I see a lot of comments about how bad spotify recommendations are. I have had great experience but I follow a methodology to keep the recommendations curated. I'll also note that I listen to a wide variety of music ranging from EDM to metal to high enery jpop to classical. What I have found is:
- Adding things to playlists makes a big difference. If you really love a song, hit it with a heart, if you want to hear more but don't love it, add it to a relevant playlist
- skip mildly bad songs
- actively dislike terrible songs (hide it on mobile, hit the no smoking sign on desktop)
I got into a chill beats phase and it took a couple months for me to eradicate it from my discover weekly but now it's pretty on point. Just my 2 cents.
Mentioned to the below responder, but you should give this a try if you're on a family plan, I heard it helps with that problem: https://www.spotify.com/us/kids/
You can disable sharing altogether if you want. This is specifically for a single "session." Like if you want to listen to a guilty pleasure and don't want your friends bugging you about it
It's also useful if you have a second musical "life" that you don't want to involve in your recommendations. Parents with kids' music, for instance. In my case, I turn on private listening when I go to bed, because my sleeping music is repetitive and nothing like the music I want to discover.
No no, but in the UI you can see what your friends are listening to (if you're added as friends). Example I found online (the right bar is the friends feed):
I agree that some curation effort makes a huge difference.
I have a "Queue" playlist into which I copy my "Discover Weekly" every now and then; then I listen to that Queue playlist, which lets me delete the tracks I don't want, and keep the ones I do (you can't modify your Discover Weekly). Then, every time I refresh the Queue playlist from Discover Weekly, I first move the current Queue contents into a YYYY-MM playlist (e.g. 2020-12 for this month).
I've been doing this for several years and it's been great — I've got a timestamped record of what I was enjoying/discovering during those months, and it does seem to have helped Spotify to keep recommending me things I really do enjoy. (Weirdly some weeks seem _really bad_, like I delete virtually everything — but I guess there's some A/Bing going on there.)
(Also: I'll only like/heart tracks I _particularly_ like, and sometimes I'll just listen to my "Liked Songs" playlist; I think this helps teach Spotify what I really like.)
> Weirdly some weeks seem _really bad_, like I delete virtually everything — but I guess there's some A/Bing going on there.
Noticed the same, but I think this is actually great, because it seems like there is some randomness that gives you different stuff. It’s like breaking your filter bubble.
Honestly all I want is for Spotify to differentiate between music I actually like to actively listen to and music that I like to play in the background 24/7 (e.g. chill hop)
Same, my spotify thinks I'm very obsessed with Ambient and Classical. I mean I enjoy those genres, but they're not my typical "active listening", I just always want some sort of sound going on in my apartment.
Also whenever I'm DM'ing a D&D game the majority of my daily mixes change to video game music for weeks because I use them as backing music.
Spotify's daily no es solve that problem for me. I always have one or two mixes with chill-hop music accumulating things I listen to when working, plus different mixes with different genres and 0% ambient music.
I wish other websites had similar recommendation systems. Spend an afternoon watching shitposting videos and YouTube will only recommends low-effort videos.
I feel Spotify makes a half decent jab at identifying moods with their "Daily Mixes" feature. Right now for me it's identified 6 sort of genres that I listen to.
It didn't identify that one of them is hip hop, and the other one is dutch hip hop, which obviously to me are the same genre, but that's alright.
It's got a classical music mix, one for rock, one for soundtracks and one for electronic/lo-fi.
It would've been cool if it knew to group electronic/lo-fi, classical and soundtrack together as my background work music, but I'm not sure how it would've learned that as normally I have to pick one of those genres while working, I have no playlists that mix them.
I've wanted this for video streaming too. After getting rid of cable, I'll often want to put something on in the background while I'm browsing the web or playing switch or something. I feel like almost everyone has a completely different thing they are looking for in active vs passive consumption and being able to tailor it would be very nice. Very straightforward example: I really don't need subtitled shows when I will be half paying attention at best. I also don't want to watch something that is new to me and also "good" when I won't really be paying attention.
If you're on Family plan, you could sign up for a separate account and use it for background music only. Kind of a hassle, but that's what I'm doing with YouTube so that relaxation recommendations aren't mixed with lectures.
