Comment by chewz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chewz | Hacker News Reader

With all that AI excitement Spotify, Google Play Music and Apple Music misserably fail at generating good musical recomendations. At least for me. Spotify Discover Weekly was no different for me when I still used Spotify (six months ago). Not only it is not personalized at all it is also quite lame. I am doing enough to seed - following enough artists, genres, liking album, subscribing to playlists but the quality of recomendations is mediocre at least.

For example at the moment Apple Music is suggesting to me four Wednesday playlist - all heave metal the genre I never liked and listened to. Also two artist spotlights - Jeff Chang and Danny Chan. Yes I have Japanesese account but this is Cantopop and Taiwanese crooner - so a little off the map especially that I do not enjoy pop music at all especially Asian. Some other examples are what I call comin denominators. Yes I follow lots of jazz but Frank Sinatra is not jazz music, nor Tony Benett. etc...

Same here with Netflix: their recommendations have been a complete failure. It seems like Netflix is pushing mostly their Netflix original series. What does works for me in Netflix are the similar to this below the movie, e.g. after you've viewed the movie. But that is a very simple algorithm any sophomore could write, not related to the recent developments in neural nets/machine learning.

When I go to an filmfestival or an concert, part of what I pay goes to the proffessionals who make the selection for me. And I'm happy to pay their services, just like I pay for journalists.

I have the complete opposite experience compared to you. All of my Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes are at least 75% music I like, even if I didn't know it beforehand, or only knew the artist by name.

At bare minimum I really with I could tell these services which artists I explicitly don't like so that they're never recommended to me. That alone would be a huge improvement.

Disliking multiple songs from the same artist only to have it suggest the next one from their repertoire is infuriating. Worse, Apple Music will play songs you've disliked in the radio anyway.

My experience was that Spotify radio is utterly bad, Discover Weekly quite okay, but the weekly Apple Music playlist really nails it. I found a lot so far that I didn't know before and added to my library.

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