Daily Mixes have very short songs

[Dragobrath]

Plan

Premium

Country

Estonia

Device

PC, iPhone 13

Operating System

iOS 16.3.1, Windows 10 21H2

My Question or Issue

Recently the quality of Daily Mixes have declined significantly. I tend to listen to albums that have a short intro (1-2 minutes long) and long individual tracks. And in the past few weeks all of my Daily Mixes are filled with these intros and very short tracks from the albums (very few are over 7-8 minutes long).

Whatever the change it was, I'd appreciate if it was reverted or improved.

[Bollotoral]

The image is from the desktop app, but it applies to all apps, Android, Web player, etc.
 

I have noticed for already some months that when you Start a Radio from a song, the Algorithm chooses too many short songs, which is useless because many times you end up listening to intro, interludes, etc. Many tracks/songs below 2 minutes. #annoying

[Alex]

Hi there @Bollotoral,

Thanks for the post. We've moved your message to the Help Boards, as it's not an Idea for a feature.

The recommended songs generated by your algorithm are automatically picked based on your listening activity and what is most popular with other users who listen to similar music. 

What you can do in this case is exclude these from your taste profile. Check this article for more info. 

We'd also suggest hitting the Hide button whenever you come across one of these intros in your Discover Weekly, Release Radar or Radio. 

Hope this helps.

[Eni]

Hi there @Dragobrath,

Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Community!

Keep in mind that your Daily Mixes are created based on the music you listen to, disregarding of its length. This means that if there's a song that matches the Mix's genre or topic, it can be added no matter if it's just a short intro.

No worries though, since those mixes are updated daily, you just need to keep listening to your favorite music and you'll start receiving better recommendations over time.

Hope this clears things up. If you need a hand with anything else, the Community is here for you.

Cheers.

[Dragobrath]

> Daily Mixes are created based on the music you listen to, disregarding of its length

This is not true. There's a clear prioritization of the shorter tracks.

The thing is that I haven't changed my listening patterns, and I usually skip the intro tracks when starting the albums manually. I've always done that. And most of the time daily mixes for the genres and artists that I've been listening for years have been fine with occasional intros here and there. In the past weeks I noticed that Daily Mixes are practically unlistenable, because there's intro after intro. This is really noticeable.

If you start going track by track in my daily mix, you can clearly see that more than half of the tracks in the playlist are the shortest tracks (1-3 minutes) from the respective albums. Usually these are either intros or interludes. There's an undeniable bias there.

I can easily prove it if needed, if you deem it necessary to contact a technical team.

Some playlists (like Release Radar) have an option for "disliking" the track, to stop it from appearing. If the similar option was for daily mixes, it would help with mitigating the issue.

Best regards.

[AlejaR]

Hey @Dragobrath,

Thanks for your reply and for the info shared. 

We'd like to add some insights about this behavior. Keep in mind these playlists (e. g. Daily Mixes, Discover Weekly) are created by Spotify based on your recent listening activity. If you can replicate it across all your devices, we suggest you make sure the Private Session is off, so the algorithm can gather enough info about your most recent listening activity. Also, make sure you're listening to music not only from other recommended playlists like Discover Weekly or Daily Mix, but through the Search option as well.
 

Keep in mind that if most of the music and episodes you listen to come from your personalized playlists (like Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, etc.) the new suggested content won't update as often. It's worth mentioning that these playlists update regularly, so please give them some breaks, explore actively some new music, and check in the coming weeks and let us know how it goes.

Also, for personalized playlists (such as the Daily Mixes), you can improve the suggestions you receive by liking and disliking songs. You can do it, in the case of Daily Mixes, just from the mobile app. 

We hope you found this helpful. We're always here to help.

[Paha_Agentti]

Why some artist radios often have mostly unrelated approximately 1 minute long (Chinese) songs on them? I'm in Europe and I'm listening mostly European artists. Those songs are like some sort of AI spam music. Spotify algorithm seems to be really bad quite often.

 

[Paha_Agentti]

I have never listened more than few seconds of those short Asian AI songs and I'm pretty sure nobody else has listened them either. I'm also quite sure that not many people (if any) have heard my example artist Coneville in Asia. So I wonder where does that Asian AI **bleep** music come from? Spotify algorithm is not bad normally, so why does it suck on (small) Artist Radios?

[Paha_Agentti]

Spotify algorithm likes a lot of these Asian artists that make songs that are all same length like 1:04, 1:02, 1:07, etc and seem to have AI generated song titles. To me these look and sound like some sort of fake (AI) artists. Even if they are real artists, I wonder why on earth Spotify algorithm favours these artists so much on Artist Radio's?

This is a fine example:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/7MuG0NWftnGYmrOdVn7idu
This "artist" released nine EP's last year and all songs are 1:20 long and every EP has six songs. And Spotify algorithm loves them.

