Over half of my Discover Weekly songs I've already heard before

[ohseriously]

Plan

Premium

Country

Spain

Device

Desktop and Android phone

Operating System

Windows, Android

My Question or Issue

I have previously looked this up and saw that it was recommended to mark songs you've already heard as "I don't like this song" which I have been doing for a few months now, but this week fully 19 of the 30 songs on Discover Weekly I've heard before.

I don't think it's practical to dislike all those songs, firstly because I don't really dislike them all, and secondly because it doesn't appear to have any effect on getting songs I've already heard before recommended to me again, other than maybe not repeating those specific ones. Surely that's just a never ending cycle though? I listen to a wide variety of music, there will always be new songs for them to repeat! How can we ensure that Discover Weekly is actually allowing you do "discover" songs rather than just repeating old recommendations?

[mblackhurst]

I want to echo the concerns here and in many other posts regarding the inability to dislike or hide songs. I've largely been enjoying Spotify for about a year. However, I am finding that Spotify's algorithms present me with a very, very narrow selection of material, much of which I simply don't enjoy. These algorithms seem to inform autoplay, daily mixes, and other recommended playlists, as the same songs pop up across all of these services. I have a pretty large and diverse group of "liked" songs, and I have tried to add and remove liked songs to improve upon Spotify's reliance on my likes for its algorithms. However, the service has actually gotten relatively boring, and it's frustrating to be presented with the same songs that I don't enjoy across Spotify's services. So I spend way too much time listening to material I dislike or clicking through songs. I would encourage Spotify to either improve upon their "like" algorithms or make it a lot easier to dislike a song. I don't really understand why tagging a song as something you don't enjoy would not improve Spotify's services. 

The community resources for understanding Spotify's dislike features are also a mess, reflecting variation in these features over time and across different playlists. There's also many posts marked as "solved," implying there's a solution whereas the "solutions" are really only guidance to provide feedback as a suggested features. Implying there are solutions to the problem many users present is really frustrating. It's incredibly time consuming and confusing. I have spent an hour sorting through various posts and have learned nothing.

[Alex]

Hi there folks,

Thanks for reaching out about this in the Community!

The way the recommendations algorithm works is based on your listening habits and what is most popular with other users who enjoy the same type of music.

The best way to influence the algorithm would be to listen to listen to songs and artists via the Search option and not only through the other recommendation playlists, which will narrow down your recommendations pool and you'll start seeing songs that you've already heard.

If you're really unhappy whit the recommendations you get you can follow the instructions in this Guide and transfer your music collection over to a new account. With a new account the algorithm is calculated anew in the first few weeks of listening, so you might get better results based on the music you're currently in to.

Hope you find this info useful. Don't hesitate to reach out again if you have questions.

[ohseriously]

Hey Alex,

Thanks for your reply. I find it a bit baffling that the best way to improve your discoveries is to...discover your own music? I only listen to Spotify which means that I would have to do some research, maybe try to find similar songs on YouTube or something, which of course can be done but is time consuming and it defeats the point of having a service that is supposed to do that for you.

I imagine preventing tracks from repeating is just a question of programming? I would rather Spotify recommend more different songs that I might not like, and with the staggering amount of tracks available surely that should still be possible without any repeats.

Suggesting work-arounds like disliking every repeated song, manually discovering your own music or creating an entire new account places the responsibility of the 'fix' on the user, and don't actually address the problem.

Ideally a 5 star rating system would allow for a far more nuanced analysis of musical tastes, although I'm aware this would probably be a lot of work, but the reality is that taste is not so black and white, and I think this extra information could be very valuable when it comes to curating recommendations.

I appreciate you taking the time to reply, and I can only hope that Spotify eventually gets around to addressing this aspect of their service as it is something that users want and can only really be addressed from their end.

[jimpdx]

Thanks for everyone's posts. I have been a premium subscriber since it was first made available, and recently have gotten very frustrated that "Discover Weekly" is playing the same songs over and over. I hear Alex's response but don't like it 🙂 I certainly can not have heard all the possible songs I might like, even with the long time I have been listening.

[veronicalsc]

This was we very well written response to an absolutely idiotic recommendation. You are spot on! Sounds like "Discover Weekly" should do the discovering for us. The algorithm only seems to get worse at serving me things I've already heard.

[bryanjj]

I've noticed this more recently as well. Most if, not all songs, in discover weekly are songs I have heard before. In the previous 5 years of using this service they would be almost all new songs. Did something recently change?

[atomicgerg]

I've been having this same issue recently, this week is the third week in a row that I've had songs that I've had previously on discover weekly again on my discover weekly playlist. At least 2/3 of the songs on my discover weekly playlist are songs that I had months or even over a year ago. It's kind of pointless to listen to the playlist when I've already heard all the songs. It's pretty obvious that there is some sort of bug going on here as it's no coincidence that this has happened for the third week in a row

[Spot1fysmom]

I've been having the same issues since a month ago. Clearly, something has changed. I used to be super happy about starting the week with a fresh pot of songs to choose from, but now it's boring since I have listened to most of them already. Would be great if you could fix what you broke

[s3d]

I have the same problem for about a year now. Discover Weekly was one of the best aspects of Spotify for me and now it sadly became obselete. Not only it recommends songs i already listened to but somehow its musical range seems to have gotten narrower too.

