If I had to guess this is partially because Spotify has actual humans with ears who are categorizing specific artists into genres. Not because of any great advancement in AI. If you like portishead, you might like (similar thing).

Just within electronic music, look at how many genres and sub-genres have been categorized by someone simply as a hobby project. Now updated for the web 2.0 era.

https://music.ishkur.com/

> Spotify has actual humans with ears

Yeah the actual humans with ears are me and you. They use play-time as the basis for recommendation as well as content-similarity, and put effort into de-biasing this data for, e.g., position bias. This is the same for YouTube etc.

Spotify is one of the best examples of a modern large-scale recommender system, for me.

One of their ways: https://github.com/spotify/annoy

Was about to say the same. Have been eagerly awaiting an updated "Discover Weekly" playlist every Monday for years and it keeps getting better.

Scrolled through the comments exactly for this. In addition to the discover weekly, I'll often make a new playlist of 5-10 similar songs I like to get another in the same vein, and it works very well for my decidedly not-chart-topping music preferences. Maybe there are some genres I don't listen to enough that it struggles with?

Spotify has a couple of weird fetishes. If you throw a Eurovision song or a song in your local language into a playlist with unrelated music, it will exclusively recommend those genres. Even when they are outnumbered 20 to 1 in the playlist in question.

This is so foreign to me that I have have to ask this at the risk of appearing very rude, but from my perspective this question makes total sense.

Do you have a memory problem? My weekly have always been 30-70% the same recordings of songs I have already listened to at least ten times. And it's always been this way.

Yo that’s indeed very rude.

Why would you assume I use discover weekly to discover music?

I just use the Radio feature, which plays endless amount of songs based on the song you started with.

I'm sorry but I couldn't come up with a nicer way to ask an objective question about it.

The radio feature is global to all playback situations so I assumed that couldn't be it.

My discover weekly is maybe 50% songs that I've heard before though maybe not on spotify, I think they're from the itunes library I imported.

I've been using the weekly for many years now amd that's not the case for me.