Spotify’s Mathematical System For Determining Your Music Taste

Video written by Ben Doyle

[ConfusedRambutan]

spotify never quite gets my music taste right, i just kinda wander along until i find a band/artist i like and then listen to them obsessively

[b_]

I find that spotify isnt that great for discovering new music: it kinda just recommends stuff close to what it knows you like and after a while, listening to similar music gets a bit boring imo. However, finding some new songs on youtube and then playing their radio on spotify works very well, so im pretty satisfied overall.

[DavidFrostbite]

I really wish I could just see the genres directly. It baffles me that Spotify doesn't display the rest of the metadata.
It would be so cool to see what Spotify thinks I like so I can actually search for that type of music - without having to wait for Wrapped once a year.
Makes me miss Pandora but their bitrate sucks worse that YouTube

[Krebzonide]

I wish there was some type of voting system on the discover weekly to tell spotify if it's good or not. This week specifically I got a lot of trash in mine.

[jbritain]

According to Spotify my favourite music is 'speedrun', which I'm not sure whether to be happy about

[christopherr]

0:40 oh yeah, Ed Sheeran is a niche indie musician

[BobbyHill]

I’ve never had much luck with the autogenerated playlists, but I think their “similar artists” or whatever section is usually super spot on even for really obscure stuff, and when they automatically play songs that aren’t in the playlist you are listening to, it’s also usually really good.
Lots of people here in the comments are saying it’s only good for chart toppers but maybe you guys just listen to too much of the chart toppers because I’ve found tons of great music that was exactly what I want and from groups with like 10000 monthly listeners or even way less

[noneontheair]

I’m pretty thoroughly convinced that Spotify only bases it’s recommendations on recent additions to your listening habits. I only ever listen to my one big playlist that’s a giant conglomeration of everything I like (currently approaching 2k songs), while frequently adding any new music I come across that I enjoy. And according to my Spotify wrapped, I listened to 2035 songs from 900 artists across 107 genres this year. However, my Discover Weekly is only ever songs related to whatever I’ve added in the previous few weeks. My recommendations would be so much better if it _actually_ looked at everything I listened to.

[Imperial_Squid]

As an academic working on machine learning "these rectangles make the song smaller and these rectangles are borderline sentient" is a) fucking hilarious and b) honestly not a bad summary 😂😂

[toinefr]

Once Spotify understands you like never heard of artists, man it finds things!

[happyelephant]

In my experience, Spotify's algorithm was terrible. It almost never guessed what I like and what not.

Once I went to sleep with some rain sound album in background and as a result, it started to recommend me almost exclusively sound of rain which I don't want anymore. What is worse, I had no way to make it stop.

[charlielinden]

I love spotify, but I never have much belief that AI suggestions really know much about me. Some people worry about the big data being collected, but still we just seem to get weird song suggestions and ads out of it. Really cool system though, and it at least makes some good suggestions sometimes!

[CatWithHumanEars]

Spotify is really good with chart topping music suggestions but anytime I try and make a ska playlist it basically is just like "You want the entire discographies of Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Streetlight Manifesto, and Less Than Jake? Maybe we'll throw a Goldfinger or Mustard Plug in there to make you think we know what niche is"

[michaelshields]

My problem with Spotify is that what I want to listen to can vary wildly from one part of the day to the next. so I never know what I'm doing to listen to next when I let the server create a playlist

[concretestag]

Love the satire, really well written. Especially the jokes about spotify getting peoples music taste right.

[alexanderptolemy]

0:50 "three times better than one algorithm because of math" is the best quote I've heard from you

[CompletelyNormal]

I can confirm that the Spotify algorithm gets a little bit confused if you put Metallica, Queen, Social Distortion, John Coltrane and Claude Debussy in the same playlist.

[David-zltp]

I actually clicked on this video in hopes to learn something about Bricks.

An insight into the inner workings of Spotifys recommendation system was also a good watch but if I had to quantify it, it was about half as interesting.

[emmaodom]

I’m so interested in the Spotify frequency decomposition algorithm - I tried running some of my own songs through a spectrogram filter which essentially makes time vs frequency plot

[MultiFlauschig]

A couple of years (7-8) ago the AI was much better, every single week they made me a super good playlist of which I enjoyed most of the songs. After they changed stuff it got relly weird. They put scandinavian folk music in there nearly every week (never been there, never listened to that stuff). It got better over the last 2 years or so but most of the time I am better of, finding new stuff on my own...