Integration between BBC Sounds and Spotify means my recommendations are dominated by classical music

[mcallisterw]

Sorry for the brief post, I'd spent ten minutes giving all the details of what I've done and what's happening and then it failed when I tried to post and I don't have the mental energy to type it all again.

In short I have my Google Home Smart Speaker scheduled to play BBC Radio 3 (classical) every night, it helps me sleep. I've done this for years.

At some point in the past year it seems BBC Sounds has become integrated with Spotify so that every track played while listening to the radio counts as a listen for Spotify.

As a result of this, my recommendations on Spotify, and the tracks Spotify will play when it reaches the end of a queue are now entirely classical. For example I have a house party, use Spotify for the music, a few people add things to the queue but every now and again classical music takes over, also I can't use Spotify's recommendations to discover new music because it only recommends classical.

This must have been going on for a while as I realised when my Spotify wrapped was 100% classical.

Is there any way to break this connection so that I can listen to Radio 3 again to help sleep without Spotify thinking I'm some kind of classical music superfan?

[MihailY · Accepted solution]

Hey @mcallisterw,

Thanks for reaching out. 

We're sorry to hear you had trouble uploading your full post. No worries though, we think we'll be able to help you out based on the current description of the issue. 

Please note that Spotify doesn't host radio stations (we offer this feature instead), so what might've happened is you've been playing the BBC Radio 3 station through a different service on your smart speaker and at some point (most likely after setting Spotify as the default streaming service) your command started returning a Spotify user-created playlist inspired by the station (and one that also contains "BBC Radio 3" in its title).

To "fix" your music recommendations all you need to do is :

1. Locate the playlist either from the "Recently played" tab on your phone's Spotify app or by giving the same voice command to the smart speaker and checking the top of the Now Playing View (again on your phone) to see what gets played as a result. 
2. Once you've opened the playlist, select "Exclude from taste profile" from the playlist options menu (the 3 dots in the top right corner).

This will prevent the algorithm from considering any past or future plays of the tracks in this playlist for your personalized music and it will also exclude them from your next Wrapped experience. Note that plays of those tracks outside of the playlist will still get counted.

We hope this helps! Let us know if you need any additional assistance with any of the steps.

Cheers,

[mcallisterw]

thanks, I'll do that and will have to investigate what the smart speaker is playing when I get home after Christmas... I've just been asking my smartspeaker to 'play radio 3' assuming that it was playing live radio since with classical tunes being so long I might not notice if there is no DJ talking between tunes.