Release Radar includes wrong artist with same name as desired artist

[abcdefgabcdefg]

I constantly find my Release Radar recommending songs by an artist (say A) with the same name as an artist (say A') that I might actually wanna listen to. This is extremely dumb as an issue because these two artists are listed as genuinely different artists in Spotify and the newly recommended song by a wrong artist is listed as a song of A' in the system. A reasonable conclusion is that at least Release Radar does not look into the artist IDs but just merely refers to their names. This happens to like 5 different artists to me and my Release Radar is contaminated by songs which I have absolutely no interest in. I believe this is a very basic bug that can be fixed in like 5 minutes.

[abcdefgabcdefg]

Here's an as short as possible version of a previous post in this thread, explaining the behavior of the Release Radar.

• I receive tracks from artists I don't follow at all in my Release Radar - This is intended and we don't plan on changing this. The Release Radar doesn't only help you keep track of artists you follow, but is meant to allow you to discover new music from others we think you might enjoy. It is also one way for Spotify to help artists get their music noticed.

• I get music that I don't enjoy at all in my Release Radar - This means our algorithm doesn't know your music taste so well. There can be many reasons behind this, but the rule of thumb to improve the music you receive in the automatically generated playlists for you is to listen to music without a private session, use the like and hide features, have more intentional music listening habits rather than opportunity based and when you discover something new that you enjoy, listen to it proportionally more than other content. Following these guidelines should give you better recommendations in time. It will still not be perfect and it can vary from person to person, but we're constantly improving these as we go.

• I get tracks from artists that are named exactly the same as ones I follow and enjoy, but it turns out the track is unrelated to that artist and they only have the same name. - This happens if a track initially gets erroneously uploaded to the artist you follow. It can be that the error is already corrected by the time your Release Radar updates, but it already captured the track on its upload. It can happen with featured artists as well. Currently, there's no technical solution in place than can prevent errors like this happening, as we rely on submitted metadata. If you spot an incorrect content, it's best to report it as described here. Make sure your report is clear. If you can't find an artist profile with the same name as the one you follow, it probably hasn't been created yet and is part of the reason the error occurred. Point that out in your report to ensure it can be processed efficiently.

[MadmanOnWheels]

Yeah, to_be_still

I didn't see that you were quoting him. It looks like you are starting it. I was making a statement against that, because it doesn't solve anything. Someone needs to fit that "Hide" feature, apparently.

[clnr]

Thanks for the information on this subject.

I have two suggestions for Spotify to minimize this problem:

1: Never add an artist without a profile to a generated playlist such as Relase Radar.

2: Never add a song where the guest artist is a match in the algorithm for Release Radar.

Those two fixes would have completely removed all the wrong recommendations for me.

[DzintarsRerihs]

Hi!

I already filled out the form, but as there is no field for more details I will repeat myself here. At the moment I have 3 artists that I follow, but there is no other artist page with the same name, so I could not provide that other artist's url.

For this week's release radar: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZEVXbfEHmBzDvyol

Here are artists with songs from another artist. For these artists, it is the first time I notice the wrong stuff.
For artist: Dons: 
https://open.spotify.com/track/04J8xF46APwDUxC5dMTcut?si=7f6fe719e319466c

For artist: Meiko:

https://open.spotify.com/track/1i1Rhs8qA3hiowF4QbHLXW?si=34d9c35f63894b3b

Also for artist Gustavo there is a lot of stuff from someone else and it's been theere for a while.
https://open.spotify.com/artist/3apNWJFN6ZANKwNvFK8An7

Iļl be happy to give any other details, but I'm sure that you have a lot of background information on songs, so you could easily determine songs that should go to other artists profile (new one or existing one)

[MadPop]

Here is my contribution of today’s list. All songs have featuring artist that I follow but none are the actual ones. 

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZEVXbn1hCBqVEk2O?si=1f2nOWPURwus04CBt1uYrg

Spotify Release Radar

Low

https://open.spotify.com/track/10TYZZAqOesAiya21UFj9J?si=t0LMz92cTz63Pr0v-RtsYw

Mono

https://open.spotify.com/track/1xnXhl49bwJLH51EMUS8EC?si=ZlpWF0eUQeu99Z_Q9mIaMA

Liss

https://open.spotify.com/track/2qjkxvHlq1I4Ud22oIZHEi?si=U2r70oVZQoe0hVNLhf-A4A

Mew

https://open.spotify.com/track/2Uj2ZJ1rvclWdyDmY3iDbl?si=p2uOle4ZSzSU5S24TQN7bg

James

https://open.spotify.com/track/6uZmCj9uWNPMDnbv39Hcxa?si=ATwQLHP2SyW9f5F8y2mrUQ

Romy

https://open.spotify.com/track/3T8kChidKtET3Mu8S04to6?si=Utzp5EJ9T8CKsXYYWIZcOQ

[clnr]

@MadPop

Interesting to see your list.

