Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new music

Re:Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new... by chrissnell on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @05:29AM (#15448389)

I think this might be a huge problem for them and I’m pretty sure that they’re aware of it. The lack of variety seems to span all genres and radio stations. I’m really into Texas Country, Americana, and Red Dirt music. These are distinct sub-genres under “alt-Country” music but from the Spotify perspective, they’re all basically the same 40-50 songs. I can’t tell the difference between the Reckless Kelly, Robert Earl Keen, and James McMurtry radio stations because they all play the same set of songs that I got sick of months ago.

I don’t know if it’s a licensing issue—do they save money by keeping song variety down?—or is it an algorithm problem? I wish they would fix it because I’m about to bail for some other service if they can’t.

Pandora is the gold standard for good variety and new artist discovery as far as I’m concerned.

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Re:Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new... by whiskeySix on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @09:29AM (#15449534)

Pandora? Really? I've found Spotify to be orders of magnitude better than Pandora for both variety and discovery. Pandora was the first to have competent discovery functionality, and it was impressive for its time, but I'm wondering if this is "good old days" syndrome speaking.

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Re:Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new... by com2kid on Thursday October 12, 2017 @03:53AM (#15456359)

With Pandora I can give it one song, and get a playlist out that won't repeat for a couple of hours (I really wish it was longer!)

With Spotify, I enter in a song, and get lots of stuff from that same artist (something Pandora can't do!) and then after that's done, a bunch of repeats.

Then again my problem may be that I'm trying to use Spotify the same way I use Pandora.

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Re:Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new... by graphitezepp on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @09:26AM (#15449515)

I have had significantly worse luck with Pandora even, but haven't used it in ages. Rdio, before it went bankrupt, worked the best for me.

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Re:Spotify’s Discover Weekly: How machine learning finds new... by KozmoNau7 on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @09:29AM (#15449530)

Go discover some new artists by yourself, use the related artists function, branch out.

I'm pretty sure that'll shake up the recommendations a bit.

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