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.

[electricwalrus]

Stop RADIO from repeating the same songs by the same artists over and over and over again. It's ridiculous and defeats the purpose of a radio app, which is to hear a variety of material by a variety of artists.

[ebinary]

I find it almost astonishing that there is not only one person but several TEAMS of people working on Spotify radio, attempting to improve it. 

Here is a simple solution to make it 100% better:

1. Generate the first 200 songs for the station into an array.  Ensure that NO SONG APPEARS IN THE ARRAY MORE THAN ONCE!!!!  Start playing at a random position in that array, so that yesterdays radio is not identical to today's radio.

2. If the source for the radio is a playlist, use EACH ENTRY in the playlist to generate a recommendation.  At the very least, the playlist will now represent the entire playlist, rather than only playing 80s music because there happen to be a few 80s song in the source list.

If you just did those two things, radios would likely become useable.  It's getting very hard to justify paying for Spotify when, after a few years, it still can't create a radio station without making one that is a repeat of 30 of the same songs day in and day out, based on a couple of songs in a playlist.

[user-removed]

Spotify, make radio usable. Add variety.

We can mmaaakkkkeeeeeee some noiseeeeeeee :d

Greetz!

Jyrziu 😛

[pepper_rhino]

If I voted a song down, it should never re-apear on any radio!

[b2iii]

Most of my posts on Spotify are written in hopes of improving the radio fuction.  I think it is great that you can generate a radio station based on a song, album, artist, playlist, etc.  What I do not like is the way the radio stations chose songs.  Here is a link to my Spring 2015 playlist:

spotify:user:1210402601:playlist:57svEdxNK7nLF5yk0Wgvqs

There are currently 12 songs from 12 artists most of, if not all, have been released in the past couple of months.  The 12 artists are:

Alpine

MsMr

Kaskade

The Bohicas

Is Tropical

Joywave

Alabama Shakes

Strange Talk

Zac Brown Band

The Eiffels

iSHi

Miami Horror

I have no idea why a radio station chooses a particular song to play.  Sometimes the radio stations play great music and most of the time they just completely miss.  For the Spring 2015 playlist the radio chooses to play a ton of Foster the People despite me thumbing down everytime they play Foster.  Also a lot of Two Door Cinema Club gets played.  I like these bands but they have no relevance to the playlist.  Also Los Duenos del Pabellon, a band I have never heard of, shows up a lot.. They are a traditional Spanish sound with a modern twist.  Nothing like anything in my playlist. 

A 30 song clip from the radio station generated from the Spring 2015 playlist included:

4 songs from Foster the People

3 songs from Two Door Cinema Club

3 songs from actual artists in the playlist (2 of which were the same artist)

Next 100 songs:

Only played 5 of the artists in the playlist.  7 completely left out!

12 songs were from artists in the playlist. More than half of those 12 songs were from 2 artists

MsMr had one song of the 100 and it took 60 songs to get there

Thumbing down might slowly be working.  6 songs were Foster the People

Young Blood Hawke has replaced Foster with excessive play.  15 songs were from them

Two Door Cinema Club took the crown with excessive play with 16 songs

37% of the songs were from 3 artists I don't want to hear on this radio station at all!

Somehow The Whip became relevant in the playlist with 7 songs and they don't belong there

With artists like Alpine, Joywave, MsMr, Alabama Shakes who all have a number of great songs to their own, this radio station in theory should be awesome.  Instead it sucks.

[sixsence]

• Device / Platform you're using 

Desktop/Windows 7 and Phone (Nexus 6)/Android Lollipop

• Approximately what time (& time zone) the problem occurred

12PM EST 06/11/2015

• 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)

Playlist Radio (Right click a playlist and choose "Start Playlist Radio")

• Any actions you took during the sessio (i.e. hit Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, or Skip through a lot of songs)"

I did skip some songs, and chose thumbs up/thumbs down for a couple songs. I also tried restarting the station several times

My particular issue is with playlist radio, because this is the option that allows you to add several different types of music (different artists/songs) and then create a radio station that should play songs similar to the variety of songs in the playlist. For me, however, the songs played did not reflect the songs on the playlist.

For example, I had a playlist with ~27 songs which were a mix of several different genres such as techno, alternative rock, rock, pop etc. Only about 3 of the ~27 songs were techno, but the radio played nothing but techno.

There is a serious issue with how the radio chooses songs based on the inputs you give it (songs/artists/genres). If this gets fixed, spotify will make pandora obsolete, but until then, people still need to use Pandora and other similar services.

[b2iii]

So my playlist Sping 2015 has a few more songs added and due to my recent frustrations I have not used the radio function often.  I figured with the new songs let's see what the radio station plays now.    Well, 14 seconds into the first song I had to hit pause and come here and let anyone who might read this know what song came first.  Wet Catch-**bleep** Have the Power with the opening lyrics repeating "Get Power From The **bleep** Juice".  WOW!  Unbelievable!

[ghart999]

I just signed up for Spotify Premium with the hopes that the radio functionality would be good enough to replace Pandora. Wrong...

