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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

Music discovery has never worked for me, for the simple reason it's the lyrics, not the music. I listen to anyone speaking truth, (the truth I believe, of course), and that gives me a wide disjoint range of music, but they are all singing about political social truths. Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine, Beyonce, The Stranglers, The Jam, Psychic TV... It's the lyrics, and now today, we finally have the ability to have music discovery with the lyrics, with the intellectual content of the music and not just the dressing.

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I only pay attention to melodies and rarely can even discern the lyrics unless I have them written out as I listen. Even relatively clean vocals like Johnny Cash just wash over me without being understood. The words for me become just another instrument that can play notes. If I can always predict the next series it is boring, if I never can, it is too challenging. In the middle I get dopamine whether I predict the notes or not. The right series of notes can make me feel such varied emotions with no words necessary.

Music discovery used to work for me with pandora, nothing else has. I have no idea if they had better algorithms, or just a better catalog. It doesn't seem to work as well as it once did either.

Tl;dr I don't think it is simply your preference for lyrical content over melodic content that causes the algorithms to fail. They are just bad.

I'm pretty certain Spotify uses lyric embeddings as an input to the recommender. They'd have a hard time recommending podcasts otherwise.

That's a very good point, I also love discovering with lyrics. What I tried to do is to find some connections between the image and music, maybe some connection we as humans cannot see right away.

I've been wondering how well a word2vec on song lyrics would work; just completely ignore the music and pair up subject matters.

You might like folk punk - check out Pat the Bunny.

I feel like there are two kinds of singers - people who are good at singing, and people who have something to sing about. You and I, I think, prefer the latter.

A perfect example of lyric dominant music, which I own a hug amount, and feeds right into hip hop and then Johnny Cash and The Clash.

> with the lyrics, with the intellectual content of the music and not just the dressing.

> Marvin Gaye, Public Enemy, Rage Against The Machine, Beyonce

Thanks for the laugh, man, I needed it.

Even though you'r being mean I feel the need to defend you, only because I agree that this was one of the most unrelatable things I've ever read on the site (i.e. GP's preference for music with a political or social theme in the lyrics rather than a specific genre, theme, sound, style, or mood).

If you're reacting to the inclusion of Beyonce, I suggest checking out her recent Country music album, which is a political re-envisioning of Country music and to many a direct attack on the comfort seat of White racism.

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