And here's another one:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/2CCUItDUu53g0f78RDyRB4

16 EP's released last year, six 1:20 long songs on each and Spotify algorithm loves them all.

[Paha_Agentti]

This interesting Rolling Stone magazine article from 2019 explains a bit of this "Fake Artist" thing : https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/fake-artists-have-billions-of-streams-on-spotify-is-sony-n...

"Why? Because Spotify pays out royalties on a pro rata basis. This means – as explained on Rolling Stone previously – that the firm divides its total industry payout across the entirety of artists on its platform, based on their portion of overall streams. The important bit: if “fake artists” are paid lower contractual royalty rates than “real” acts, and then, driven by playlist inclusion, claim a certain percentage of Spotify’s total monthly streams, Spotify ends up keeping more money. An ex-Spotify insider was once quoted by Variety as suggesting that this was a deliberate company strategy: “It’s one of a number of internal initiatives to lower the royalties [Spotify is] paying to the major labels,” they said."

I guess that explains why Spotify algorithm is so eager to put these fake artists everywhere. Pretty sad.

And here is another newer article about same thing: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2022/03/29/spotify-fake-artists-investigation/

Really sad. Listener satisfaction might not be Spotify's priority after all.

[Bollotoral]

Hello Alex,

Thanks for your reply, but this is not a solution.

The artist that appear in the "Radio" are most of the times correct, but short songs are definitely something I don't enjoy or listen to more than I listen to longer songs, above 4 minutes up to 20 minutes.

An adjustment to the algorithm is necessary.

Thanks.

[ochinchinn]

I have the same issue! Weird 1:00mins - 1:50mins songs that get mixed into the song radios. They also completely removed the "Playlist Radio" so you're forced to use "Song radio" with the intentional**bleep** algorithm.

Thanks for linking these articles, not unexpected but definitely disappointing!!

[TimonStip]

I have also all of a sudden gotten these shorter tracks in my discover weekly. I never listen to these short tracks, I even take time to use the delete button when you do recommend these to me. They have been appearing since about a week or 4, and to me it more so seems like spotify aquired a new database of these 1 minute tracks and wants to push them. They are barely even containing anything I´d listen to.

[fco-cl]

Same here, like 80% of songs suggested are under the 2 minute mark. And it has nothing to do with the lists I listen to, like Alex suggested. I mean, look at these names, none of these bands are what you would ever consider "straight to the point punk rockers"

This are not fake songs like someone suggested, but there's most probably some algorithm manipulation to maximize the number of songs played.

[alonefold]

I have also been noticing this issue, I only ONLY listen to long ambient tracks greater than 5 minutes but more often 10-15 minute tracks of well known soundscape musicians, but my recommendations are never longer than 2 minutes. It wasn't like this only a few months ago.

Update: I literally just listened to an entire album of 7-8 minute long tracks and the next recommended track was 1 minute 30 seconds in length, followed by another lasting 1 minute 70 seconds. I kept skipping to the next recommended track and nothing was longer than 2 minutes until I started getting repeats.

[rphlf]

Yeah, that's also been happening to me recently. Basically every song on mixes or radios based on albums etc are short songs, usually intros or short transitions between longer songs.

Those mixes use to be great and are now of very little use.

[Alex]

Hi folks,

Thanks for reporting this.

Can you try removing some of these from your Taste Profile and check if you start getting regular song recommendations over the next few weeks?

More info can be found here.

Keep us posted on how you get on.

[Dragobrath]

Hello,

Do you mean exclude the whole Daily Mix from the taste profile or make a new playlist, fill it with all the short tracks and exclude them from the profile in one bulk? ATM, exclusion feature only works for playlists.

[Joan]

Hi there @Dragobrath,

Yes, try adding the unwanted tracks to a playlist and exclude it from your Taste Profile. Also try disliking/hiding the songs from any generated playlists.

Let us know how it goes.

[Dragobrath]

This did not help.

First of all, you can like/dislike songs only from the phone, while track length is only visible on desktop. So I had to scroll down the daily mixes both on phone and desktop, check lengths on desktop and dislike them on the phone.

Secondly, disliking does not work. I've seen daily mixes reloaded a few times already, and they still contain the disliked songs.

Lastly, I noticed the following pattern - if I listen to a new album, it starts appearing in my daily mixes, but the tracks appear in the playlist in ascending order loosely sorted by their length. So if an album has the following tracks:

1:52, 7:34, 4:54, 1:34, 5:10, 10:02, 1:50, 16:58

they appear in the following order:

1:50, 1:52, 1:34, 4:54, 5:10, 7:34

The longest tracks are not included at all.

I've noticed this exact pattern with at least 3 albums.

And if there's only one track from a particular album in the daily mix, it's the shortest track. This is the case for 50% of the individual tracks in the daily mix.

This is definitely a result of a recent change to how the daily mixes are generated. This was not a case a few months before, when daily mixes were actually listenable and mostly had the tracks which I listened to the most, not the shortest ones from albums of the same genre, that I haven't even listened before. (like really, I see a track from a new album in my daily mix, that I haven't listened before, and it's a 1:18 acoustic intro).