[vagabund]

It may just be my perception, but I seem to have noticed this steering becoming a lot more heavy handed on Spotify.

If I try to play any music from a historical genre, it's only about 3 or 4 autoplays before it's queued exclusively contemporary artists, usually performing a cheap pastiche of the original style. It's honestly made the algorithm unusable, to the point that I built a CLI tool that lets me get recommendations from Claude conversationally, and adds them to my queue via api. It's limited by Claude's relatively shallow ability to retrieve from the vast library on these streaming services, but it's still better than the alternative.

Hoping someone makes a model specifically for conversational music DJing, it's really pretty magical when it's working well.

[ThrowawayTestr]

Spotify's recommendations are biased towards what you've listened to recently. Do you share the account with someone else?

[vagabund]

No, but it's also biased toward their commercial partners. From this page [0], detailing their recommendation process:

> How do commercial considerations impact recommendations?

> [...] In some cases, commercial considerations, such as the cost of content or whether we can monetize it, may influence our recommendations. For example, Discovery Mode gives artists and labels the opportunity to identify songs that are a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithms that determine the content of personalized listening sessions. When an artist or label turns on Discovery Mode for a song, Spotify charges a commission on streams of that song in areas of the platform where Discovery Mode is active.

So Spotify's incentivized to coerce listening behavior towards contemporary artists that vaguely match your tastes, so they can collect the commission. This explains why it's essentially impossible to keep the algorithm in a historical era or genre -- even if well defined, and seeded with a playlist full of songs that fit the definition. It also explains why the "shuffle" button now defaults to "smart shuffle" so they can insert "recommended" (read: commission-generating) songs into your playlist.

[0]: https://www.spotify.com/ca-en/safetyandprivacy/understanding...