The algorithm!!

[newgreyarea]

Still trying to sort out what the algo eats and how that effects what it spits back at me. 

how does FOLLOWING an artist effect things versus liking a track or album? 
i can’t seem to figure out a way to get it to spit out more variety. 

The best thing I’ve gotten Spotify to do lately is use the Liked Songs as my overall playlist. Which is heavily flawed i it’s filtering cuz it appears that absolutely nothing has the correct meta data tags and users are not able to correct it for them. Otherwise the “just for you” stuff is just the same always. There are 6-10 great songs by some of my fave artists that I’ve had to tell it to “never play” because it would only play this out of literally hundreds of tracks to choose from. 

first I just followed artists. Didn’t like any songs or albums. Didn’t seem to make a difference. 

Then I started liking albums hoping it would pull some other cuts from the albums and not just the singles. Nope. Useless. 

then I started liking individual tracks making sure to steer clear of the hits. Nope. At this point I don’t think the algorithm actually does anything hint except loosely guess what genre you might like, find the greatest hits, which I’m guessing it arrives at by what the average person listens to and regurgitates a very very very AVERAGE playlist. That’s probably fine for most people that just casually interact with music but for music nerds it’s just lazy. Nothing new. Nothing fresh. **bleep** my “under the radar” had **bleep**ing Fleetwood Mac!! Did one of the biggest selling albums of all time go under anyones radar?!? 

[1155485398]

Other user here..  I recognize your complaint, as far as the suggestions are concerned that are randomly played when any playlist ends. They have gotten better as time passed by the way, but I wanted to suggest my way of circumventing the algorithm.   I also don't think the 'enhance' is quite there yet, those suggestions seem logical (I see where it came from) but just not often golden..
Thats why discovering new artists is an activity with my participation to steer it.  What I do is quickly make a new playlist, add a bunch of tracks, sometimes entire playlists and albums,. . like spices for my new soup.  Than use 'create similar playlists',.. then again 'similar playlist' on the result, (this has partly the same tracks and partly quite uninspired suggestions.. ) repeat 4 or 5 times to see practically all of your own tracks replaced, and the algorithm seems to play a track on itself. The suggestions based on suggestions converge into an actually quite decent advice 'in between'.  Throw away all the intermediate playlists and start listening and marking your new discoveries! It actually feels better now to make my own soup beforehand than to trust on what happened to be played in the last 48 hours.  Hope this helps! 
Luuk