How to fix 'contaminated' Discovery weekly?

[acurran]

Plan

Premium

Country

New Zealand

Device

(iPhone 8, Samsung Galaxy 9, Macbook Pro late 2016)

Operating System

(iOS 10, Android Oreo, Windows 10,etc.)

My Question or Issue

Discovery Weekly used to be a feature that I liked and I would often find good new music there. But recently it has become 'contaminated' because my kids sometimes listen to music on my ipad. So now Discovery weekly is just full of stuff like what they listen to even though their listening is just a tiny fraction of the overall listening on this account. How can I reset the taste profile for Discovery Weekly? It has gone from being awesome to being completely useless to me. I still get good suggestions on Release Radar (just a small amount of contamination), but Discovery Weekly pretty much has nothing that I like any more. How can I reset it? 

[Mihail]

Hey @acurran,

Thanks for searching for the answer you need here.

Right now there isn't a way to reset your Discover Weekly playlist, however it seems that other Spotify users would also like to see this feature introduced and posted this idea. You can add your support there by up-voting the idea. We'll inform on any developments there, if there are any.

In the meantime you have two options. One is to create a new account and transfer your music collection using these steps. That way you will keep your songs and playlists, but all personalized content will be built anew.

Alternatively, you can help the algorithm adjust on your current account by expanding your library with new liked songs and albums or following additional artists. After a couple of weeks you should start seeing more relevant recommendations.

Keep in mind also that Spotify has the Private listening feature. Anything you listen to in a Private Session may not influence your music recommendations, e.g. Discover Weekly.

[acurran]

Starting over with a new account is a major pita so I don't want to do that. I have lots of liked songs in my account and keep adding them but it is not having an impact on the discovery weekly selection. I've gone through discovery weekly for the last few weeks and previewed everything and marked the artists as 'don't like' but no improvement. Just did it right now for the latest discovery weekly and it was 100% don't like. This is a major flaw in Spotify. I don't know why my Release Radar is still coming up with music that I like but discovery weekly completely sucks - doesn't make much sense.

[Jeremy]

Hey there @acurran,

Thank you for your reply.

Can you confirm if your kids still listening to music through your account? If so - do you use the private listening feature that was mentioned in the reply above?

We'll keep an eye out for your reply.

Take care!

[acurran]

Yes, I still let them play their music from my phone or ipad. 

Private mode - only when someone remembers, so mostly not. Access to the switch for private mode It's too cumbersome for the kids so they usually don't set it to private.

By the way this form has some problems. I typed a response and lost it after submitting. Got an error upon submission. This has happened before also. Pretty annoying

An Unexpected Error has occurred.

•  
• Your request failed. Please contact your system administrator and provide the date and time you received the error and this Exception ID: 37FF74E2.

  Click your browser's Back button to continue.

Return to my original page

[Jeremy]

Hi again @acurran,

Thank you for getting back in touch with us and for your confirmation.

In this case we suggest that you check out this article. This is a great way for kids to use Spotify and if they use this, it won't affect your algorithm. 

Regarding loosing your replies after submitting - can you clear your cache and cookies to see if the issue persist?

Keep us posted 🙂

Cheers!

[matzof]

I have the same problem. In my case I keep getting 10% recommended songs in Finnish because I once liked the Levan Polka. I tried hiding those songs, but I keep getting weird stuff (recently ~40% of my discover weekly is in Slavic languages that I don't understand, and this is really annoying).
I understand what you say, but I have built recommender systems in the past, and I am saying it would be useful to have a negative feedback option in the discover weekly, where I can say I don't like one specific song, so you could give a negative rating associated to my profile to that song and all similar songs.

[averyw88]

I don't have an answer but I COMPLETELY AGREE! I use my Spotify to listen to music to work and study to, like chillhop, jazz etc.  This is completely opposite of what I like to listen to when I am not working.  My Discover Weekly is also contaminated with this music and is not a representation of the music I actually like.  There should be a way to have separate profiles within your account, like a "Work" profile, "Kids" profile, "Study", etc..

[jschementi]

This is also a problem if people use Spotify through an integration like Google Home, where it only allows one Spotify account to be linked to all devices in the home - you cannot switch profiles. My Discover Weekly is now just recommendations for Sleep music, because my kids play that on the speaker in their room. So yes, it'd be great to be able to adjust what song plays actually get filtered out of what Discovery Weekly uses.

[Yordan]

Hi @jschementi!

There's a feature in the app which allows you to exclude certain playlists your kids usually listen to on your account from your taste profile: just open the three dots menu of one of those playlists > Exclude from taste profile. That way, listening to it won't affect your recommendations.

On the mobile app, you can also curate the content in the Music feed of your Home screen. In case you find a suggestion that doesn't interest you, you can mark is as Not interested. More info here.

Hope you find this useful. Cheers!