> Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing.

Spotify's recommendation system is much better than youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better.

Having been following Spotify's "Discover Weekly" for several years now, I'm actually really impressed how it manages to blend my long-term taste with recent moods. If I've been listening to one type of music for 1 or 2 weeks, there will be a noticeable uptick of it in the recommendations, while still mixing in less recent tastes.

As a father of a young child, Spotify's algo's are completely useless to me. If their ML is so smart it should be able to determine that Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax. Wish I'd be able to toggle 'don't recommend kids music' somewhere.

I used Spotify to play music at a children's party. I am still getting recommendations for "Happy Birthday" months later. According to Spotify, it goes very well with Sheryl Crow and R.E.M.

Almost every monday when the "discover weekly" is rebuilt i get new songs which are not in english.

I have no non-english songs in any of my playlists and when they show up on discover weekly i flag them.

I would think that recommending me Spanish/Russian music when my entire collection is english should flag a problem with the system?

Yet week after week at least one song on discover weekly is in some foreign language.

I would argue for the vast majority of people language is not the primary indicator of what they consider good or bad music. I would assume it doesn't go into the algorithm at all and I certainly would not want it too. I have discovered some really cool music that I'm not even sure what language they are in this way.

I would wish you great success trying to frame an argument that the "vast majority" of people are not primary concerned with language.

It is a bit hard to listen to/enjoy music when you cant understand a single word.

Sure they had "gangnam style" but that was really a more a "one off".

> I certainly would not want it too.

I'd love to know if the majority feel this way.

given there are countless articles such as this: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Windows/How-to-get-...

i would think most find this annoying?

Well i think the statistics are very strongly in my favour because English pop music is very popular all over the world and there are plenty of countries where the majority of people don't speak English (and still listen to English music).

When I was young we (in all the kids my age) listened to plenty of of English music even though we didn't understand anything. And let's not even talk about the plenty of examples of songs in English where even native speakers don't understand the majority of the lyrics.

Are you American by chance? Feel free not to answer, but living in the US I was surprised to learn friends in other countries commonly listen to music they can’t understand (most commonly English, sometimes German).

Put things in perspective for me - we really live in a bubble here. I guess Spotify could help reinforce that if that’s what the market wants.

I think it's likely you're right, although I haven't looked for any hard numbers.

But anecdotally, I only speak English and I listen to lots of Finnish, Swedish, German, and Norwegian music.

I don't know if Spotify just started recommending this stuff based on the few metal bands I knew from those places, but it started recommending other genres too and I really like lots of it. Not sure how I'd find this music otherwise, actually.

Why would you only listen to English songs?

i would think it would be obvious, but here goes - because i only speak/understand English?

That's exactly why I enjoy listening to foreign pop music: I cannot hear how vapid the lyrics are.

But besides that, great music does not need to spell it out to convey meaning and emotion.

If the appreciation of a foreign song keeps growing, I will eventually look up a few translations. Their mixed interpretation usually only enhances an already enjoyable experience.

For me the lyrics of songs are mostly irrelevant and it doesn't matter if I understand it or not. I usually don't pay attention to to it anyway.

Can be helpful to turn off watch history during such sessions, or to remove the videos from your history afterwards. Agreed that there should be an automated solution, but you can avoid it today will a small amount of work.

Are we talking about the same Spotify? Because the only reference I found to removing songs from my recommendations is a thread from 2020 that says it is not possible.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Accounts/How-do-I-delete-my...

You can start a private session next time you have a birthday party, to prevent even more birthday songs being recommended.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/What-is-Private-Sessio...

It sounds like a nightmare. Much like my YouTube suggestions, which now are mostly my kids' planet videos, and my wife's workout ones.

I set up the browser session we use as a TV with profiles entirely to prevent any more of my spouse's yoga videos from leaking into my carefully curated feed of machine shop footage and construction videos.

