Spotify - anyone heard of it?

I signed up for that Label Love thing a while ago, and it's cool, but clunky. The guys is working on a discovery app for Spotify that looks pretty cool:

https://tracknack.com/

xp yeah, that curated stations seem good. I only seem to use it when spotify connect doesn't work, or I am playing music for a few people, as I hate picking music for a crowd.

You should always start off with Captain Beefheart, you'll learn who's who in that crowd right quick.

Reporting back on a little experiment. For the past three years I've used ifttt to append my Discover Weeklys into a long playlist called DW Archive. In the past week, I've gone through half of it, weeding out artists I don't like and any tracks I already knew before DW suggested them to me.

I was curious whether a track being in a playlist has an effect on future DWs even if you don't listen to it, and if so whether removing tracks you already know (and like) would just make them reappear in DW.

Results: it's comical how many of the artists (and often specific tracks) I removed from the archive playlist in the past week have appeared in this morning's new DW. That pot is not going anywhere! So, I'm not going to remove any more of the tracks I like but already know all about.

I have a 331 hour playlist of Discover Weekly stuff I haven't checked out yet. Seemed like a good idea to set up at the time :) It's using Smarter Playlists... i think using that you can also de-dupe any playlist.

Your plays from the playlist you made will count - there's nothing to distinguish it from any other playlist you've made. Back when DW was new I did hear that playing from the DW playlist didn't affect future recommendations.

> I was curious whether a track being in a playlist has an effect

Sorry, I answered talking about plays from certain playlists. Making/adding to playlists has no effect on any recommendations - only actually playing things. Unless that's recently changed.

But maybe that's the case for what kind of things it will suggest to you, yet still a part of the algorithm deprecates putting a track in someone's DW if it's already in one of their playlists. Because otherwise it seems a massive coincidence that so many of the tracks I deleted from this megaplaylist in the past week have turned up on this week's DW.

No, DW doesn't filter based on the contents of your playlists, at all. But if you PLAYED a bunch of those old DW saves while deciding whether to keep them or not, those plays made it much more likely that you'd get tracks like those in DW again this week.

I had that mega DW playlist thing set up but after a while it up and died, at which point I just started backing them up one by one for a few years. I finally got rid of almost all of them last week and experienced a brief sense of Delete All My Bookmarks disencumbering.

Thanks glenn

I didn't listen to the ones I deleted on the grounds of knowing them well already that then reappeared in this week's DW (eg Star by Primal Scream). I suppose it's possible some of there weren't as many of these as I thought and others were actually just other well-known songs by the artist (eg maybe I'm misremembering and I actually deleted These Days by Nico instead of I'll Keep it With Mine, which is the one that appeared in the new DW.

I guess if I was listening to lots of the other songs from my DW archive, they're just close enough in Spotify's A.I. to I'll Keep it With Mine and all these other old chestnuts for it to have thrown them at me. How much of a track do I have to listen to for it to count? I'm worried now that all the bad U.S. indie singer-songwriter stuff I listened to for 30 seconds before deleting will make my DW bad for weeks now :(

I suppose it's possible some of there weren't as many of these as I thought

:30 or more counts as a play.

Thanks you! I'll be sure to let my hasty judgment kick in before then.

Oh, and do listens of tracks in Discover Weekly itself count? Would all be a bit circular if they do.

They do. You definitely want them to, otherwise you'd REALLY get the same things over and over...

Or, to be a little less glib, playing an individual song in DW strongly weighs against getting the same song in DW again (it can still happen for complicated reasons, but it usually won't), and slightly increases the chance of getting more stuff "like" it (according to matrix math) in future DWs.

Ah, that's fascinating - thanks again.

(it can still happen for complicated reasons, but it usually won't)

and i appreciate that you have to hit the 30 second threshold for DW to stop suggesting the song (for other people at least). i always wondered if there were great recommendations for me that were getting thrown out because i skipped listening to DW that week.

but i always thought that was a ridiculous number for the purpose of spotify thinking i actually liked a song. i ALWAYS listen to a new song for at least 30 seconds, unless it's something i've already heard. i probably don't give up on a new song until i'm halfway through. i wish spotify could 1. keep track of the average % of a song's length a user makes it through songs they haven't heard and 2. decides that the user likes the song based on reaching that variable, or a portion of that variable. i don't know how anyone can decide they don't like a song before 30 seconds.

I know what you mean, but on the other hand there was this Nazareth track in Tom Ewing's Twitter poll yesterday…

Is there an easy way to duplicate a playlist without having to go through and add all the songs individually?

