Unable to remove songs from Discover Weekly

[_fj1-gf6lbp3h]

I'm on the premium plan, using the Windows desktop app version of Spotify.  I'm trying to remove a song from my Discover Weekly playlist, since it's been there before and I didn't think much of it the first time.  The button to do this has been removed.  I can find old posts explaining where it is, and it's not there any more.  How do I remove this song from my playlist? 

[Olwenlaine]

I'm having this issue as well. Fine on iOS but Windows Desktop is missing the feature. It's sorely needed- after consistently interacting with it last week and letting it know I don't listen to 80s pop/rock, it has decided to fill my DW playlist this week with several 80's pop/rock songs... It sure ain't what it used to be...

[Fujilives]

Discover Weekly is "the" best feature in spotify.  For Me, and I imagine MANY OTHERS, it is what allowed Spotify to replace "Pandora".  It allowed us to "voice a preference" in what is fed to us, and slowly "rule out" music that might not be to our liking, but keep music we might want to hear 'again and again' in the future.

Over the course of a week, I'd widdle down the playlist, often playing the whole list top-to-bottom again-and-again until, eventually, it was "just" stuff I really enjoyed hearing again and again.  Of that remaining list, some would make it into the "liked" music or find their home in a playlist for future listening.  Nearly all of my spotify tunes are discovered and managed in this way.  Without the "dislike/remove/negative-symbol" option, I'm FORCED to listen to music that I don't like and FORCED to manually skip them every time I encounter songs I truly hate.  It's was a great system before, now it feels like I could just as easily pop up YT music videos and let it auto-play, because effectively it's the same lack-of-choice.

To me this feels like one of two things:

1) Prepping for a sale (To google probably, since this seems to follow their logic, which we as users already HATE).

2) Force users to "look at the app" more often, which I can only assume is to force "visual ads" into our experience.

Please cut the BS and bring back the features we paid for.

[kittymcfizz]

Spotify for macOS (Apple Silicon)
1.2.55.235.g5eaa0904

[armache]

+ 1 solidarity with all the comments... we need that feature back (asap please)

[Sychius]

The choice to remove the feature before the replacement is bizarre to me, and then to have it missing for *MONTHS* without any form of correction is just plain infuriating. In *any* other industry this would be considered as a catastrophic failure of service and frankly would call into question the planning capacity of those in charge of this decision.

The whole point of 'Discover Weekly' is to be fed a list of new songs which broadly follow your interests but may push your comfort zone, with the goal of potentially finding new songs which you enjoy that you may not have found without it. A ***CRITICAL*** aspect of this, is the ability to indicate which songs on the list you enjoy, and which you don't. The previous implementation of having a simple button which automatically skips the song in the playlist if you don't like it was a perfectly reasonable way of indicating that you don't like the song, and don't want to hear it again.

Yes, it isn't perfect. It doesn't allow feedback from the user as to *why* they hid the song, e.g 'I don't like it'/'I've heard it before/I've heard a different remix before'/'It's offensive to me in some way'/etc, but it was a damn sight better than literally nothing. And when the feature is still available in the mobile version, but just nonfunctional in the desktop version??

You're literally a music distribution and provider software company. What on Earth could take so long to either reverse the incomprehensible decision to remove the feature without a replacement, or to release the replacement?? Whoever decided this was a reasonable course of action and that the current state of things is fine needs to refresh their understanding of proper project managment.

Yours sincerely, and with a great deal of confusion and frustration,

-A concerned paying customer.

Spotify for Windows (64 bit)
1.2.55.235.g5eaa0904

[emperor_krk]

I am sorry, but this suggestion is absolutely useless - it has been clearly described by numerous users and has been a problem for quite a long time now. How hard can it be to bring back a feature that was present before?

[gekkehenk]

This sucks, please reinstate the feature. 

[jfnoubel]

I think they just shot themselves a bullet in the foot. If they had a long term vision, then on ANY music one could give their own rating (1-5 stars for instance), and decide to ban the music that hurts their ears. It would give the AI a powerful tool for profiling users, classes of users, and offer you a more accurate choice of music. Since I use Spotify, I have expected this evolution but it never came, and even regressed. I just signed up for a competitor, hoping they will do better. Doing my last month here, unless they evolve.

[Jadge]

Plan

Premium

Country

US

Device

PC and OnePlus 9

Operating System

Windows 10

My Question or Issue

On my phone every week I'd make it a point to open discover weekly and cycle through the whole playlist, hitting the (-) button on songs I didn't like so I could just continue listening to the ones I was enjoying until I'd decide whether or not any are truly keepers for playlists. The problem is although I can do this on my phone, sometimes I do like pop it on my PC and listen for a bit while doing stuff, but this feature is gone and all we have is the "exclude from your taste profile," when I don't necessarily dislike the whole playlist and don't want the next weeks playlist to be skewed further.