Spotify does have an incognito mode to prevent this, but you have to carefully enable it beforehand. Why you can't just delete stuff from your history is baffling.

I agree. There are some playlists and songs I only listen to in the gym, and similar songs constantly float to the top of Spotify's recommendations for me due to gym being 3x week.

I did consider creating another "gym-only" user on our Family plan, but Spotify should really have a way to create named contexts for the one user. e.g. commute, gym, run, working from home, on a plane, etc.

Hell, Spotify should use GPS tagging on your plays and determine "oh look, these songs are only played here, and always skipped elsewhere, hmmmm."

But that is too complicated!

I actually watched someone give a presentation at spotify on exactly this when I worked there. This was probably about 5 years or so ago. I have no idea what happened to that project. Probably the biggest issue would be getting people to give you location permissions but they also talked about working around that. It's a big org though they kill off ideas all the time.

It seems easy enough to "sell" it to people listening. Location, speed based track selection.

Pandora does this with 'stations'.

There's a lot I like about Pandora and a lot I don't. The "stations" you mention can be pretty good. The problem I have is with the app itself. It's buggy and learning to use it well can be frustrating. A simple example would be when using the back arrow to return to where I was in the app. If I try to go back to a previous screen, it shrinks the app and when I resize it, Pandora restarts from scratch. This seems to take forever and it happens just about every time I use it. The only reason I haven't deleted it and switched to another app, is that I can't be bothered with all that while I'm working or driving (the only time I use it). Of course, there's other, more common issues like searching for a favourite song and only finding live sessions or worse, finding out they've stopped carrying a certain artist on my playlist.

Seems to be an unsolved problem to train the algorithms for recognizing different situations. One recommendation for all roles the user has. Though, thinking about, it's probably unsolvable as long as the interfaces remain simple and focused on satisfying only the one user, not the different roles, which would complicated the interfaces.

I think this is fairly well solved from a mathematics point of view (high-school level k-means clustering). The unsolved bit is simply how we get the Spotify et al. product managers to care.

All they need to do is filter out content with genre=kids from recs. They could create a separate kids recommendation item if people actually want that.

This wont happen whilst they have family and kids’ account types. Charge parents more for the premium option of not filling their carefully curated genre recommendations with nursery rhymes and Ed Sheeran.

It's fairly trivial to keep the recommendations consistent depending on the latest request, not just the logged user. Pandora does a good job at this. We have it on our Alexa and at dinner, we take turns with the kids requesting songs. If we stop requesting, it keeps playing an internally consistent series based on the latest song we asked for. So if it's the kids' choice, it's a never ending row of Kids Learning Tube :-)

Spotify is missing user profiles, in the Netflix fashion.

From a technical point yes, but profiles are too rough and hard to use for this. What I mean is more some way to automatically maintain a kind of sub-profile, for each different aspect of a user, but exposed user-friendly and effortless. Most people won't maintain a separate user profile just for recommendations, as it's too much work for too little benefit.

spotify is usually on people's personal device like a phone not on communal device at home like a TV.

Speak for yourself. I use Spotify on my TV at home. Multiple people use it.

rude response.

i said 'usually' .

I would consider Alexa a communal device. Spotify is heavily used there in households. Source: worked on Alexa.

It should be noted that in a Tesla, changing the Driver Profile (stores settings like seat and mirror positions) also changes the logged in Spotify account.

For young kids with no personal devices of their own, they would only get Spotify from their parents' devices.

People use it to play white noise for their babies which makes all the future song recommendations useless

Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about music mood vs time of the day vs activity. Like late evening before sleep being perhaps not a good moment for heavy metal. And running not a right time for slow classical music.

Which is weird in case of Apple Music because Apple knows exactly if I am sleeping, running or driving a car - just from reading my watch.

>Both Spotify and Apple Music algos have no idea about music mood vs time of the day vs activity.

You say that, but I attended a conference with Spotify- they are specifically working on that problem now.

If they're working on it then the point still stands that they don't currently have it as part of their product.

