>pays the least royalties

This is a very interesting theory, I don't know if this was revealed somehow but considering how consistently terrible the guesses are on assistant devices... I wouldn't be surprised.

Why would a live version of a song pay less royalties than the studio version? Similarly for the instrumental version. The only one that seems like it would pay less royalties is maybe the cover, if the cover band has a weaker royalty rate with the provider.

I think the far more likely explanation is just that these home assistant products suck.

But how do you mess that up? Let an intern code that shit up?

Assuming the voice recognition part worked perfectly:

1) query song database for input 2) play result that is most popular (most plays by manual selection in eg desktop client etc)

The only tricky part is to determine whether the query is an artist or a title but again in most cases this will be solved by checking popularity.

What's a plausible explanation that they mess this up so badly?

My assumption has always been that Alexa, Assistant etc. just have really naive sorting of results - if I search on Spotify, the song results for 'War Pigs' are returned with the album version second, but I know that's what I meant.

Play the most recently released result? Covers and live versions are often more recently released than the album version.

Because the studio version is a top 200 of all time album, and the live version from the 50th anniversary "Still Kickin'" Tour with 30% of the original lineup and 20% of the original vocal range?

YTM seems to prefer youtube over their music catalog. It's not hard to extrapolate from there. Wouldn't a live cover recorded and uploaded by some random person pay less than the official version from WB?

The live version and the studio version are not always the same owners.

This is a larger GIGO problem with the music industry these days. It's not a shortcoming of voice assistants in particular. Ever use Spotify? Sometimes it seems that 9 out of 10 albums returned by any given search are live versions, heavily-doctored remastered editions, or remix collections.

Spotify search is terrible. It routinely misses exact text matches.

Anecdotal, but I’ve never had any problem like this with Spotify. I’ve been a user for about 10 years now.

I have a friend that works for one of the major assistants not made in MountainView... there is explicit logic where it looks if the song title includes "live | cover | instrumental | etc" and tries to find a new version.

This was the worst thing about Google Play Music - the search engine was awful, always showing really obscure results. Maybe your theory is right.

"Here's a dreadful remix."

> Ask for Magic Stick? Here’s an instrumental

Karaoke time! You can do this.

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" - Napolean

I am sure they're working on improving it. We've not yet reached late stage capitalism with voice assistants.