Don't fix what isn't broken or re-invent the wheel, being able to knock out certain songs was working fine, and the thing is discover weekly is never going to be spot on, but the point is the "discover" part, which is nice when the next weeks playlist gets you a gem of a song or two. I feel like a great many users probably experience what I'm talking about.

[Sindrom]

Enshitification 

Enshittification, also known as crapification or platform decay, is a term coined by Canadian-British-American author and blogger Cory Doctorow to describe the phenomenon where online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.

The term was first used by Doctorow in November 2022, though the concept had been observed and discussed before. Enshittification can be seen across various industries, but it is particularly noticeable in the tech sector where dominant platforms have near-total control over their user experiences.

To mitigate enshittification, some advocate for upholding the end-to-end principle, which asserts that platforms should transmit data in response to user requests rather than algorithm-driven decisions. Additionally, antitrust laws, which break up monopolies and encourage competition, can help prevent enshittification.

[peterjjohnson]

Credit where credit is due, and perhaps it's because we made our voices loud, but the HIDE THIS SONG BUTTON IS BACK!!!  Happy day.  If this little community mattered, thanks for listening to us, Spotify.  And please don't ever do that again!

[UncleBeer]

Not for me.  🙄

[drongie]

How do I find it?  I'm listening to Discover Weekly now but that
downloaded on Monday.  Do I have to close it and open it again or what?

I really hope you are right and that it is back.

Best, Debi

[peterjjohnson]

I hope I didn't speak too soon but it's on my Release Radar spotify dynamic
mix that dropped today. Maybe Monday's Release Radar will have it?
Fingers crossed!

[drongie]

I don't use release radar but apparently it has always worked on that. 
The most disappointing is that we can't see the minus sign on Discover
Weekly which is how so many of us create our playlists after eliminating
what we don't want to listen to.

How do you get to release radar and what is it good for?

Best, Debi

[januaria81]

Hello, Spotify. How are you? How's your day going? Well, I hope.

So by the way, I was just wondering if you made any progress with restoring the "dislike" button in the Discover Weekly module. No pressure, it's only been a couple of months, and I understand that doing computer stuff is hard and all. I mean with all the wires and gizmos and whachamacallits it must be super hard to fix that button thingee.

So I just want you to know, take your time, I'm not going anywhere. If you need a year or three to restore this super basic and essential function, that's 100% A-OK by me. Meanwhile I'll continue to subscribe to your broken service because I like paying full price for an incomplete service. Sorta like the NYC subways, full price, but the service is...how can I put this..."sub-optimal."

So have a blessed day.

[Omniscently]

This feature is incredibly important for curating new music. Because your business model is based on exploring music and increasing listen time, this feature has a significant  impact in the community's ability to engage with the artists and grow their audience. 

Please prioritize the hide feature universally. Curating music is cumbersome without it.

It is also very strange how it works on mobile (kinda), but not desktop. 

[YouHateUsers]

The simple solution is to not remove the functionality on the user side. If it works for "release radar" then it can work in "discover weekly". Did some intern push some bad code to production on accident or did the good idea ferries visit the team and say "get rid of this functionality that a lot of people enjoy while we don't have a solution"? Seem like a non-answer response for whatever is truly happening, or you all really don't care about your customers to have ready the replacement for the functionality you take away. 

[etlaut]

I've been a paying Spotify customer since 2009, and the majority of my listening is Discover Weekly on desktop. The only significant frustration during this time is that disliking a song in the Discover Weekly playlist is not replicated across other devices, but I can live with that. Now, quietly, Spotify have made the Discover Weekly playlist unusable for me on desktop, since I am typically removing up to 50% of the songs each week. For the first time I have checked when my current subscription expires, and they have 15 days to fix this before they lose a long-term paying customer.

[transalp]

I'm in a similar boat.  I've used Spotify for over a decade (?), and I use the Discover Weekly playlist the same way.  It's very hit or miss, so I'll sometimes dislike 18 out of 20 songs, but those 2 good songs are worth it if I learn about a new artist.  Without the dislike button, I have to take my attention away from what I'm doing and remember to skip tracks I don't like.

The dropping of the "dislike" button and the ability to permanently make songs go away is enough of an inconvenience to prompt me to explore alternatives to Spotify for the first time in years.  I hope they come to their senses.