Here's my 2 cents: don't rely so much on spotify for recommendations. It's first and foremost a streaming service, any recommendation features are secondary. My strategy is to use a variety of recommendation systems. I've found things through spotify, pandora, gnoosic, reviews, forums, even wikipedia pages. Hunting for music is really fun! Music tastes are subjective, I just don't think the algorithms are ever going to be perfect.
I don't know how much Spotify uses human curation, but Apple Music has a lot of human editors behind the scenes to assemble -- and update/maintain -- what I'm pretty sure are tens of thousands of playlists at this point, based on artist and genre and subject and mood and more. And while this is absolutely one of those Totally Subjective YMMV Works For Me May Suck For You deals, for me it's been far more hit than miss.
(I have some experience with Tidal, which also has apparently human-curated lists but they haven't at all at Apple's level. My experience with Spotify wasn't good, but it was also really limited, because it just didn't offer anything obvious over Apple Music to me -- the reverse is almost certainly true for someone who's already deeply invested in Spotify, though!)
It is subjective, but I agree with you and enjoy the human touch on the Apple playlists. I tried Spotify long ago, had some issues and then moved to GPM. I used GPM for years until they started pushing me to YTM, so I moved to AM. AM has been the best experience so far, but like you said, YMMV.
I don’t consider it as much as “relying on Spotify” as I just consider the recommendations a great addition to music discovery. A long time ago I relied heavily on last.fm’s radio for music discovery, and Spotify does a decent job filling that gap.
To each their own, I guess, but I’m naturally a “passive” music discoverer, using a combination of recommendations and similar artist radios and whatnot. It works fairly well.
The recommendation features, albeit imperfect, are a big reason I'm still on Spotify. I don't think they're secondary at all, as I would have gotten bored by now and canceled my subscription. True, I could go through all the effort you mentioned, but realistically I wouldn't.
I mean, maybe. I only listen to music when I'm a) driving; b) working. Neither are times I'm particularly interested in searching for new bands to listen to, so I'm going to end up relying on my streaming service's recommendation engine.
Sometimes I do this with music videos. Unfortunately a song has to be popular enough to have a video made, but I'm routinely surprised which songs do have videos. I'm sure this is a bit of nostalgia, since I grew up in the era when MTV still showed music videos.
I use the Spotify heart button as a "mark as listened" button since there is no listening history on Spotify mobile and Spotify adds songs I have already listened to my Release Radar. However, this means I can't use it to tailor my recommendations since I heart everything I listen to.
I also listen to a wide variety of music, and what I've found works really well is letting playlists run past their end, into the recommended tracks at the bottom. Spotify's usually pretty good about keeping to that theme.
Sorry, I am not going to let an external AI engine sneak into my Playlists :) I would let the AI engines of Spotify do the same job for me - whenever that happens.
You think that being able to favorite, skip, and dislike songs is worse UX than the radio, which just plays endlessly, whether you want to listen to that song (or annoying DJ) or commercial or not? I mean, sure, you can change the station, but, best case scenario, you get a song you want, 3/4 of the way through.
I heard recently that some radio station here had developed an app that they were promoting. One huge feature of the app was that it could send you a notification when your favourite song...
...was playing on the radio station, so that you could then turn on the radio and listen to it.
This was - unironically - the big thing they were using to try to get users to download their app. I can't even. This is so dumb.
A music experience where you listen to music industry's preferences instead? That's a step down, even from not curating your spotify preferences at all.
What makes you think spotify isn’t injecting the music industry’s preferences into your playlist? But anyway there are plenty of radio stations that still pay humans to DJ that know more about music then, me with good enough programming skills that even if they play a song I don’t really care about, it is played in a context where I don’t mind listening to it.
> still pay humans to DJ that know more about music then, me with good enough programming skills that even if they play a song I don’t really care about, it is played in a context where I don’t mind listening to it.
Sure, and that's what Spotify IS doing, only they can do it for literally any song/artist/genre, instead of just the mainstream ones. If the RIAA wants to give me some melancholy lofi during my melancholy lofi listening, I don't really mind. I don't have to sit through an Imagine Dragons song, which is the radio alternative
- Adding things to playlists makes a big difference. If you really love a song, hit it with a heart, if you want to hear more but don't love it, add it to a relevant playlist
- skip mildly bad songs
- actively dislike terrible songs (hide it on mobile, hit the no smoking sign on desktop)
I got into a chill beats phase and it took a couple months for me to eradicate it from my discover weekly but now it's pretty on point. Just my 2 cents.