Blend playlist is not updated

[dead_lesbian]

Plan

Premium

iPhone 12 / windows 10 desktop app

My Question or Issue

Since I've created a blend playlist with a friend it was not updated at all or maybe it was (according to  "date added" for each song) but all songs are the same. So the variety of common tastes are not working well for some reason

[Elena]

Hey @dead_lesbian,

Thanks for reaching out on the Community!

We are happy to see that you're exploring the new Blend playlists feature already. The feature is a new one, and we're always aiming to improve our features, so we hope you’ll continue to use it and find it gets better in the future.

You could try to leave your current Blend playlist and create a new one with your friend again, to see if this will resolve your situation. There is a “Leave Blend” button in the context menu of every Blend, which will allow you to leave the Blend and nobody will be able to access the Blend after that.

Keep in mind that the Blend is created depending on both of your listening histories, so some songs that are on repeat might linger there for longer times. Also if both of you haven't added new songs to Your Library recently, this could also explain why the playlist stays the same. Also it's worthwhile to mention that you can dislike songs from the playlist, which will also help for it's future composition, to be updated more in tune with your preferences.

Hope you find this useful. Keep us posted if you have any questions.

[thegoatherder]

I have the same issue. I have one Blend playlist. It never updates. It's the same as it was when it was created 4 weeks ago. I have tried leaving the Blend and initiating a new one with the friend. It still doesn't update. I have tried opening it on mobile device (iOS) and desktop (Windows). Still no change.

It would be nice if there was a button to force a refresh...

In the meantime, this new feature is pretty defunct for us. It's a shame as the Blend playlist created was bang on the mark, we love it! But 4 weeks in and it's same old, same old...

We are both Premium users.

[Kiril · Accepted solution]

Hi @thegoatherder,

Thanks for your post on this topic 🙂

The refreshing of the Blend playlist is really dependent on the listening habits of both participants as mentioned by @Elena above. In these four weeks, have you both listened to anything new/different from your usual listening routines? The Blend playlist should get it's new content when both of you are actively exploring, liking and disliking new songs/artists/albums with your personal profiles. This is how the app can learn and eventually will start pushing new content in your Blend playlist.

Also keep in mind that listening to other personalized lists (like your Daily Mixes) does not really count for "new music", as these are also already based on your preferences and are basically using the same pool of songs used for creating your Blend experience in the first place.

Hope this clears things up. If you have any questions or need anything else, the Community is here for you.

[thegoatherder]

While I can accept this as a "Solution" I really do think this is quite a flawed model for Blend. Both my friend and I have been Spotify premium members for several years. We have a large pool of listening behaviour, saved and liked music to draw from. Surely the algorithm can do better than suggesting a blend of 50 songs once and then waiting for us to discover more music by ourselves before it can suggest something else? Why should I need to actively go and find and like new music for Blend to recommend to my friend? If I was going to do that, I could just use the "share" feature to notify my friend of cool new tunes (which I do all the time when they come up on Discover Weekly)

The whole reason I've used Blend is for 2 reasons: (1) I'm tired of hunting for new music (2) I'm tired of the music suggested to me by Spotify because it's always based on things I've liked in the past. (yes, I know it's a bit more complex than that, I'm summarising). I hoped Blend would mix it up a bit by injecting some other tastes into the mix. I figured I'd get new tunes every day through this feature, which in turn I would hit "like" on a load of them... which in turn would help to diversify my Discover Weekly and Daily Mix recommendations... which in turn would de-stagnate my music pool and improve the recommendation engine.

I thought, "GREAT, I can get some new recommendations based on the listening habits of someone else who's music I always enjoy when I visit his home. No longer do I need to ask him what this tune or that is - I can simply get a playlist of his taste and mine!"

In its current incarnation, Blend seems quite pointless. To be honest, the great majority of both our listening comes from Discover Weekly and Daily Mix and other music recommendation intelligence. I don't have time to go and hunt down new music all day long. That's why I've been a Spotify Premium member for 7 years - all I need to do is press play and enjoy tunes.

I can totally understand the Blend algorithm design for new users. But I think Spotify have really missed a trick here. There's tons of music locked up in historic behaviour and right now Blend doesn't seem to have access to it except the very first 50 song playlist it produces.

[Jeremy]

Hi @thegoatherder,

Thank you for your reply and feedback.

We're always testing things by to make Spotify better overall and we’re constantly aiming to improve our features. We’re sorry that this means you’re not able to use the Blend feature like you wish to do at the moment.

You can read more about how your feedback reaches Spotify here.

Once again - thanks for the time you made to leave this feedback, we appreciate it. Let us know if we can help you with anything else. 

Take care!

[samn]

I’m in the same boat as @thegoatherder

The blend you created didn’t even have any of my favourite songs in it, and out stuff in that I’ve barely listened to in comparison to my most played stuff.

my friend and I (both premium users) wanted to share music with each other and get new updated songs from our listening collection

Instead  it’s the same songs for the past week, and we aren’t getting any new music from each other despite only having 78% music compatibility 

what a waste of a function! 

