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Comment by blippitybleep | Hacker News Reader

I moved off Spotify to escape AI. It was good at first, but I started to feel like I was being pushed into a rut with music, that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself. I wonder if the novelty of a lot of consumer AI will wear off for others in the long run.

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Spotify certainly does sometimes give unexpected results. A few months ago some random train of through made me think of the song "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats and I decided to listen to it.

I went to Spotify's search and typed "i dont like' and hit enter, figuring what I was looking for would probably be near the top of the results. It was indeed the first result.

But man...the rest of the results were something else [1]. I've never done anything on Spotify that would suggest I might like most of those songs, or in many cases that I would even be interested in their genre.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me and I did listen to some of those to see if they were as bad as their titles suggested. They were.

But now I think Spotify has decided I like that kind of music.

If I do the same search now it has many of those still but now adds songs called "Sex Offender Shuffle", "Niggas in My Butthole", "3 BIG BALLS", "Alabama Nigga - Original Version", and "I Don't Like Beaners" to the top 15 or so.

There are plenty of songs with "I Don't Like" in the title or something close to which are about things like relationship problems or self esteem that are in the search results, so it is not like they only had songs about disliking certain races or songs about people's genitals to choose from.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/zks8UoQ

Wtf? That playlist is horrible.

Amusingly, I find that Spotify will put B(maybe even C) songs or artists in front of me that I'd never hear on my own, but that have little moments that I enjoy experiencing, and this happens more frequently the more I use Spotify.

> that I’d lost all autonomy when it came to finding new music for myself

Music discovery is the best feature for me in spotify. Especially if you listen to more unpopular genres like french/german techno, old school hard trance. I found plenty of great artists there which have <5k monthly plays.

I wonder whether I got in a bad A/B test group or something - I tried Spotify after Rdio shut down but no matter how much training I gave it the recommendations kept going back to the same pop albums they were promoting. It was very weird to see after reading all of that echonest guy’s blog posts about the cool things they were doing.

Somebody I know also had this issue at one point. In his case it was girlfriend which also used his account (but apparently without creating playlists or hearting anything, idk).

In my case I imported my Rdio history so it’s possible that something went wrong with a difference between loading albums & seeding the recommendation engine. It was really weird because I was expecting better based on most of the other users I knew.

Talking about Discover Weekly playlist: I think the recommendation engine is mostly based on what you actually listen to. When I listen for a week to emo rap, I get emo rap recommended in the next one.

I think song/album radio is not exactly based on your taste, but on what spotify considers similar.

Try making a playlist with your favorite songs and press "enhance" or "playlist radio" to see recommendations based on that context.

I used it for a couple of months and it never got better. I ended up switching to Apple Music but I would hope that they've fixed it by now.

The import could have something to do with it. When I started using Spotify I used a playlist importer that included many false positives when it couldn't find a particular song. I ended up with a bunch of live David Bowie recordings that I've never heard in there, and now it still thinks I want to hear him every time I shuffle my liked songs. It could have chosen a worse artist, but I don't need to hear him every time.

got any french/german techno? I would really appreciate it.

Sure. I'll post some artists with my favorite songs as youtube links, as I know that not everyone on this site has a spotify subscription.

On a sidenote: Looks like techno had massive growth in the last 1-2 years. I discovered most of these artists when they were much smaller. Now most of them have 3x to 10x more monthly listeners. Seems like Spotify is indeed a great platform for discoverability. For monetizing probably not though.

---

French:

KASST - Hell on Earth (the most popular on this list. 430k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwi1qgSaxZY

Trudge - страсть (this dude has many decent tracks, check out "Sway over the Void" and "Self Love Club" out): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx-zzugl-P0

BXTR - Reboot my soul (40k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruxTTzO3yTI

RAUMM - Perdue Dans Le Noir - BXTR remix (Has French lyrics. 38k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-xkLnJUvDQ

Automates - Meta (French lyrics too, 29k monthly listeners. One of my overall favorites): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il0_Pcj4nho

Any another production one from RAUMM, which is more like a 16-minute experience with beautiful lyrics with a lot of trance influence. I'm uncertain if this still counts as techno; I don't think so. But I really love sitting down on the couch and putting this on a loud volume and just relaxing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-KUdT5bU8

I Hate Models - Daydream (pretty famous; 500k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjCb4CB-hdw

Anetha ft Sugar - Candy from Strangers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofOPhZvnVF4

Trym - Millenium Pain (ナルト Mix): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INwOGDbQFmQ

-----

German:

In Verruf - Let Out (80k monthly listeners): https://youtu.be/pc_Pp0kObxQ?t=1

Parallx - Red Clouds (30k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEX5xJOuxAM

Inhalt der Nacht - Die Liebe (25k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVu6UBYuq80

Klangkünstler - Ihr Werdet Weinen (Pretty famous; 500k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFIiveXMxyI

Introversion - Dystopa (50k monthly listeners): https://youtu.be/KRXuatwFhIE?t=2

B2 - Destiny (64k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXaqpT323DQ

Kobosil - Rigid (Kobosil 44 Rush Mix)(Fastest growing Technio Producer in Germany, 500k monthyl listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf1MLglK3fc

AKKI - The Ocean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD5GrfTy9Ac // Into Your Mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWWAGoZmx9A

rezystor - alice (this isn't on spotify unfortunately; rezystor has <10k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcGa15wEalE

David Strasser - Trust the Process (17k monthly listeners): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY9T6mdg2wo

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I had to snuck a track from two Italians in here because they only have like 1k monthly listeners on Spotify and make good music:

Anticyclone - Ruins Of Las Vegas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFquUsnXKuw

Thank you tremendously!

It's hard for me to move off Spotify because their API is far better for finding new music than anything else out there.

I have some cron jobs running that generate new playlists every day with very specific targets (e.g. "min_instrumentalness" on a track) while still being random enough to have variety.

If Spotify ever shuts down their API like how Twitter has done, then I'll move to something else.

I'm intrigued. Are you able to share these scripts?

I'm also interested in them!

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