I really wish Spotify would understand the difference between white noise and actual music, using Spotify on my smart speaker when I go to bed playing a continual brown noise loop completely screws up the recommendation algorithm.
YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.
YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.
I feel ya. I usually fall asleep at night to some kind of "10 hour loop of blizzard and crackling fire noises" playing on Youtube... and now my YT recommendations are full of "10 hours of crackling fire", "10 hours of thunderstorm noises", etc. suggestions. Sadly YT is incapable of understanding that I only listen to that stuff when I'm trying to fall asleep and I have zero need of those videos any other time. groan
I mean, sure, I can go in and hand edit my watch history to remove that stuff (and I do occasionally) but doing that constantly is a huge PITA. I wish they could figure out a way to fix this.
I find myself doing the same, especially when searching for something that I am considering purchasing. I don't need Google, Youtube, Amazon, etc trying to sell me alternatives to whatever I've already made an informed decision on
At the risk of sounding like a condescending asshole, maybe the problem is your offloading the responsibility of managing your playlist to a third party?
I'm an ancient relic from the nether times who still manages his own locally stored audio files and playlists, so I simply can't relate to this beyond that if you play lazy games you will win lazy prizes.
Nothing wrong with being lazy, of course. But if you want the power to have a satisfactory playlist you kind of need to own up to the responsibility for one.
You don't sound like an asshole, but you do sound oblivious.
There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
In the past, people would get recommendations from people they know. Now we have the help of algorithms. They're not perfect, but most people will find hundreds of songs from random artists they never would have listened to and their friends/family probably have never heard of.
There's no manual way to do that without spending an enormous amount of time on it (which I say as someone who did that in the 90s/00s).
> It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
As another old fogey, at least old enough to have been active in the filesharing scene, that filesharing has got me so much music stored on disk that it would take nearly a year to listen to every recording if they were played back-to-back 24/7. With such an embarrassment of riches, what need is there for continual recommendations for new music? Sure, I occasionally add new music if I come across some interesting mention of an artist in a book or article, but I have a hard time understanding why some other old fogeys feel that a discovery algorithm is essential.
Back in the Napster days, my "algorithm" was to stumble around somewhat randomly until I found something cool. Then I could look at that peer's collection and download other things that seemed interesting. Usually, it was possible to go deep and get full albums.
After they killed Napster, my discovery ended up on BitTorrent, which often optimized for the complete discography of artists. This could leave quite a backlog but it was interesting nonetheless.
Now I use Apple music, primarily for the albums and the depth of the catalog. I was an early Spotify user but they lost me when they were serving other people music through my connection in the early days, I didn't appreciate that.
When they started monetizing, I also didn't like the way that they took in tons of money from people who liked exclusively small artists and paid it out to mostly the top acts from big labels. Sure, they all do that now, but Spotify started it. At the time, iTunes still had you paying by the song.
It's hard to stay into new music as I get older. A lot of times I already know what I want to hear, and I'm not a constant soundtrack type. But I do make an effort to prowl around the catalog a little and also listen to college radio. Those experiences haven't failed me yet.
By that logic, what need is there of new books, paintings, movies, TV, or ideas? You can't possibly consume all the good ones already available to you.
You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music. Music and culture change, so you can't just find everything you might want in a historical catalog.
>By that logic, what need is there of new books, paintings, movies, TV, or ideas?
you may legimatey not need them based on your goals for the medium. For books, I tend to only read technical textbooks these days, so sure. I'm not looking for any fiction or biographies.
Likewise, I really haven't bothered curating a playlist since Google Play Music shut down, I was barely adding new songs to my playlist by then anyway.
>You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.
Sounds rough with the current landscape, especially if they feel stuck to Spotify. But if there's one thing I learned from exploring new and recent adult media, it's that the truly great stuff isn't found on Pornhub. You gotta search deep and discover your kinks through "word of mouth". Really teaches you to properly "research" when billion dollar corporations are too scared to touch your medium to begin with, and most forums forbid even talking about such stuff.
and how to rummage through spam. My god, is there so much spam when you hit a niche adult theme and you just end up with weird russsian websites. Corporate propaganda shilling can't even phase me anymore
> You may be surprised to learn that some people just enjoy exploring new and recent music.
I never said otherwise. I just believe that most old-fogey listeners are going to divide their time between exploring new music and dealing with the backlog they quickly accumulate from that exploration, and therefore an algorithm that pumps out recommendations nonstop is not essential.
>There are tens of millions of songs released every week. It's literally impossible to find new music you like without recommendations.
how many forms of white noise do you really need? It's not really a "genre" people listen to for leisure. It's either for sleep or study. You're not intensely listening for lyrics nor rhythm nor anything other genres argue about, you don't care how the "artist" got the sounds.
