I like (138 and uplifting trance) than Spotify does (EDM). I blame it in Armin van Buuren: he is an extremely popular EDM DJ and he plays a very wide variety of EDM. If you listen to EDM chances are he has at least a few dozen sets you'd enjoy. That's the problem: he's p…

Good point. I started to notice a lot of the Spotify recommendations sounded like half of an EDM track I might like, mixed with half of something that it should’ve never been mixed with.

Spotify also seems to think I’ll like literally anything with a house kick.

It’s an extremely difficult problem to solve though so they have my sympathy!

Nobody can really explain why they love one song and hate another, and the overlap of the Venn diagram between any two people is usually very small.

I can eat any dish at a restaurant and think it’s not very good, just ok, pretty good, great, or amazing. The same for any movie, TV show, painting, drink, book, article, ... but for a song, I either like it, love it, or hate it so much that I can’t stand it.

Music recommendation algorithms have such a narrow surface area to land on, and when they miss, they go right into a volcano.

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