[vlad_is_love]

I fully agree with @samn and @thegoatherder  users 

[jkmarfin]

I have been searching for a reason my Blend wasn't working... This is the closest I've seen to a "solution" and it's really frustrating. I made a Blend with one friend back in October and it immediately filled up with Halloween music. To this day, 2/28/2022, many of the same Halloween songs remain on the playlist DESPITE us both listening to a WIDE variety of genres, new artists, new albums, liking songs, Discover Weekly, other playlists of our own that we regularly update, etc. We've even tried using the "Hide this Song" in hopes that it would kick out the old Halloween music, but it does nothing. I don't now what else we can do for Spotify to take a damn hint.

Here's some simple thoughts:

1. Allow us to remove songs

2. Actually update based on what we've been liking or listening to (despite it being from discover weekly or my most played playlist (because I update my playlists regularly and I change the music, so I'm listening to new stuff constantly)

3. If I haven't listened to a song in 4 months, perhaps it's time to remove it

[SimpleMusic]

Agree with everyone, this Blend feature isn't very useful.  I have over 11,000 songs in my playlists, two other people joined my blend, both with thousands of songs in their playlists.  We got 50 songs in our Blend and it never updates again.  What is the point of Blend?

[Sworobec]

This is horrible. Should not be based on listening history, and new listening habits. It's been made to be more complicated than it should be. Just randomly mix songs from each participants playlists each day. That's how I'll hear new music. It should be that simple. 

[thegoatherder]

I think ALL user listening history, playlist and activity should be taken
into account. Their playlists and liked songs should definitely take prime
spot, as well as songs they play regularly. Some users might not have many
playlists, or might have playlists they hardly listen to. Some users are
constantly searching for new stuff, some aren’t. Some users don’t bother to
hit Like, others do religiously. They need to just take it all into
account. It’s not difficult from a software engineering perspective. The
current model is terrible, it selects songs that you regularly listen to
for the first blend playlist and then totally stagnates until either of you
actively seek new music (or hit a like button on something coming to you
from recommendations).

[urstrawberrysmoothie]

i have the same problem. i’ve been listening to pretty much completely different music for the past two months and no matter now many blends i make the only songs on there are old music. normally there’s 1 song from the music i’ve been listening to recently and other than that it’s all old. people said it’s because they don’t have enough data but i listen to music for at least 5 hours pretty much every day and i’ve been listening to new music for 2 months so i feel like it should be at least a little more updated at this point.

[johnner555]

this dosent make sense...i;ve had blend for about a year and both me and friend have updated lots of liked songs and none appear on it, its got the same 50 songs it had when we started, and never moved since. Its daft it if dosent work, there should be a refresh button that brings it up to date, i know both of us have songs we'd both like on our liked songs that SHOULD feature on our blend...Great idea thats a waste of time..

[thegoatherder]

@kiril moderator

can you please raise our concerns to the attention of the Blend Product Owner? Months in an Blend still isn’t performing well at bringing my friend’s music to me. A few tweaks to the algorithm to utilise more of our history would really make the feature so much better. Also adding a refresh button so we can force it to choose new songs would be ace. Or just forcing it to update weekly from our song history. Thanks

[Yordan]

Hi @thegoatherder!

Keep in mind that Blends create a playlist based on the participants' current most played tracks (i.e. the tracks they've been repeatedly listening to recently), so the contents will already be familiar to the users. While the addition of new entries in the playlist is possible, it may not occur on every daily update, since this would require the user to have played the track several times already, so that the track is among the user's current most played tracks.

It's also worth noting that even if you don't see any new entries, the Blend still updates daily with the user's top songs, as well as refreshing the track order of the playlist.

As for the Refresh button feature you mentioned, there's an existing idea about it here, so feel free to check it out and add your +VOTE (if you haven't already).

The Community is always here if something else comes up.

Take care.

[jkmarfin]

@Yordan

Even if it is true that the playlist "updates" based on listening habits, I think the issue here is that most users are asking for a different set of criteria to update the playlist with.

It SHOULD NOT update by my lifetime listening habits. It SHOULD update by my CURRENT listening habits. (i.e. don't include my Halloween music on my blend - I listen to it certain songs a lot in October, but I haven't listened to ANY of them since Halloween. Yet they still appears on my blend playlist).

[echrus]

Blend is working terrible. We both listen to a lot of Taylor Swift and there's zero her songs in the Blend, while there are lots of irrelevant songs in there. It is also VERY similar every time it refreshes, would be WAY better if it was just literally blend of random subsets of songs that each of us separately likes and listens to a lot

[Kryzm]

So me and nine friends decided to make a group blend. We were all really excited about it, since it's hard to keep making collaborative playlists by hand. Imagine our surprise when the playlist just does not update. 

I know community moderators have been putting out fires over this for a while in a few threads, but the fact that this has not been fixed in the time since the feature was released is incredibly disappointing.

Do I have to listen to a song 200 times in a row in order to get it to show up on the playlist? Because that is useless to all of us. For how much time all of us spend listening to music, there should be more than enough data to update the playlist daily as advertised.

[wadewade]

I created a blend with a friend and it has not refreshed except for about 25% in a month. Also, every one of my songs came from one playlist that I just made. These were mostly new songs to me and it was for one playlist. I've been on Spotify for YEARS and have well over 2000 liked songs, over 200 playlists... I listen to new music all the time but blend just pulled 25 songs from my most recent playlist. I'd love to hit a refresh button.