Discover Weekly Hijacked

[ebannasch]

Hi Spotify Staff,

Sorry to post in the wrong place, I see catagories for specific clients, account issues and subscriptions but none for the actual service.odd. Moving on...

5 months ago we had a baby and I used Spotify to soothe her the first month with white noise and relaxation music. Oddly now months later and for the last two weeks my Discover Weekly has been entirely comprised of white noise and relaxation tracks. No more music 😞 - Now im seeing after the fact that I need to have a private session (which I do on other devices but forgot to trigger it on the babies iPad) is there any way for the team to clean the slate so to speak or at leat wipe out those style choices on the back end or do i sadly have to wait it out for actual music to start reappearing? The playlist was my favorite 😞

thanks!

[Melody · Accepted solution]

Hey there, @ebannasch

Thanks for coming to the Spotify Community.

We're afraid it's not possible for us to reset this, but don't worry.

Rest assured your Discover Weekly will get to know you again soon!

We'd recommend streaming as much as possible in the meantime to help, as well as saving your fav tunes to your Songs and playlists. 

Keep us posted with how you get on,

/M

[mezaone]

No it wont, ive only had country and teen party songs for several years now.. So say byebye to that.

[pjennings89012]

My Discovery Weekly has been hijacked too.

I've been playing brown noise @ night for the sleep benefits. This has been true for over 6 months now and it didn't affect my Discover Weekly. But 3-4 weeks ago, all 30 tracks become "relaxation-oriented" (presumably related to brown noise) and have stayed that way though I often listen to other styles of music. Discovery Weekly seems to ignore those tracks and exclusively populates my list with relaxation songs.

Would appear there was some kind of change to Discovery Weekly curation recently or there is a bug associated with it.

[ahpollen]

This happened to me and "Hijacked" was how I felt.  After having a baby, I started playing a lot of kids music. Now my Discover Weekly playlist is dominated by kids music and I can't enjoy it anymore. I understand that I can play other types of music and re-influence the algorithm but that's an inelegant solution. 

The ideal scenario for me would have been if the app said, "We noticed you've been listening to a lot of kids music lately. Do you want this included in your Discover Weekly playlist"

I posted a rant about this on Facebook and dozens of my friends shared similar gripes about unintended genres (classical, white noise, kids music) influencing their Discover Weekly playlist.

[Ver]

Hey @ahpollen,

Thanks for posting here 🙂

We always strive to improve our app and the experience and we appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback with us. We'll make sure to pass it on to the right team.

You can also check this idea as it seems similar to your suggestion. You can add your +Vote and Subscribe to the thread so you can stay up-to-date with any relevant news about this.

It's also a good idea to try listening in private session as it may not influence your music recommendations.

If you need anything else, the Community is here for you.
 

[ebannasch · Accepted solution]

Yeah, unfortunately not. Discovery weekly and now all six of my daily mixes are all taken over by my kids music. I don’t understand why Spotify just can’t create users and “who is listening” like every major streaming app. As long as there’s only one stream flowing you’re still getting appropriate amount of payment. It’s gotten to the point now where it’s time to possibly just delete the account and start over Or just switch to a different provider that allows separate users I know I’m not spending money for a family account for a three year old. 🙂

[ebannasch]

Not a good suggestion. This means every single time I listen I have to make sure jump through the menu system to get to a private session. Also we listen on the Apple TV which doesn’t have apparently the selection for a private session. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be so hard to just create users just like Amazon prime, Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Disney+ etc.I know it’s going to eat up more database but it’s frustrating thousands of users. I signed up for the Spotify the very first day it was released in the USA after watching it for years in Europe only.

[thiswilliam]

This is so stupid. @Spotify please just tell your algorithm to ignore children's music: not a single adult wants or needs to discover it. And resetting it as the 'solution' suggests is not viable when clearly the children in question still exist and continue to listen to their own music!

[125266554]

Spotify has had this issue going on for way too long! We use white noise for our baby, too. But not even that often. I spend a lot more time listening to music with my account. But still, every single song every single week is an ambient noise track. Every single one! It makes no sense.

@spotify - please reconsider the option to reset discover weekly and all other "made for you" playlists. after 8 years of having spotify and loving how easy it was to discover new music - it's just a bad experience now. 

If resetting isn't possible, can you consider recoding the "ambient sounds, nature sounds, kids music" to not show up on these playlists? i can't think of a single person who wants to listen to 30 different falling water sounds to start their week when they're trying to find new music. If they did, they'd go and find it! 

lastly, the "switching to private" solution is just too cumbersome. think of it this way.. you're trying to get your baby to sleep, they're crying, and you need to fumble through the account settings to switch it to private. not happening. instead of putting the work on your customer, fix the code!

just mind blowing that you've pushed off a solution to this for so long...

[ahpollen]

Totally agree, Spotify should be able to use AI to identify anomalous
changes in music consumption and ask the user, for example, "We noticed
you're listening to children's music now. Would you like this included in
your Discover Weekly?"

Just one note with regard to white noise - you can play different types of
white noise with an iPhone's accessibility menu.