More widely, many, if not all, of any recommendation algorithm in any field (music and beyond) are not 'intelligent' (meaning smarter than the right human) in any way whatsoever; as noted, usually some tag sorting going on - and where items have been auto-tagged vs manual makes no difference to the quality; you're still dealing with a programmed personality when auto-tagged.

However, they do (appear to) 'work' (exhibit intelligence) when it's performed on a topic of which you know little; there they offer a helping hand.

It's a damn shame because the open nature of podcasts is one of the most appealing things about them. I get where they're coming from though.

If they weren't spending ungodly amounts of cash on podcasts (cough joe rogan) they could probably buy pandora (just guessing, not looking at any actual numbers) and replace their recommendation engine with theirs.

I spent a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what the hell had just happened until I found a page promoting Spotify's dynamic ad insertion for podcasts.

This is an inaccurate assumption is how. Podcasts are audio adverts with interesting segments haha.

Ok maybe not that bad, but it's nowhere near 'few or no ads'

I'd definitely qualify the worst case of 28 out of 30 minutes being actual content to be "few or no ads".

My current favourites:

- if you sort a playlist you're playing, then click the album art to find the currently playing song, it will skip to the position of the track in the _unsorted_ list

- playlists over a certain length just won't play via Spotify Connect. There's a couple of playlists I just can't play on my Sonos speakers.

- playing a daily mix hides the shuffle button, and yet it still uses the shuffle state you had selected previously. If you want to turn shuffle off you have to play something else, toggle shuffle, then play the daily mix again

I've tried reporting these. They made me jump through a thousand standard troubleshooting hoops despite them all happening on every device I own. Then a few days later they came back and said it was "working as intended". Mind blowing.

I'd be happy with them just not breaking the things that work.

I'm almost certain it didn't work on my friend's android when we tried it too. Also I'm pretty sure I discovered it by accident one day.

Huh nobody is using this feature we've never mentioned and only exists on one platform. Sometimes Spotify comes off as just completely daft.

I DO need them to understand (or give me a manual way to tell them) which playist is for my 4yo and stop trying to play me their songs when I’ve selected a playlist for me. Drives me nuts.

Obligatory “If I’d asked customers what they want, they would have told me a faster horse.”

People may not realize the value of this new feature because they have not even imagined it.

I guess it must be significantly cheaper at scale. But it's such a waste of time for everybody it's infuriating.

Or even

https://www.grainger.com/category/fasteners/screws/machine-s...

Specialty stores? I wouldn't want to do this at scale with Amazon.

Sure, but in the meantime, they do realize the value of the features they keep requesting.

The sad reality is: not many people are going to leave Spotify because they can't change their user name or filter explicit songs[0]; they're essentially captive. The company instead wants to focus on features that will attract new users. The service will remain as bad as it can possibly be without hemorrhaging users, because from the POV of a growth-oriented company, existing users are worthless and not worth paying attention to.

--

[0] - Though I'm pretty sure at least marking songs as explicit was a feature years ago, when I used Spotify. A regression?

And the part about "anticipating what's next" that reminds me of "What's expected of us" by Ted Chiang.

Even no emotion is fine. Music doesn’t need to exercise our brains all the time. Or even every time you listen to a particular song.

Edited for clarity

What the people wanted was to go from A to B faster. How they did was "via a horse". Logically "faster horse" is their solution (of which I'm certain there were varying qualities of horses, some of which you wouldn't want to trust your life with).

What Ford did was focus on a problem "transportation is slow" (and horses make a lot of manure).

The Model T

>prized for its low cost, durability, versatility, and ease of maintenance

This was 5 years after the first car (Model A) in 1903. Which was 7 years after the prototype in 1896.

From: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Ideas/ct-p/newideas

1. Add support for Apple Silicon (run on my computer)

2. Update the Spotify app icon for macOS Big Sur (fit the theme of computer/life)

3. Please bring back the Hide this Song Option and I dont like this song/ artist (listening to this puts me in a mood I don't like, don't play it)

- This is arguably the same thing as "detect emotional state": "wrong mood do not want". Ignoring that data signal suggests misaligned incentives/goals. While I'm certain many songs share common emotions between people, the degree to which we react to an individual song or genre varies. I'm not sure how they'd hope to accurately tune an emotional scale while also refusing to block songs/artists.

4. Emotes and user reactions - again: gather the data surrounding how a song makes you feel. The ability to gather and train on this data should be crucial, without it how could they capture users emotions? (I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just clear to me this is aligned with the patent)

5. Globe Learning - a suggestion to visualize music globally by artist home country/state/city

I wouldn't consider "inquisitive" or "learning" an emotion, but perhaps it's a higher order grouper "what state is the listener in". There's an emotional component to the process of learning and ignoring "confused", "curious" exploration of something foreign could lead to an better overall "fulfilled emotional state"

To rephrase your last sentence: People (including companies) may not realize the value of a new feature because it has been neither _implemented_ nor _measured_.

I really hate Spotify for everything except their pretty complete library and reasonable pricing. Discovery, searching, UI, everything just plain sucks, I miss 8tracks.

1: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Mobile-Remove-cu...

Edit: I've been hoping for years 8tracks would be back, and low and behold, they have relaunched: https://blog.8tracks.com/2020/04/19/welcome-back-8tracks/

Edit2: not really, still not available outside of USA/Canada

Spotify isn't optimizing for placating the vocal minority of power users, they're trying to increase their paid subscription count. It would be great if we lived in a world where these were the same thing, but they clearly aren't.

I've argued that recommendation system for music are near useless for years because they don't group music together by what I actually want to hear together, and that it needs to be more careful about interpreting my actions because what goes together varies by mood and purpose.

E.g. you can't just take genre,or artist, because the music I want before bed need to be slow, soothing and familiar. Transitions between tracks also need to be much less abrupt than other times of day.

Other times I want something new and surprising.

Or loud and upbeat.

Until they convince me they can do that they're not getting my money.