Hacker News

points by ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago | 0 comments

> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.

Same here.

I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.

[–] _the_inflator 2 days ago

Another one here. Vocal techno is a pain in my ears. There are few exceptions like in Bonzai Records classic tracks like “Let there be house.” or Emmanuel Top. These male voices are more aggressive and are helping to inject some additional energy into the songs, while female voices seem to drain it.

Goth industrial stuff from like the female singer from L’Âme Immortelle was a nice exception with “Bitterkeit”.

[–] littlecranky67 2 days ago

Fellow House/Techno listener. I am astonished that you can even use Spotify/Scrobbles etc. I always feel an outsider as the only way to listen to that genre is livesets, which i meticulously collect and download from various sources (youtube rips, soundcloud, artist releases) and play offline like its 1998. Any modern streaming plattforms are not suitable for that genre at all - you don't want to listen to 1min leadin/out anyways.

[–] taneq 2 days ago

This is the way! I found my old folder of Tranceaddict live sets recently and I can confirm, they’re all still bangers. :)

[–] technotony 2 days ago

Try di.fm

[–] turbine401 2 days ago

I gave up on them for psytrance. Used to be paying subscriber for many years, but their catalog never really got updated. Got tired of hearing the same tracks over and over.

[–] jwr 2 days ago

Was a subscriber for a while, but their streaming reliability on poor networks was really bad (also when transitioning from wi-fi to cellular and back) and they weren't keen on fixing it. Spotify works so much better.

I liked their playlists/radios, though and I miss them.

[–] arcanemachiner 2 days ago

Digitally Imported... Now there's a throwback.

[–] taneq 2 days ago

Wow, they’re still around? Good call!

[–] yadaeno 1 day ago

If you have a few links I would greatly appreciate

[–] exitnode 1 day ago

me too. I love electronic music (mainly tech house) but dislike vocals as they mostly are kinda silly.

[–] fierycatnet 2 days ago

I personally love Vocal Trance, DJ Doboy mixes

[–] rubikscube09 2 days ago

never thought i'd see bonzai records mentioned on hackernews!

[–] drfloyd51 2 days ago

Who is the artist for let there be house?

[–] hardtke 2 days ago

I would bet that you can train Pandora's algo to respect this preference by thumbing down every vocal techno track. The music genome annotators will have a boolean for vocals in the analysis. You'd likely start using recommendation strategies that use the annotations more than normal. Pandora is still the best for lean back listening.

[–] ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago

Pandora was always the best at figuring out what I wanted to hear; long before AI was a thing, and it's still better.

However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.

[–] delecti 2 days ago

No matter my goal, I found that my Pandora stations always converged on the same endpoint. I always ended up with Ellie Goulding and Dubstep, despite not really liking either of those. It rather killed my interest in the service.

The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).

[–] driverdan 2 days ago

Way back when I used Pandora I found similar behavior if I gave songs thumbs down. It would converge on a small selection of a few artists and their music. It was really good at some genres if I didn't thumbs up or down many songs.

I've seen the same kind of thing in other services that weight recent choices as a part of their graph based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube. They can get stuck in a feedback loop where the pool of recommendations shrinks to the point where it recommends the same stuff over and over.

[–] thaumasiotes 2 days ago

That isn't a feature of Pandora.

I have quite a few channels:

1. Comedy rock, seeded by "Code Monkey". (Mainly Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al Yankovic, but other people sneak in there. The biggest hit, in personal terms, was a song by Matthew Ebel.)

2. Secondary comedy rock, seeded by "Weird Al Yankovic"; this channel is mostly dead. It tried to converge with the main comedy rock channel for obvious reasons.

3. Country (sad), seeded by "She Used To Say That To Me". The main thing on this channel that I personally see as a genre outlier is Mark McGuinn's "Busy Signal", but going to youtube I see that that song is tagged "#countrymusic".

4. Country (happy), seeded by "Emily Harper".

Those two channels also constantly attempt to converge with each other. But they mostly don't try to converge with the comedy rock channel.

5. "Clancy Brothers".

This has blossomed into a more general Irish folk and sea shanty channel.

6. "Steeleye Span".

This one plays Steeleye Span and some other English folk and folk rock music. It constantly tries to play Irish music, though the Clancy Brothers channel does not try to play English folk.

7. "Alan Menken". This one is good at staying separate. It plays showtunes. (And sometimes branches out a little; Annette Funicello's "Pineapple Princess" is on there.)

