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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is frustratingly dishonest about what’s paid placement on their service.

Recently they introduced a feature called “2017 Wrapped”, which contains a playlist named “Your Top Songs 2017”. I imagined this list would contain the songs I actually listened to most. Instead it’s biased so that many of my favorites don’t appear, yet there are major label songs that I don’t even remember actively playing.

It’s borderline misleading advertisement to pretend these are “my top songs” when obviously the list is a pay-to-play for labels.

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My 2017 wrapped is a pretty accurate reflection of what I did listen to, and barely any of it is the sort of stuff you'd think of when you talk about "major label songs".

There is, however, a "The Ones That Got Away" playlist, that, while still not heavy on anything particularly popular, could fit in with your experience. Maybe you were looking at the wrong playlist?

No, I wasn't.

Maybe I'm just unlucky to be in a user cohort where promoted songs are inserted into my top 2017 songs (to test how many extra plays they can get this way). It sucks that they do this to paying customers though.

Do you scrobble your plays to last.fm? If so, it should be simple to show how right or wrong they are.

My "Top Songs 2017" playlist is exlusively stuff I've listened to, specifically my most listened to tracks. Maybe not 100% in order of most listened to, but I've definitely listened to all of them a lot.

On the other hand, the "ones that got away" playlist is completely filled with pop dreck, scraped directly from top 40 lists, not worth even looking at.

My top list is missing a lot of stuff and instead contains songs I can't remember ever hearing, taken from albums where I've listened to only one song a couple of times. The copyright for these songs is owned by RCA / Sony Music, so I guess Sony is paying to insert them into playlists to promote the rest of the album.

On the other hand, Spotify's description for the "Your Top Songs 2017" playlist doesn't explicitly make the claim that these would be songs I actually listened to; instead it's more vaguely phrased as "songs you loved this year"... So I guess they're just assuming I would love these.

It also helps that Spotify doesn't show play counts, so there's no way for me to verify the actual top list. I'm thinking of buying more MP3s from now on -- files on local disk don't try to actively manipulate me to listen to something else.

Spotify is pretty consistent in doing this. If you link your Spotify account to Tinder, it gives you a list of your "Top Artists" to present on your profile, which in my experience only lists artists signed or distributing with major labels or imprints, regardless of what I've actually listened to the most.

> If you link your Spotify account to Tinder

I am shocked that this is a thing

really? it's been a pretty cool feature in my experience - gives you something to talk about with people that might not have a fleshed out profile. plus it serves as a sort of filter - if, say, the chainsmokers are in your top artists, realistically you're not going to have that much common ground with me or my friend group

Maybe someone hacked your account and use it without you noticing? My "2017 Wrapped" matches perfectly what I have scrobbled to last.fm this year and it contains mostly old stuff definitely not from major labels(The Smiths, Talking Heads, Slowdive, Joy Division etc).

Mine was pretty good actually. From time to time you find some track you just can't stop listening to - start every morning with it, put it on every time you get home, then hit rewind as soon as it's done and so on - my top songs consisted pretty much of those.

Mine is pretty spot-on. There are a few odd-balls on there that I attribute to their weighting manually selected songs much higher than those from a playlist.

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