Irrelevant search results, is biased towards local music

[owlkruger]

Plan
Premium
Country
Some country in Europe
Device
Any
Operating System
Any

My Question or Issue
I think for the past month Spotify search functionality has been providing me completely unrelated results. All of these search results seem to be local music in my country so I am guessing Spotify has mis-tuned the bias for where the search results come from. I don't want to see any local music unless I am searching for it. Right now whatever I search, completely unrelated local music is added to the list of results. I really hope that this is not how it is meant to be because Spotify is really difficult to use in this way and I am not planning to keep my music listening experience uncomfortable. In fact I outright hate local music and I don't want to be forced to browse through it. If this bias keeps up I might aswell opt for a platform that doesn't force these artists on me. There is no way to "hide this artist in results" either.

Why not just show "no results found" instead of showing completely unrelated results as if something was found. It's just wasting my time having to look through this list.

As a sidenote, I also notice that music which I have only played at most one or two times long time ago is often added to blend playlists instead of music that I listen to way more frequently and more recently. Again local music is the most common music that Spotify claims me to frequently listen to when I've maybe only listened to them at most twice.

Also noone else is using my account. All of the signed in devices are my own personal and nobody else has access to them.

[Rhosus]

This issue has been bugging me recently and now that I got this sort of result I had to look up if someone else had the problem too, it's still unresolved it seems.

[blackmoses]

About a week ago something happened to my Spotify search results. I have a list of songs and bands i want to check and listen. When I copy-paste text string to search field, results are irrelevant, unpredictable and generally have almost no connection to what is in the search field. For some reason almost all results are local artists (Finnish) which is strange because I don't listen to local music at all. If I search for "The Jam Just Who Is The 5 O'clock Hero", and the top 3 results are: Still Alive by The Crash, I'm Gonna Roll by Rock 'n' Roll Band, Just For You by The Hurriganes. When I write the search one word at a time, I might get the right results.

Can you please fix the search?

[Elise04]

Been having this exact issue aswell, if i search "Black Bubblegum" it gets me "Pink Bubblegum", "Only Strangers" by the black roses and "Cannibals" By Blackjack, but not Black Bubblegum by The Dillinger Escape Plan. Even writing "Dillinger Escape Plan" gets me nothing made by the artist but a bunch of random other pop songs.

[blackmoses]

As a workaround I do my searches via google: "artist title open spotify" which gives you at least something relevant. Still, I'm not feeling satisfied at all.

[kirvis250]

Same problem, I'm just going to vote with my wallet on this one.

[JTomkinson]

Same here.

If i spell it out exactly i can get totally irrelevant local artist that i've never listened to.

If i misspell it i get better results.

[blackmoses]

This Spotify developer topic is, I think, linked to our problem: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Spotify-for-Developers/Getting-different-results-when-searching-a-t...

Search results seem to be market specific. Because most of the songs that i search are from the UK or the US, I put "market=EN" at the end of my search string. It gives somewhat better results, but not much.

Enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) is the correct word to describe what is happening to Spotify.

[aunt-tim]

I have this issue as well. I'm from Hong Kong. I can be searching Oh Well by Fleetwood Mac and the 'Artists' part shows absolutely irrelevant local artists whom I detest with a passion. It has to be some paid promotion behind, which sucks because it ruins the search experience.

[owlkruger]

It seems that the search results are a bit more relevant when searching on mobile. However Spotify still bloats search results with random stuff if it doesn't find anything relevant. I consider this broken search functionality.

I've been wondering what'd be the best strategy to get Spotify to fix this. I am currently guessing the artists themselves should raise this with Spotify. I wonder how the artists feel when they find out they appear in search results when search keywords are things they would rather not be associated with.

[Liska22]

Plan

Premium

Country

Czechia

Device

PC

Operating System

Windows 10 and Windows 11

My Question or Issue

I have a bug in search. I search for artist, for example Taylor Swift, and I get only 10 or so relevant results in tracks, and then there are czech pop groups or singers I dont care about. Then again some relevant finds and then again completely wrong results.

[h265]

I'm in the Netherlands and therefore my search results get polluted with a bunch of (horrible) songs when I'm trying to look for listenable songs.

Is there a way to filter search by location? I can't change my spotify region because my payment method has to be local for some great reason.

Thanks!