My stations play songs I have already thumbed down. WHY!!!!! What is the point of thumb up and down if they do not seem to influce the station. It would also be nice to include and exclude certain bands from a station. 

[b2iii]

Dear Spotify,

     I do not like Youngblood Hawke.  Please stop putting them in every radio station I listen too.  Stop!  Even if Youngblood Hawke were to write the greatest album ever I will continue to hate Youngblood Hawke due to your radio stations.

[stevenostaw]

I started a radio station using a bluegrass song (Angel Band by the Stanley Brothers) after that I got 7 Alice Cooper songs in a row,

Radio fail.

Please advise if I am doing something wrong, otherwise I'll just never use this feature again.

Makes Spotify a little less relevant and perhaps not worth $10/month

[bhu73]

All I want is a "Do not play this artist on my spotify ...EVER"  button. I hate  "The Smiths"

[dinomight]

I've been using a test account to compare radio selections as lately several of my stations have become extremely similar and all play a certain set of artists quite frequently. It's to the point that today I finally deleted all my stations on my main account along with my liked on radio playlists to see if I could somehow reset the stations. This didn't help at all unfortunately.

I've noticed that the vast majority of songs that any of my stations play are from 2-3 years ago. I almost never hear any current music on them. However, on my test account, I created stations from the same playlists, and the playlists that feature newer music resulted in more appropriate stations that often included tracks from this year.

The problems are happening on all devices I've tried, including a Windows 10 laptop, the Spotify Web Player in Chrome, and my Samsung Galaxy S6 phone, so it's clearly connected to my account and not a certain device. I'm out of ideas when it comes to fixing my stations, so I did want to provide this feedback on my experiences.

[PiedmontJim]

I'll add my frustration with the radio relevance issue. I tried the radio first back in December and tried to get it to play Christmas music. Although I started with a Christmas music seed, the radio would play no Christmas music. Today I found a Gaita Zuliana (VERY specific genre) album and decided to give it a try as a seed. The closest it got were songs from an old Latin Christmas album and one other Latin song. The bulk of the music was completely unrelated to Latin music, and none of that was Gaita in any way, much less Zuliana Gaita... even though the see was completely Gaita Zuliana.

So there's that.

Spotify is a great service for playlisting music from artists I already know, but there's no really good way to discover ones I don't already know, at least by using the radio feature. And simply using the radio feature to listen to the genre I want to listen to doesn't seem tenable.

[Thekian]

On android, I have a playlist with over 350 songs of different genres. This includes all Arctic Monkeys albums, all the AWOLNATION albums, all the Kasabian albums and many more.

I constantly get the same songs and artists all within a few songs of each other. For example, I got Bezerk again 6 skips later, it's not even on thumbs up. That song is on the playlist but I'm fed up of hearing it again and again. I never hear AWOLNATION or Area 11 who are on that playlist but I get plenty of rap that I'm not interested in ALL of the time.

This is silly, youtube instant mixes are better than this.

[4string]

Even Rhapsody Radio does a better job of presenting new music on any radio station I originate even from a single artist. So far with my Premium subscription I can say the Spotify radio sucks big time. Same few artists over and over even after a thumbs down. The artists themselves only glancingly or rather just generally in the same genre of the original artist. Might drop Premium. The whole point of subscription radio for me is exploration. I do not have the time to build a radio station then sit if front of my media and hope Spotify will play something new I can thumbs up.

[Steephu]

My problem with Spotify radio is that I seem to get the exact same songs when I select a station based on an artist. I happen to like jazz and when I choose Miles Davis radio I am fed the same songs by other classic jazz artists every time, and this is a genre with 1000's of possible tracks. I would be happier even if I got different tracks by those same artists. Seems like an increase in variety would really help. 

[hknerdr]

Hi,

I love using Spotify but when i start song radio from my saved list, the radio playlist can't find good songs that i may like. I use thumbs up and down to modify the list but nothing much changes.

On the other hand, i use soundcloud often, its song radio algorithm is much better. Nearly i like %90 of the songs in the playlist it creates.

Can you please develop the algorithm for song radios so it may learn our listening habits and recommend songs for the genres we like?

By the way, daily mix and weekly mix are perfect!

Keep up the good work.

Thanks

[Haridas108]

I came from Pandora also and it is mind boggling, that I have 20 intrumental reggae tracks on Spotify and radio for this playlist plays tracks with vocals. 

I have to click every 5-10 seconds thumbs down. 

This is very bad.

And it seems this problem is in Spotify for 5 years already (since 2012)? Why I should pay premium then? I have to go back to Pandora... 

[Lasselakan]

When clicking Radio on any playlist I get a Radio Station with almost identical songs as the playlist, but an even narrower mix. Who would want this? And when I thumb down a song I really hate it has no effect. That song will be played very song again. This is incredibly frustrating. And it's been like this for years. Any kid with decent programming skills would achieve a better Radio-algorithm. What's the problem here? Is it that you try to optimize for licensing costs that messes up a proper Radio-functionality?

[Haridas108]

I went back to Pandora...