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by skrtskrt 1430 days ago
> I used to actively look forward to my weekly recommendations. By the end, they were recommending music that was already in my most played. And lots of generic indie folk crap that all sounded the same. I didn't seem to be able to convince it that I didn't like it.

This is the way of the Discover Weekly, it recommends music that is sonically similar to what you listen to most. Eventually you run out of music that is actually good that is sonically similar to what you already listen to.

You can also do

* song/album/artist radio on any song/album/artist you hear, which will be matched to that song/album/artist and not your personal pref.

* release radar - new song release weekly by your favorite artists or similar artists

* automatic mix playlists with a friend that bring in their music preferences

* daily mixes - 90% songs you like and already listen to, separated by genres, with a handful of new ones mixed in

... and that's just a small percentage of what is or can be automatically generated by Spotify. There are endless user-created playlists to explore.

> I'd search for specific albums by specific artists and get guided instead to playlists.

The search can be filtered by whether you want songs, albums, artists, playlists, podcasts, or profiles. It's the top, most obvious option on search, right below the search bar.

Their search has also improved massively in the last few years to where you don't need to filter and can just type the song name and artist/album name in the same search to filter out all the similarly named songs by other artists - it no longer indexes the search on just a single attribute.

The rest sound like device issues. Never encountered them across Androids, iPhones, Ipads, Macbooks, Linux laptops, etc.

2 comments

Yeah, I actually found a lot of great music from Spotify's suggestions that I wouldn't have listened to otherwise. However, their suggestions for me are now stuck in such a specific (and frankly kind of weird) musical niche that they've become useless.

A big part of it is probably because I try to only use Spotify for discovering new music. Anything that I know I actually like gets added to my local music library instead and is never played through Spotify.

edit: Is there a way to tell Spotify to forget what it thinks it knows about my taste in music? I think I'd prefer starting over from scratch instead of trying to feed it more information about what I already listen to.

Contact the support desk. They helped me migrate to a new account once and migrated everything in my library over. Idk about the recommendation engine bc that wasn't a concern of mine but I had a human on the other side helping me figure out my situation through email. This was 2019ish
I suspect Spotify have taken a similar approach to devaluing all complaints about their UX/UI, thus why people like me have deleted their account.