More relevant radio

[Sam_Garner]

Update from Spotify staff:

"Hey everyone! As this idea is quite vague and it's difficult to say when it has been officially implemented, we're moving it to the Help boards. From there we will continue to pass this feedback to the Radio teams--who are continually working to improve the Radio experience. 

Please keep leaving your feedback here, including the following details:

• Device / Platform you're using
• Approximately what time (& time zone) the problem occurred
• How did you start the radio session (i.e. started radio based on artist X, or based on song Y, or using genre Z, etc)
• Any actions you took during the sessio (i.e. hit Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, or Skip through a lot of songs)"

Original message:

Dear Spotify,

First of all, awesome program. With that being said, the relevance of music that the radio plays is really poor. The Music Genome project has a significantly better way of picking songs to play when forming a radio station in terms of relevance that the station was set to. Currently, when picking a 'Skrillex' radio station, the thing plays one skrillex song, then is giving me Beyonce, Chris Brown, and music that ultimately has nothing to do with dubstep and dirtier electronica. 

If you can integrate a stronger, more relevant radio I wouldn't have to use Pandora or Last FM as much. Even Window's Zune has the DJ feature where you can pick a song, and it then plays songs of similar nature. Unfortunately your radio is like listening to MTV or something that plays one song the user enjoys, then songs that fill the space between the next more relevant song. 

Just as I write this, Kelly Clarkson comes on the Skrillex radio station. This is not pleasurable, although makes me laugh a little when a completely irrelevant song comes on (sense of humor helps).  Maybe this is a product of what kind of licenses that you have with music lables, but it would be a good idea to integrate a better radio service into Spotify if possible, so that people dont have to switch between programs for radio and music streaming.

[Pseudotaxus]

Spotify needs to adjust their playlist radio algorithm in order to better suit what users want out of their radio.

So I've generated quite a few different playlist radios during my time on Spotify, and they all have one massive problem: the algorithm suggests songs based on the artists in the playlist i'm drawing upon, as well as the "other people have this song in their playlist" process. This is a problem because most of the playlists I'm turning into radio are being turned into a playlist radio, as I'm trying to find music that sounds similar to what's in the playlist.

This is not what happens. Instead of getting similar-sounding music, or even music remotely of the same feel and emotion, I get music that might be from similar artists or similar general genres, but music that sounds way off. It's jarring to be listening to a chill electronic song and all of the playlist radio is just hard trap. 

On the flipside, the "recommended songs" feature for each playlist has the opposite problem. It recommends songs that sound too similar, to the point of that they'll fall completely out of the genre of music I'm going for.

My example is this: I have a playlist. It's rather small, but I'm trying to find more songs in the same vein as it. The songs are all chill electronic songs (think of Haywyre, WRLD, or Grant Bowtie). The Playlist radio that was generated was basically all trap and breakbeat (lots of Snavs, Urbanstep, and Au5), which is nowhere near the kind of music I had in the original playlist. The "Recommended Songs" is mostly slow, chill, indie acoustic pop (from artists I've never listened to and a general genre I don't want in my playlist), which matches the pace and feel of the music I want, but misses on the type of music.

TL;DR

Spotify should adjust their algorithms for recommending music in their playlist radio feature (or add a new algorithm) that recommends music based on the musical quality, sound, feel, and style, as opposed to algorithms that generate music based off of fascially similar artists and disrupt the auditory aesthetic I'm trying to get out of my playlists.

[user-removed]

Hi, new here, just tried my 1st radio experience. 1st off I see I can't customize the station playlist with a thumbs up/down, why? I wanted Christmas Holiday music... I get everything from generic rock to metal to show tunes to love songs having absolutely NO correlation with Christmas or any other Holiday theme for that matter!!! Am I missing something? I tried logging out and reinstalling the Android app... still no customization option. HELP!

[r3lau]

radio update 2018? still sucks. going back to google play music

- no artist diversity

- clogged with liked songs w/ no way to dislike them

- very short loop lengths for all-day listeners (~25 songs)

- audio fidelity on "extreme" is very mediocre

- i literally had to have my accounted treansfered and deletred because of a bug affecting radios