Time of day aware recommendations is something YouTube seems to have had for years. It always knows what to give me up top based on if I'm sitting down for dinner or lunch or if I'm looking for an audiobook for bed etc

Isn't that more just you thing though?

Why isn't late evening before sleep good for heavy metal? I listen to the same music I listen to all day before sleep if I had music on.

The music I listen too doesn't change no matter where I am or the time of the day.

What that really means is that they either:

1) aren't doing the sensor fusion we all think they are, out of inability to access the data.

2) the models (and therefore modelers) aren't good enough to use the data they have correctly.

Or 3) they run loads of A/B experiments to optimize engagement or some target metric and they've reached a local minima and are unable to escape it without a lot of political will or Product Managers willing to stick their necks out.

Google Play music had that feature. I really miss it.

THIS! People have been asking for different listening profiles for ages. But they keep ignoring those feature requests in their community websites.

Spotify has supported this for many years - it's called Spotify Premium Family[0]. You get 6 separate accounts for $16/mth. It is worth the price of admission just to keep my listening history / algo feed clean.

[0]: https://www.spotify.com/us/family/

You can turn off monitoring what you listen to for recommendations by launching a "Private session" in the app

That's a good tip though I'm not sure that there is an option for it in the car when I most often get a request for nursery rhymes, or more recently Disney songs.

  > Row row row your boat doesn't mix well with Anthrax

I'm not so sure about that. Have you heard Koяn's Shoots and Ladders?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU2k-U2Ze0o

I'm trying to avoid this outcome by playing as many different genres other than "kids music" as possible to my baby. Probably won't know whether it worked for a few years but in the mean time I get to listen to real music.

That sounds like a great argument for easy profile switching, along with an option in your play history for "move this play history item to this other profile".

I keep hearing this, but it hasn't happened to me yet. I wonder if it's because my Spotify history without kids is ~10 years vs ~2 years with?

We listen to a lot of Disney music, etc in the living room on my account, but I've never had that type of thing show up in my Discover Weekly or any of the Daily Mix playlists.

I will be very displeased if/when it does happen though.... Discover Weekly is a major reason I've paid Spotify for so long.

Ha, my life exactly. Ever since my kids used my Spotify account to listen to music my discover weekly list has unbearable amounts of paw patrol, baby shark and others mixed in. Now to be fair it still puts in music that fits my taste as well (and often my kids also like that music too), and considering that this is one profile I don't know what it could do better.

A lot of the time it's not an algorithm in charge. Most of the time now recommendations are based on who paid to promote their song or podcast.

Algorithms cannot be left running totally when sponsored ads can be purchased on the fly by content creators and musicians unless a site is lying to ad buyers about ad effectiveness.

I abandoned my account, partly for this reason. Too much kids music damaged it.

The easiest thing for them to do is simply exclude Kids music from their recs. Kids music doesn't benefit much from it anyway. Apple Music does this as do most video services.

Don't these end up in separate mixes, though? My 13 year old makes a lot of grime requests on road trips etc. and now I have a separate grime mix under my top mixes.

It does it relatively OK with the daily mixes, but daily drive and top of the year don't. That's why I don't really get it, they already know fairly well what kids music is so let me just toggle it off?

My brother who has young kids did the thing where you can make a combined playlist with me. He has indeed kids music littered all over in the shared playlist but moreover he also listened to a 100 track audio book on Spotify (which was not a great experience since it was published as an album and did not have bookmark support). The algorithm thought: oh he must REALLY like that album because he keeps on playing tracks from it, and so chapters from this book were also in our combined playlist

driving to grime sounds like hell, that's parental dedication right there

Can't be much worse than "Jenny" on loop for hours on end, heh.

They do, but recently my weekly discover is infused with kids songs. And it’s taken a few weeks ok ignoring those tracks to get them out.

I feel like this could be easily solved by adding an "incognito mode" to the Spotify app.