Low and MONO are two of the most frequent incorrect recommendations I see on my list as well (toghether with japanese band Boris). I have reported these in the correct way.

Questions to Spotify, @Mihail:

Do you keep track of which artists that are repeatedly being incorrectly uploaded and reported?

Do you follow up this with the uploaders?

What are the consequences of incorrect tagging an artist?

[Mihail]

Hi everyone,

we've checked the reports submitted in the form from this Friday so far and there're a total of 2.

The first report is for a different issue - Tracks of artists without their own Artist profile have been uploaded to other artist profiles. This in turns makes it so they're featured in the Release Radar if you follow those artists.

The second report also includes one instance as described above. As mentioned and explained numerous times previously, this is something that needs to be reported by the means already stated.

We're starting to doubt ourselves if we're able to explain this properly, as even with 7 detailed posts in which we elaborate on the matter, we're now with 6 additional pages in this thread (almost half of the original thread length when we first announced we want to look into this on page 11) and we still keep getting reports about an issue that is known and has an established handling process that we also keep asking you to follow.

So we're left with having to sift through multiple false reports to finally get to the 1 single track, that looks like a valid report: It appeared in someone's Release Radar. The artist already has their own Artist Profile. The user follows another artist by the same name.

We'll monitor the situation more closely and hope to get other valid reports as well. If we continue to receive invalid ones though, we'll need to close this thread as just continuously repeating the same thing over and over and submitting reports here instead of where they can be actioned really doesn't help anyone. We really do want to help, so much that we woke up in the morning eager to sift through your form submissions  So we're as frustrated as you are, because we do want to be part of making the Release Radar better thanks to the Community efforts.

We hope you understand and we also hope to receive other valid reports throughout the next days. We'll update you again on the results early next week.

[Mihail]

Hey @clnr,

Just to quickly answer your questions.

Records of reports absolutely exist, but we're not sure of the whole workflow of the team involved and if they're keeping active track of multiple reports. This is something we can tackle later on after we try and resolve the issue at hand. So let's put a pin on that one for now.

As for the consequences - The team will create separate artist profiles for the reported artists and eliminate inaccuracies in the tracks reported, should there be any. The artists will as such be successfully differentiated by our systems.

Cheers!

[jeremycorbett]

@mihail
That's not really fair to expect the users to fully investigate the status of the artists in question when reporting these bugs. Remember, we are not your paid QA department, we are your paying customers, doing this reporting for your benefit, for free.

[jeremycorbett]

I also got the Low one this week, too! Yeah I've had this rapper pop up regularly.

[MadPop]

@Mihail

So, I've tried to browse through your previous posts in an attempt to find the proper way to report my issue but failed. 

Previously when I’ve reported this the support team usually comes back asking for the artist id of the artist the track should be linked to instead. Which is something I don’t have a clue about and could not be expected to know. All I know is that it is not the artist I follow...

So once again, may I kindly please ask you to explain how I should report this? 

[Mihail]

@jeremycorbett - We're not expecting any sort of investigation, just reports of an issue that we have described extensively and that we want to assist with. Valid reporting of this will be for the benefit of everyone experiencing the issue at hand. Reports and data from users are commonly used and required in technical investigations. Overall, we will need your help in order for in turn help out. 

@MadPop - No worries, I can understand how information can get lost in a thread as big as this one. Here's a link to one of the posts that features this info.

[clnr]

I see this reply frequently from the content team as well. So I have started to add the line "..and I don't know which artist the track should be linked to" in my error reports.

[clnr]

@Mihail: Hi and thanks for the quick reply.
From the customer point of view there is only one problem: Wrong artists ends up in our generated playlists.
The fact that Spotify have several internal issues they need to fix is in order to solve the customer facing problem is frankly speaking not our concern. I don't care if the wrong song is listed to the wrong artist, the wrong artist has an empty profile or any other issue. I care about the fact that artist I don't care about end up in my playlist.

[Mihail]

@clnr If you can't find another artist with the same name just by using the search, you can say that the artist doesn't have their own Artist page. The team handling your report will then know what to do.

Regarding your second post (please avoid double-posting and instead use the Edit option), we understand that and we've explained the reason for this happening and that it is something we know of and expect to happen based on how this is made possible in the first place. As it stands, there would be two solutions: Remove recommendations and playlists like the Release Radar altogether or develop a new system that somehow solves the root cause.