Seems the magic algorithm needs us to listen to more (or more of) songs we don't like in order to stop suggesting them? Is that right? It sounds wrong.

well, no idea about the past few months, i sort of gave up on it

Also this

Can't you just select them all and drag and drop them all over to a new playlist at once? Requires the desktop app, I don't believe that's possible on a mobile but then editing playlists at all is clunky on a mobile device.

To stop Spotify recommending them? Are we at the point of making playlists of things we don't want to hear in order to game the machine?

Sorry - that was an xpost, I was answering Groovpanda's question.

To make amends for listening to too many 30-second bursts of songs in my DW archive thus throwing my DW into a rut, I've taken the step of leaving Spotify running on silent overnight with a long playlist of newish stuff by forkslcovetofu. I wish my life hadn't turned out like this.

Just come across this, which seems like it's right up my alley

https://newsroom.spotify.com/2019-05-02/five-ways-to-make-your-discover-weekly-playlists-even-more-personalized/

On the other hand, now I'm more confused:

Listening to a song once without replaying or “hearting” won’t affect your Discover Weekly selections.

I guess, glenn, this means in terms of working out what your taste is, and doesn't apply to the issue of whether a song will reappear in your DW or not

and this:

If you’re totally obsessed with a new-to-you track, add it to your own personally curated playlists. This lets us know the song is more than just a momentary obsession, and we’ll be sure to serve up songs in the same vein.

Which suggests that adding it to a playlist does act as a signal that you like it, though maybe it only works if you listen to the track as well. Anyway, I think I'm going to try and weed out that DW archive of mine a little more without breaking the 30-second rule!

I've taken the step of leaving Spotify running on silent overnight

maybe it knows if it's on silent and ignores all such plays...

DON'T TORTURE ME

I forgot to mention that one of the sections I quoted from in that Spotify listicle was titled 'Don’t Overthink It'

Can't you just select them all and drag and drop them all over to a new playlist at once?

Thanks for this - had no idea you could drag tracks on the desktop app. Worked a dream

didn’t know that either, thanking you!

now I can start saving my Release Radars, very cool.

Those tips for DW are all good things to do to influence your Spotify personalization in general. And the one about using Private Sessions when you're playing things you don't want us to think of as part of your tastes, that one does affect DW in the way it says. The others have a more indirect relationship to how things actually work. Adding a song to one of your playlists, for example, doesn't directly affect your DW in itself, but songs you PLAY from your own playlists get a higher weight in our calculation of your taste than things you play from Spotify editorial playlists or other peoples'...

is there anything i can do to stop my DW from being 50% repeats? do i just need to listen to a ton of new music or something?

Well, it's not supposed to be repeats. DM me your Spotify username and I'll pass it along to the right team...

ty glenn!

Glenn, I have observed that if I Follow an artist and then I click through the Artists page to them, I will see all songs from them from Liked Albums or in Liked Songs, but not songs in other personal playlists. Assuming this is by design, but might be nice to see others. In fact it would be nice to have some cross-section into to my bespoke playlists as well.

Seems like it used to tell me when I created a playlist but now I can’t find it.

― Together Again Or (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, May 1, 2020 1:57 PM (one week ago)

If there's one thing I've learned going through my old DWs, it's that there are lot of singer-songwriters whose names start with J that I never want suggested to me again. Get lost all you Jeffs, Johns, Joes and Jacks.

Ha!

This double J artist song managed to survive my DW purge:
https://open.spotify.com/track/4ZaAk3UJ0asITuGS7JvXPB?si=wwJJYXOJSzq1RqQaZG_tgQ

are any of them Jeff "Guitar" Elliot?

Glenn, any idea what happened here?!?

https://i.ibb.co/XxcvKWY/Untitled.png

(The recommended tracks all being a few seconds long, identified with strings of random characters, and all with random stolen cover art labelled with #hiddeninspotifyDVD, and which seem mighty odd suggestions for a perfectly pleasant pastorally ambient album)

Is there a way to export a playlist to a text file? (i.e. a list of the tracks that are in the playlist)

The methods that Google brings up don't seem to work anymore

The csv export function on http://joellehman.com/playlist/ doesn't seem to work any more, but it still displays a tab demited text version of the playlist on the screen that you can then paste into either a spreadsheet or a text editor.

Cheers, that worked

I use https://www.tunemymusic.com/ to export playlists to text it's excellent

Oh, that looks great.