Using the Spotify kids app is a solution to this problem.

dunno, "Indians" could probably be made to work with "row, row, row your boat" lyrics.

Can't really complain if they offer Spotify Family which gives you 6 separate premium accounts, I think it's only double the cost of a normal Spotify account.

So the solution is paying double so I can log out of my own account and into an account I created for my 2 year old so we can listen to a disney song? And when I want to listen to my own songs again then I have to log out of my kids account and back into my own?

Yes, if you want multiple accounts you pay for multiple accounts. It's a solved problem you just have to pay the $9 a month.

I have two children, myself. I just installed second account on an old phone which has no SIM card in it, it has all the kids playlists and I don't have to worry about them getting recommended any of my 90s thrash metal. :)

Always those complaining customers ...

(and I am back to caring for my own mp3 collection again and use spotify only for rare and new stuff)

That unfortunately doesn't solve it. There will always be moments where kids will want to ask for songs on your Spotify, like you're renting a car and have your phone hooked up.

Click on your account dropdown in the top header, choose Private Session. Now nothing you listen to will affect your recommendations.

Come on, guys, I'd expect better from HN than complaining about features which already exist.

https://community.spotify.com/t5/FAQs/What-is-Private-Sessio...

> Spotify's recommendation system is much better than youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better.

I've had the opposite experience with Spotify - I'd say my discovery of new music has withered to almost nil since switching when Google Music shifted to YouTube.

The algorithm just churns stuff I've already listened to, or suggests artists with (consistently) two songs that feel like Spotify's own fake artists - session musicians generated to capture royalties in-house.

I have the same problem with Spotify, just the same stuff over and over and over. YouTube Music has a much more diverse recommendation approach than Spotify does in my experience.

> Spotify's own fake artists - session musicians generated to capture royalties in-house.

Is this something you have any references for? It sounds super interesting, like shadow kitchens for music.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xabb3/spotifys-fake-ambient... - from 2017, they have been up to it for a while

True, but it makes for another good use: building a live playlist. Youtube would cram all random things with the couple of novel interesting clips, while Spotify will keep the mood until I decide to switch.

Spotify's algorithm works really well until you let someone else use the account. I wish there was a "child mode", "party mode" or whatever to disable updating recommendations.

Perhaps Private listening is what you're looking for, assuming it's working as advertised.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/

Pandora gives people granular access to the songs that are being used as the basis for recommendations. You would just delete the songs used by guests.

There is. Called "private session" in the settings.

Oh ... today I learned. Awesome.

It is cryptically called "hide activity" in my translation of Spotify.

It does. It's called "Private Session".

I turned off youtube recommendations years ago so I can't comment on that, but spotify's have pretty much always been terrible in my experience.

Anything suggested on the front page is either songs i already have in my liked songs or completely out of place. And the songs that i've already liked are from a few specific genres and artists, which seem completely random.

A few examples:

* Ratatat and Röyksopp both are in my top 5 of all time according to Spotify's own stats, yet I never got any suggestion about E.VAX, Kunzite, or Röyksopp's releases (their Lost Tapes playlist and their latest album, released about 4 months ago).

* the 'recommended for today' section is regularly filled with random synthwave when it's a genre i barely ever listen to, and a lot of 'electronica/trance/organica/deep house/whatever you want to call it', which i don't really listen to either (at least this kind of electro music).

* still, the worst offender has to be podcasts. I have zero interest in podcasts, have never clicked on any and likely never will, yet it's always the first thing on the app homepage, just below 'recently played'.

I've tried to use the browsing categories but these are most of the time just as poor, they only contain a few playlists and the latest big releases of the genre.

Highly subjective, but i'm tired of personalized suggestions & feeds. Just because I watched or listened to something does not mean I want more of it. And imho 'just use a no history session' or 'click not interested' do not solve the problem, especially since the argument in favor of recommendations seems to be that it is 'more convenient for the user'.

