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Discover Weekly keeps giving me the same genre that I'm completely sick of.

Discover Weekly keeps giving me the same genre that I'm completely sick of.

First, this framing is important:

 

- I listen to a lot of different kinds of music.

- I use Spotify nearly every day.

- I've listened to tons of non-lofi hiphop music and non-downtempo pretty much exclusively for weeks.

 

I like lofi hiphop and downtempo as much as anyone else but despite not listening to those genres for weeks on end, consistently telling Disover Weekly that I don't like ANY of the songs it recommends for 3-4 weeks in a row now, listening to other types of music like modern classical, NU-jazz, obscure electronic music, and podcasts, I still get the same type of recommendations:  Downtempo and lofi.  I'm so sick of these recs. 

 

Also "top recommendations for you" is giving me the same thing.  I'm tired of the entire genre of slow, repetitive music.  At this point, I'm going off the platform to get recommendations. 

The best thing I've been able to do is to create my own playlists and do playlist radio to find new music to listen to.  Is there any way to get Discover Weekly and the general recommender system to give me anything different?

 

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8 Replies

Same problem here....if only there were a solution.

Hi folks,

 

Apologies for the late reply, we've just come across this thread. We really appreciate you taking the time to post this detailed information.

 

If you're listening to more new music on a daily basis your personalized playlists will update more regularly. Now, take into account that if most of the music you listen to comes from playlists like Discover weekly, Daily Mix, Daily Drive etc. the new suggested content won't update as often.

 

In any case, please try performing a clean reinstall of the app. This one is more thorough than a regular one, and can be helpful to get rid of any cache that might be causing the repeated suggestions. 

 

Since some of these playlists update weekly, please give them a check in the coming weeks and let us know how it goes. 

 

Lastly, in this article you can find info about disliking songs from your personalized playlists. 

 

Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

MafeGModerator
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I've been having this issue for the last few months. Every week I go into the playlist and remove almost all of the songs from the playlist. This hasn't stopped me from getting endless low-fi, relaxing songs. Note: Release radar is pretty good and follows what I'm listening

This week I've got 4 songs left on discover weekly. When does the system figure it out? removing the songs from my discover clearly isn't working.

 

In addition to that, I've been liking songs outside the discover weekly and release radar and am still having the issue, it's not changing.

Hey @Flawededge,

Thanks for your post here.

I see that you're already utilizing one of the tools to help shape your suggestions and this is to remove the songs you do not like. However you should also effectively show the app what you really like to hear instead, by actually adding new (different type of) music to your Liked Songs and also by favoring new artists. You can see additional suggestions for improving the algorithm behavior here.  

I can share from my personal experience, that the algorithm needs from one to three weeks to register a change of your listening habits and reflect that in the suggestions you receive with your personalized playlists. 

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

Kiril Moderator
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I, too, am sick of the same music over and over.  When I play an artist radio I've noticed it's the same songs over and over and even in the same order.   I am starved for new music!  My Discover Weekly plays the same  bad slow sad music over and over despite the fact I  have  "disliked" most of the songs.  What to do?

I listen to Spotify playlist 'Deep Sleep' I have not liked the songs in it. But now my discover weekly is only ever similar ambient sleep music (with some titles being obviously made for sleep). it's stuck on this singular genre, even though I listen to new music friday, rock playlists etc. 

I moved to using a different app for sleep sounds.

My discover weekly didn't come back fully.. I still only ended up with a handful of songs which weren't ambient. 

 

Good luck with getting the playlist back. Maybe time to look at Youtube music for me, as Spotify doesn't want to provide any tools to downvote genres in discovery playlists.

I'm having the same problems, and I really think Spotify needs to change something instead of telling users to change their behavior.


In particular, suggestion that users do a clean install points to _profound_ shortcomings on the side of Spotify. Why _exactly_ is it that users would need to do a clean install? Does everybody need to do a clean install every x weeks to get decent suggestions? How exactly is "cached" information from an installation negatively affecting Discover Weekly, to the degree that it requires a clean install?


Why is it that it so happens that the issue _always_ is, for _everybody_, ...

1) ... that Discover Weekly is not diverse enough, not reflecting the diversity that users are actually listening too? Why does Spotify not employ factor analysis for Discover Weekly, similar to the Daily Mixes? In fact, at the end of the year (2022), I was really implressed with the factor analysis based presentation that Spotify gave me about my musical taste. Why not do the same for Discover Weekly, which would make it more diverse?

2) ... that Discovery Weekly seems to have some kind of bias for "playing it safe", boring, repetitive "elevator background music" that is not offensive to anybody, yet gets really annoying? It's great if these kinds of tracks appear on Discover Weekly, but not completely dominating it!


I also have the impression that Discover Weekly is self-reinforcing. If you only leave people to discover songs of the same kind that they "kinda" like, then of course DW will think "oh look I got it right" because people will be liking some of the songs (in fact people do not *hate* those songs, they're just so-so and sometimes kinda likeable. It's like in a market with mediocre fruit, and you're kind happy to find a just half-way decent apple here and there and then praise it.)


For example I was listening to a lot of Bach - but not even ONE suggested song in DW was baroque music. Not ONE. Who is this even possible...


Moreoever, since DW is so monotonous, I've now started to dislike those songs that I find less interesting (even though they're not offensive), just to get it to stop with suggestion the same stuff all the time. And I continued to like those that I found ok. But I guess this confuses DW because I'm liking and disliking stuff of relatively similar kind. The truth is that those that I disliked, are 2/5 stars for me, and those that I liked are 3-4 stars. I think Spotify refusing to introduce a star rating system is part of the problem. Only then it can learn to differentiate what kind of music type is "mediocre" to the listener, which is "quite okay", which is "great, which is subpar, and which is awful. What Spotify is doing in DW is presenting the listener with "quite okay" stuff, forcing the listening to categorize it into great and awful.


I've also read that Spotify interprets skipping a songs within the first 30 seconds as disliking it (to some degree). I do hope that Spotify does not interpret skipping a song that has already been liked, as a negative signal. Also hope that Spotify does not interpret clicking the seek bar (e.g. when the song is at 0:15, then clicking position 2:00), as a skip action and thus a dislike cue.


In any case I believe Spotify has all the tech to make Discover Weekly much better.


I also don't understand the logic with Daily Mix. Some Mixes consist almost exclusively of stuff that I have already liked, whilst others have a lot of new stuff added. I'd prefer a consistent amount/percentage of new stuff thrown in inbetween for every Daily Mix.

 

I hope there was something in here that helps Spotify to make things (even) better.

 

 

 

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