8. A channel seeded by "Kiss Me", by Sixpence None The Richer. I like the way this song sounds. I was never happy with anything that played on this channel and it's been abandoned.

Within the past several years I have gotten the feeling that Pandora would rather I just have one channel that plays "everything"; there have been attempts at crossing the deeper channel boundaries.

I have never ended up with Ellie Goulding or Dubstep.

[–] malfist 2 days ago

Maybe you found the secret sauce to Pandora by everyone I know that used Pandora extensively had OPs experience. Myself and my partner both stopped using it after years of paid subscriptions because of that problem

[–] thaumasiotes 2 days ago

> However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.

I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.

Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.

In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.

(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)

[–] ahartmetz 2 days ago

Spotify fucking sucks - it seems to try to herd everyone into one of a few genres. For me, last.fm was the best. Currently I'm reasonably happy with Soundcloud.

[–] johnnyanmac 2 days ago

yes. You are (or at least, were. c. late 2000's) Pandora's customer. They want to maximize engagement either to serve ads or to justify a subscription.

You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.

[–] devin 2 days ago

We used to have a running joke in the office that all pandora stations eventually converge on Maroon 5. You could pick a death metal station and eventually it would somehow work its way to a paid 2 play popular band track. It was still pretty good though.

[–] fcarraldo 2 days ago

This but ‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

[–] switchbak 2 days ago

I've never felt so seen. That _fucking_ song.

[–] socalgal2 2 days ago

Pandora had the problem that I dislike a song and then it's like "how about mix #17 of the same song?", "how about mix #7 of the same song", "how about mix #3" of the same song?"

[–] taurath 2 days ago

The algorithm was the product, the licensing model was its failure. Proof you can get goodwill via an algorithm if you actually make it for the user rather than treating them like fodder for your ad network. Maybe someday in my lifetime we can actually achieve the dreams our platforms promised but rugpulled to make the worst people on the planet billionaires

[–] totetsu 2 days ago

Last.fm and scrobling was way more accurate 20 years ago than anything available today.

[–] crab_galaxy 2 days ago

It’s still pretty good. I use it for discovery on my self hosted navidrome setup

[–] hylaride 1 day ago

Even iTunes genius was amazing - I shudder to think how much money I blew on $1 songs, but with subscription music there's now no incentive for them to have good discoverability - they get my money either way.

[–] andai 2 days ago

Came here to say this. Last.fm was amazing, and I think they just used old fashioned statistics without much in the way of ML.

[–] joe_the_user 2 days ago

Yes, just because an algorithm knows what someone wants doesn't mean the algorithm will give it to them.

In fact, the algorithm is there to make money by changing the choice a person would make otherwise - the subtlety I assume is figuring when someone will accept a "good enough" choice handed to them. But just limiting choice to what you want someone to make might be a simpler approach.

[–] AlexITC 2 days ago

It happens to me that I keep skipping certain song but no matter what, it gets again into autoplay.

[–] ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago

I’m having that problem, right now, with AppleTV.

The new Korean monster movie, Hope, keeps getting jammed into my watchlist, and I can’t remove it.

I don’t want to watch it, and I’ll bet that watching it, won’t make it go away.

Maybe Bono invested into it…

[–] altairprime 2 days ago

If you long-press on it and choose View/Goto Episode/Show, are there any third-party apps listed as a way to watch it? If so, and you’re using any of those apps, then check each of their in-app wishlists for it as well; it’s possible that (unlike Netflix) they’re actually well integrated enough into the TV app to cause this. If not, in total seriousness, you could open an Apple Support case that might result in them asking permission to reset your watchlist database records cloud-side.

(None of this excuses the annoyance but I loathe leaving something untriaged when it’s a matter of seconds for the dice roll of helping.)

[–] ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago

Nope. Doesn't work. It's a zombie. I have watched other movies like it, in the past, and I might watch it in the future, but I don't want to pirate it, and I don't want to pay $25 to watch it now.

Those of us that were Apple users, back when, may remember a certain forced "gift" of a U2 album...

[–] altairprime 2 days ago

One that was forced on something like one billion people, rather than just one, yeah.

There was a case a few months ago where the App Store was forcing an app reinstall into people’s phones even after they’d deleted it years prior, which I assume ended up being a server-side bug (perhaps a database shard had a defect?) since so few, relatively speaking, were affected.

I had to escalate to a cloud data repair through their support to unbreak my own database entries re: a different service. It took several weeks but it eventually got resolved.