Why can't I just browse instead? Spotify has a very extensive way of categorizing songs based on multiple characteristics (https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...), so why can't I just use that when searching for new music, directly in the normal app?

All these recommendation engine problems people aren't discussing here aren't bugs or problems, they're features. They're either pushing the content that makes people engage with the platform the longest, or that promote another feature that the platform is trying to push on you. With YouTube, it's MrBeast style videos, influencer bait, and shorts. With Spotify, it's for sure podcasts.

Podcasts are so heavily pushed by Spotify because they're trying to make themselves the centralized one stop shop for your audio consumption. They didn't pay Joe Rogan millions for no reason.

As a man under thirty, I see the JRE logo on the front page of my Spotify at least five or six times a month. I have no interest in listening to podcasts on Spotify. I very much dislike Joe Rogan. I hit the option to not request it to me again, and yet there it is.

They're not recommendations based on your taste. They're a mix of just enough of your taste so that you trust and buy-in, mixed with whatever flavor of the week the recommendation engine would love to sell you.

> Spotify's recommendation system is much better than youtube's (at least for me). I frequently "joke" that it is one of the few applications of ML that actively make my life as a consumer better.

I hear this all the time but Spotify just plays stuff I've listened to. It's not a discovery service for me, it just plays the hits.

I'm wondering if that's just what it is and everyone likes it because it's playing stuff they already like for twelve tracks and then one new song.

> It's not a discovery service for me

Last.fm used to be good discovery service until it went downhill years ago, there should be services willing to take that niche

> Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing.

I've heard reports of this happening but for well over a year, YouTube was still recommending relatively high quality videos to me that went along with my interests.

Until last week.

Somehow, somewhere along the line I must have clicked on some sort of "influencer" video. Now all I see are hundreds of hyper Minecraft videos, "I filled my house with 1 million packing peanuts" videos, etc. I have tried manually searching for some of the topics that interest me again, but these influencer-type videos still overrule whatever I try to manually teach it.

I don't know what happened, but it has ruined it for me.

You can review your history on YouTube and remove videos (or at least tell it to not use them for recommendations). You may find one obvious culprit a few weeks ago.

I have the same problem. I don’t know what I did to tell YouTube I’m interested in Minecraft (never tried it, never watched someone try it).

I can vaguely see why YouTube is pushing right-wing conspiracy videos on me, but Minecraft? Mr. Beast? I’ve blocked perhaps two or three dozen of these channels. Take the hint, YouTube.

Something I noticed after I watched an episode of Stoic Finance[1] about a possible "impending crash of the Chinese economy" is that YouTube started recommending about a dozen "independent" channels.

I put the word independent in air quotes because they all have near-identical looking title cards with the similar fonts, some variant of the phrasing "The collapse has begun!", and the same-ish content. Different presenters, different channels, same message. Over and over. And over.

Reminds me of the "This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy" clip that edited together dozens of apparently independent local news channels saying the same script, verbatim.[2]

You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read?

I would love to know if anyone on Hacker News knows something about this kind of thing...

[1] In case you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=stoic+finance

...and some copy-cats clips I recommend opening in a private tab unless you want to be inundated with even more clones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6slQLbT_fNY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-tLenP5NA4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDVNag9Pq7s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JEdz1eA2vQ

[2] Entertaining and terrifying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

The average Chinese person needs to save 100% of after-tax income for >30 years to have the down-payment for the average Chinese house. And, then, the interest payment alone would still be higher than the person's after-tax income.

Either China has to indefinitely grow at 10%+ per year (it's becoming obvious that's not going to happen), or the Yuan or Chinese home prices (~50% of Chinese wealth) are massively overvalued.

>You've got to wonder if there's someone with deep pockets trying to influence public opinion on China? Or is it just the same thing as the "local" news channels, where a bunch of YouTubers have been "bought" by a corporation that send them material to read?

These are the least likely options.

