Spotify has one genious feature that I use a lot: similar artists. The problem with machine learning and recommendations is that it has a few pitfalls that lead to poor results. This is on full display on Amazon which manages to recommend stuff I've already bought from them while not being able to tell the difference between hard science fiction and fantasy. The resulting recommendation bubble seems impossible to escape.
With Spotify, they do have a few features that work for me. I've discovered new artists by exploring their "Fans Also Like" feature. The nice thing about this is that they don't try to be too smart there.
Their normal recommendations suffer from the same issues that other sites have and are thrown off by the fact that my tastes are all over the place. I happily listen to sixties psychedelic rock, jazz, metal and some techno or some punk and tend to go from one to the other. Yet I'm very picky about what I listen to. Somewhere along the lines it seems to have decided I'm a middle aged guy (correct) and it consistently does not recommend me any music made this century; which is kind of frustrating if you are trying to find something new to listen to. Recommendation bubbles are a thing and escaping from them is hard.
I work around it by using the fans also like feature and using it's suggested additions to playlists. This works surprisingly well. Example based similarity search is a much simpler problem then recommendations. And it's IMHO a much more interesting feature to explore content with.
The desire for these recommendation services not to be "too smart" really resonates with me. If we can't yet give a great set of zero-effort recommendations, why don't we pull back a step and give the user a few power tools to find their own? Maybe I'm out of step with mainstream users, but I would see that as a huge improvement.
With Spotify, they do have a few features that work for me. I've discovered new artists by exploring their "Fans Also Like" feature. The nice thing about this is that they don't try to be too smart there.
Their normal recommendations suffer from the same issues that other sites have and are thrown off by the fact that my tastes are all over the place. I happily listen to sixties psychedelic rock, jazz, metal and some techno or some punk and tend to go from one to the other. Yet I'm very picky about what I listen to. Somewhere along the lines it seems to have decided I'm a middle aged guy (correct) and it consistently does not recommend me any music made this century; which is kind of frustrating if you are trying to find something new to listen to. Recommendation bubbles are a thing and escaping from them is hard.
I work around it by using the fans also like feature and using it's suggested additions to playlists. This works surprisingly well. Example based similarity search is a much simpler problem then recommendations. And it's IMHO a much more interesting feature to explore content with.