This. Old fogey over here too, and I would have stopped listening to any new music 15 years ago had it not been for streaming and recommendation algorithms.
I find it funny that you think FM radio isn’t also run by an algorithm. It is really rare to find a traditional DJ who gets to play whatever new music they want. Maybe from a college radio station, but not from most major market stations.
depends on the station. And someone at this point still listening to FM radio and commenting on the internet probably isn't listening to any of the few remaining major stations.
To paraphrase up thread: If FM stations were the only way to discover new music, I would've given up on new music a long time ago. Absolutely can't stand radio or television advertising; I'd much rather listen to nails on a chalkboard.
If that is true, then most of those releases are inaccessible to most listeners. For example, Spotify only adds around 100k "songs" per day and that includes remasters and mixes of an existing song, no matter how small the change is. For someone who truly wants to pick from all those ten million songs, there isn't even a service that would let them listen to the songs, let alone find them and recommend them.
For what it's worth, you can pretty easily create your own white/brown/pink noise 24h (or any amount of time) in Audacity[0] it's a generator in the menu.
Dude youtube drives me absolutely crazy. I fall asleep to it almost every night watching some documentary or something on say the medieval times or whatever. Specifically a channel I want to keep watching videos from.
Then when I pop up awake at 3am cause of noises youtube's sent me to WW2/Hitler/Nazi videos. It never, ever fails. Sometimes I get sent to this one physics teachers video who I've never once clicked on, watched, or selected myself, but he has an INSANE amount of views like tens of millions. Like, youtube purposely sends videos to him. I forget who it is but it's a dude with long grey/white hair and a beard talking about physics I think from MIT but I dont remember it's been awhile.
Why can't you keep me watching stuff related to what I'm watching?? How do I get from the Teutonic Knights to Hitler?? It's ALWAYS Hitler.
Now i have to make sure I watch a channels playlists because I wind up in Hitler territory every other video if I don't.
I mean, we are talking about the same genre: history documentaries. And there are plenty of WW2 documentaries on YouTube… so it’s not quite Godwin proper (no one is getting called a Nazi who wasn’t an actual 1930s-1940s Nazi). This is more Godwin adjacent… if you watch enough videos on a loop, you’ll eventually see a documentary about Nazis. To be fair, this is true of traditional cable TV too. There are a LOT of WW2 documentaries, so I don’t completely fault the algorithm here.
I fall asleep to documentaries. I don't want to loop one video. I want to play videos that relate to one another and not go from one topic to one completely unrelated. The only way to reliably do this is to use a playlist, which sucks, because not every channel makes playlists and I'm sometimes fine with the channel changing, as long as it doesn't go from #SpaceScience to #WW2againagaingain.
And then I'd say about 30% of the time it'll grab some documentary/video I've already watched, which is also annoying.
Look spotify, I did it for you
`if (!song.white_noise) {
add_for_recommend_history_(song);
}`
In a more serious note YouTube has a similar problem, "Oh I looked recommendations for a drawing tablet to buy my friend", now till to the ends of time I get recommendations for drawing tablets, and if I had used the "Incognito mode" they show me ads despite me being a premium user, I want it incognito but not THAT much of incognito you geniuses at Google.
it would surprise me if they didn’t try to handle this. It is similar to the Christmas music in January problem.
With white noise it is so easy to generate for free that likely 1000s of people are generating hordes of static content and uploading it to try to get a payout.
And it’s probably not that easy to identify every track that is intended to be listened to as ambient noise. Ambient noise itself is a music genre.
You can exclude certain playlists from the list of stuff that is considered when creating the recommendations. Tap the three dots on a playlist and tap "Exclude from taste profile".
Heck I just use YouTube-DL to rip tracks like that to MP3 and copy them to my phone to play directly. That said maybe OP just wanted to vent about Spotify rather than find solutions.
Yeah, I youtube-dl audio tracks to stuff I frequently listen to and they end up in the downloads folder. So far it’s the simplest least invasive method I found on Ios
Yeah there are a lot of 8 hour "music for studying" tracks I listen to (I like the ones which are mixes of music from the halo video games, with a fav being a mix of the ODST soundtrack with additional rain noises), and those are a prime candidate for ripping versus streaming every time, killing the phone's battery and ending up with ads when you are wandering away from your device.
I use the VLC app on ios and transfer music using its wifi web interface, since my computers all run linux and can't easily transfer MP3s to the phone any other way.
YouTube has a similar issue. Viewers who watched "60 minutes of white noise" also enjoyed "8 hr tv noise loop". Yeah... thanks for the rec.