[Sepes_Owlcat]

This is the firs week for me to have this issue. I've always used the dislike option for songs a dont find entertaining. I search for new songs regularly when I hear them on radio/youtube (or soundcloud discovery). Once it got spot on songs and I even saved the whole list. But now It had almost half the songs I've already disliked for the algorithm. Something has clearly changed for the worse. 
NOTE: Making a new account for only this purpose is not a valid workaround!

[MafeG]

Hi folks,

Thank you for sharing your posts on the Community.

To start, we'd recommend that you make sure that you listen to more of your favorite tracks with the Private session feature off. Also, please clear the cache of all the devices you use, log out and back in to sync things up. You can find the steps here.

Also, please bear in mind the recommendations given by @Alex, since your recommendations may be affected if you mostly play music directly from your personalized playlists.

Keep us in the loop here and let us know if you have any more questions. 

[ignaski]

Same issue here, in this week's discover weekly there are only 12 songs (less than half!) which I have not heard before. With every week it is getting worse and worse. 

[Spot1fysmom]

I find all moderator's solutions to be highly inefficient, and to be honest, disrespectful. The issue is clearly the algorithm or how the information is being implemented, not how users use their accounts. You should pass on the information conveyed in this and others threads like it instead of suggesting to "create new accounts" and loose our right to keep our sessions private.  I have the same issue as all the people above and I'd like to be able to fully use the options of a service for which I pay for. I'd hope for a more useful or at least respectful comment from the moderators. Telling us to delete our accounts and change our ways to use it it's not a good policy. It's clearly a bug and bugs are responsibilities of the company, not the users. If you want us to work around it, I'd suggest you start paying us as workers instead of charging us. 

[simplyknudsen]

This should be simple! Just create a new playlist and call it "Discover New Songs Weekly" and then actually look at our play history and send us new songs. Discover Weekly isn't doing it. I'm hearing songs I've memorized. It's becoming a complete drag in finding new music. I use to rave about how amazing Spotify is. But lately, I've been telling people it use to be good at finding new music I really enjoy but now I'm at a loss because Spotify isn't showing me new music in what should have been my NEW MUSIC FEED A.K.A Discover WEEKLY, A.K.A. My favorite go-to playlist. But you ruined it just like you ruined your end-of-year playlists by removing Akira the Don from them due to some woke staff you have on board. I'm very disappointed about the staff answers on this feed and would really like Spotify to think about improving this ASAP! I've been debating switching to Apple music all together.

[Mjsielerjr]

It's almost 2022 and this is still happening... Very disappointing.

[ldycel]

To add to the discussion, I have *three* songs in my current discover playlist that are marked as disliked, because I disliked them previously before this week's discover playlist was even made. I don't understand why the algorithm would stitch a playlist together that includes previously disliked songs.

Having songs I've already heard in the discover playlist has been an ongoing frustrating issue, especially when it has included songs that I had previously added to my library but removed due to losing interest in them. However, this is the first time I have seen it including songs I explicitly disliked. I don't understand why the discover feature would include this. How is this not a bug?

[Zadak]

To me it seems the "disliked" songs in my Discover Weekly resets every year or so. I am getting shown the same songs as in the last year (happening for a few years now). No, I still don't like them. Why does Spotify even think I've changed my mind in the meantime? What does Dislike even do here? It seems to not persist for long enough or have any effect on the recommendations. 

[Yordan]

Hey all,

Thanks for your posts.

The "Hide this song" feature is not synced across devices, so if you use your account on multiple devices it's possible to find a recommendation that you've previously hidden on let's say, your phone, in your Discover Weekly / Release Radar on your computer. An idea to have this feature synced between all devices has been suggested here, but even though it's marked as Closed, we’ll continue to monitor it and update its status once it reaches the required votes, so feel free to check it out and share your feedback.

Take care.

[Digamma]

Well, that's just not... fully true?

If I go on desktop, and select "I don't like this song", then the song will be skipped on my mobile client too - I literally just checked this. The inverse, however, doesn't work, where hiding the song doesn't hide it on PC - but there's a connection one way that must be account bound, and not device bound. I don't see why this distinction needs to be made.

On the other hand, if I select "do not play this artist" on mobile, this will also grey out the artist and skip all their songs on the desktop client.

Surely it's an easier solution for all of your user preferences to be stored on your account, rather than per-device? If something is done offline, then spotify should just update preferences once you connect to the internet.

Doing it like this is more hassle than the other way around, since there is obviously  already a system in place to sync some of the user preferences over your account settings. Why it's not universal is actually beyond me