As this is something that we - A: don't think people would want; B: have no possibility of doing at the moment as it involves a major change to how music makes it on to Spotify in the first place and would affect many others as well;

we instead want to do our best to eliminate a technical issue that seems to be present, but is definitely not expected.

We want to focus the discussion in this particular thread on the latter so we can gather accurate reports and work on eliminating this technical issue, which in turn would make the recommendations in the offered playlists, while not perfect, better. Our only request is for assistance on gathering this data here. Discussions on all related matters are still welcomed in their own dedicated threads, but we can't be everywhere so we need a designated place to gather your reports for something that we wish to fix and we initially thought that this thread is the best one to do so.

[jeremycorbett]

Just to check, if I find an erroneous artist as a supporting artist, but clicking on that artist takes me to the 'correct' artists page - but there is no reference to that song on the artists page - what do I do?

[MadPop]

@Mihail

I think this just addresses how the Spotify support and customer approach works. 
“If you can't find another artist with the same name just by using the search, you can say that the artist doesn't have their own Artist page. The team handling your report will then know what to do.”

Surely me as a user could not be expected to know which artist songs should be correctly linked to. This is what I expect the Spotify support to know and investigate. 

And this could actually be the root cause for our disappointment with the Release Radar recently:

“Remove recommendations and playlists like the Release Radar altogether or develop a new system that somehow solves the root cause.”

I’m not sure about you other users but from my experience Release Radar did not feature recommendations in the past. At least surely I would not expect recommendations from this list since there are other lists for that, Discover Weekly for instance or the feature of Autoplay. The only thing I would expect is new release by artists I follow. 

[Mihail]

@jeremycorbett - Tracks where an artist is only featured on and not the main one aren't designed to be part of the discography and as such aren't listed on their pages. They might appear if they're in a playlist as part of the "Appears on" section, but it is expected that you don't see the track on their page. If you think they're wrongly featured in said track, report it via our CS form as described under the broken or "Incorrect" section here.

@MadPop - We really don't want to start a discussion on these topics here, but allow us to set the record straight: The Release Radar has always, since it's conception, included recommendations and this is reflected into its description. It is definitely not expected from anyone, neither users nor our team members to know which of the tens of millions of songs are correctly linked. We're just asking for a listen, a quick search and reports that we can then indeed investigate 🙂

[jeremycorbett]

@mihail - sure shall do, I already did one earlier today but noticed two more similar wrong 'featured artist' tracks later, so will do a new one with these later.

[spotix]

Some band pages are so littered with incorrect features that if I'm expected to report it all in separate reports I then get caught in the spam filter. I can't help but think this wouldn't be an issue if Release Radar didn't feature songs from artists (supposedly) featuring on tracks.

[ishi_the_fishy]

Spotify has made straightening out Radar Release problems extremely complicated and laborious, placing much of the work on the paying subscribers. For a billion dollar company, this is shameful!

HOW DO I HANDLE THE FOLLOWING SITUATIONS?

1) This week I have the a track on my Radar that is from a rap artist(s) named Kazz, Dio (spotify:track:7mh6VQCY8ecejj0Xnso5nZ).  I follow a famous heavy metal artist named Dio (spotify:artist:4CYeVo5iZbtYGBN4Isc3n6), but when I click on the Dio credited in the track it goes to an empty artist page (spotify:artist:4Rl4cBEP0xeuwB0DBrMK73).  Why is this happening, what category of error is this classified under, and exactly how do I report this?

2) Given that I listen to punk rock and heavy metal, why am I getting Christian-faith music on my Radar?  I documented this in an earlier reply.  It's like a vegan, sitting down at a vegan restaurant, only to be served a **bleep** steak. (EDIT: I typed "b-l-o-o-d-y steak", as in an undercooked steak, and Spotify saw fit to treat that as profanity?  You couldn't ask for a more poignant example of how dysfunctional this company is)  This is a prime example of how absolutely ridiculous the Radar has become.  I'm also getting all kinds of international fiddle and clarinet music for some reason this week, which doesn't align with a single artist I follow, NOT A SINGLE ONE!  Again, why is this happening, what category of error is this classified under, and exactly how do I report this?

I really expect some thoughtful answers to these questions and an immediate solution that doesn't involve me actively reporting tracks (too much work) or the "Hide" option (doesn't seem to work---as they artists are relisted the following week).  My fear is that if you add another feature right into the app to report, it will be just another useless button that doesn't do anything.  Again, Spotify is a BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY, due in large part to our subscriptions.  It shouldn't take over a year and 18 pages of comments to get this straightened out.  Oh, and a Google form? Really? Spotify has a reporting tool on Spotify.com for artists. Why are paying customers being asked to sit at the kiddy table?