[–] therealdrag0 2 days ago

Have you tried brain.fm? It’s closer to the Lofi genre, has zero vocal which I really appreciate and no quick abrupt, distracting changes. It’s very rhythmic.

[–] dzhiurgis 2 days ago

Soundcloud is still best for me - you follow artists and people who repost dj sets that you like. Pretty simple and still the standard in berlin afaik.

[–] gogusrl 1 day ago

big soundcloud fan as well but I do wish I had an option to dislike / ban / remove certain artists or tracks.

Enabling their "AutoPlay Station" keeps going to certain tracks that I ALWAYS skip and yet they come back again and again.

[–] ErroneousBosh 2 days ago

> I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.

They get pushed also by what's the most profitable to play out, which is why you get so many bootleggy "Live Version" and shitty remixes.

It's often hard to get Spotify that actually all you want is the unremixed unedited unremastered album version of a track.

[–] Melatonic 2 days ago

What playlist creation tool are you using ?

There's many auto generating dynamic ones. Like the Monday and Criday ones. Plus the DJ new AI thing and then the better stuff is often in all the human curated Spotify lists.

There's also a way on desktop to take an existing g playlist and "create similar" where it tries to make something similar too one of your already made playlists. You have a lot more control using this

[–] herbst 2 days ago

Spotify was never a good product IMO and for techno it has always been obviously a bad product as many many songs and variants never make it to their platform.

Even YouTube music works better for me most of the time, but SoundCloud clearly takes the lead

[–] BoofMcQueen42 2 days ago

Sure would be nice if we enforced Payola laws. It's hard to believe that at one point the US Government sought to regulate fairness on something as low-stakes as radio. Today corporations do much worse and our politicians mostly sit by and watch. Maybe a small fine.

[–] sfink 1 day ago

Our politicians have dominated their ecological niche and are wholly dependent on nutrients in the form of campaign funding, which mostly comes from corporations. Those who were unwilling or unable to consume that flavor have died out from lack of sustenance. You want them to chop down the tree that produces the fruit that keeps them alive? Good luck with that.

[–] cobbaut 2 days ago

Similar here: I occasionally listen to music on Youtube late in the evening, and always watch a math or physics video in the morning. Simple, but it appears impossible for Youtube.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

Spotify especially likes to push its own AI generated slop tracks because then it gets to pay the royalty to itself

[–] AnotherGoodName 2 days ago

In fact simply no royalty at all.

The music industry associations around the world generally can’t force you to use their royalty system for your own music. So if you make an ai generated track they’re out of the loop completely. As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

It's important that they pay the royalty to themselves because the royalty is a fraction of your subscription fee divided by the number of royalties paid. Paying one to themselves dilutes the others.

[–] vintermann 2 days ago

It's amazing how many people commenting on streaming royalties don't understand this fact, claiming for instance that s music treaming service X plays more per stream.

It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.

(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)

[–] lelandfe 2 days ago

I also perform my own covers of songs in my bedroom for free, thereby saving hundreds of dollars on concert fees.

[–] scottyah 2 days ago

I typically book my shower as the venue, purely for the superior acoustics.

[–] jurgenburgen 2 days ago

> As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.

I’m so happy that massive corporations can save on royalties by pushing AI slop in my playlist.

[–] socalgal2 2 days ago

I actively thumbs down the 99 of every 100 tracks I don’t like, the services still don’t get it.

I really wish I could use an LLM to select the recommendations

[–] herbst 2 days ago

I am afraid LLMs generally don't have a good idea about music, it seems to select based on similar genre cues and texts more than anything else.

[–] pbnjay 2 days ago

I've been using https://www.getsubwave.com lately and it's great, but it is unfortunately already pre-filtered to my music collection. Would be slick to connect to spotify or a streaming service though!

[–] sneak 2 days ago

Spotify is chock full of payola. Every single playlist l they generate (and auto shuffle mode) has paid ads in it. It’s a terrible product.

[–] shostack 2 days ago

That they do not clearly disclose. It is atrocious they can very away with that.

[–] sam0x17 2 days ago

There's just no incentivization to do better at this, or they would in a heartbeat

[–] Gareth321 1 day ago

Holy shit, I’m the exact opposite. I’m so sorry. I am the reason you have to listen to all that vocal trance.

[–] cobalt60 2 days ago

you're on wrong platform, soundcloud

[–] alasano 2 days ago

Hey just let them merge a few hundred thousand more PRs of slop and maybe it will work?