The most likely case is that the channels are all copying each other. Even if they were all put out by a couple content farms, it's extremely unlikely that the content farms care about anything else but making money. The only thing they likely care about is that people watch videos like those.

People trying to make easy money is, by far, more common on YouTube.

It's probably just plagiarism.

The Youtube algorithm bothers me a lot because they have the subscribe system but as soon as you do subscribe to a channel that channel basically disappears off the recommendations/front page.

I literally ignore the front page 99% of the time and just go to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

This is also the only way I can make sense of twitter, skip the 'feed' or whatever it's called[0] and go right to my curated lists.

[0] as an aside, I only just made the connection that 'feed' is likely an abbreviation of 'newsfeed' but also brings a strong and stark connotation that I'm livestock to be fed

Funny, maybe it's a language thing (French speaking) but to me the first thing that comes to mind when speaking about feeds is "RSS", so I genuinely never made the connection.

It probably is: English has "eat" vs. "feed", German has "essen" vs. "fressen", but duckduckgo.com translates both to French "manger".

Interesting. I'd have translated "feed" to "nourrir", not "manger", but they're loosely synonyms.

Just opened youtube.com and 6/8 of the videos on the top section of my front page are from channels I'm subscribed to. That happens for me every time. Sorry your subscribe button doesn't work.

Spotify's recommendation system is so bad, that when I find a song I like, I put it into Pandora's free tier to find more songs. I hate how Spotify likes to prioritize every other song from that artist, and every other song from that genre, over songs from other artists and genres that sound similar to the song I want recommendations for. Pandora seems to prioritize the sound of the song, and actually finds similar songs.

Sites like Pandora, and many other "underdog" sites, operate as expected because they are trying desperately to please users in a bid to capture market share. Once they gain market dominance they begin to operate in an unexpected/unfavorable manner, just like Spotify does now, because "tailored" recommendations (strategic content recommendations) generates the most annual revenue for them.

The saying "power corrupts" applies to this circumstance perfectly.

Spotify manipulates recommendations to what makes them the most money, not necessarily what is best for user satisfaction. They do it just enough to prevent users from cancelling their subscriptions as well (usually).

> Spotify manipulates recommendations to what makes them the most money, not necessarily what is best for user satisfaction.

I was once a heavy user of Pandora, I am now a heavy user of Spotify, and I'm considering switching back. I think you're right.

But, having experienced both services at the peak of their quality, I think "stronglikedan" is correct, that Pandora has a greater ability (in addition to a greater desire) to analyze the way that music sounds.

I think Pandora's Music Genome Project is just superior. It always has been for me, and more importantly, it's always been consistently superior.

It reminds me of stealing a cool car in GTA and then every car you see is that same model.

The YouTube recommendation engine seems to overweigh tangent content. For example. If your recommendations are all puppy videos (awww) and you go watch Jonathan Blow talk about why programmers aren't productive anymore, you'll get a whole new feed of "How to learn Rust in 100 seconds" crap.

>Happens to me a lot on Youtube too - you watch just one thing - and now your recommendations are full of things like that one thing. Or Facebook/Youtube, somehow: I watched a single video on Youtube about Viking sword fighting and suddenly my people recommendations on Facebook were at least 20% militaria fans, always visible from the profile picture already. It finally stopped but it took well over half a year.

>That's why I thought this story was about recommendation systems recommending either only narrowly what you already know, and finding something new is not really well supported or not better than random, or that one outlier can skew your recommendations for a long time.

This kind of problem is exactly why we are building alternative YouTube recommendations. Search a channel to find more channels making similar content:

https://channelgalaxy.com

Click on icons in the lists to go to that channel's list. You can "surf" along that way to discover new content.

That's the worst, on top of youtube replaying the same track(s) you just listened to in the last 5-10 minutes in loop.

One can only handle so much Cotton Eye Joe and Black Betty...

It's not a broken recommendation system, it IS the recommendation system.

With respect to news, these systems are driving polarization in politics.