Removing Tracks from History/Algorithms

[minormumbles]

Plan

Free/Premium

Country

Device

(iPhone 8, Samsung Galaxy 9, Macbook Pro late 2016)

Operating System

(iOS 10, Android Oreo, Windows 10,etc.)

My Question or Issue

My wife (despite having her own spotify account) has been listening to thunderstorm tracks under my account for the past month.  These tracks are 2-3 minutes long.  And she ran them all night on repeat for several nights until I figured out what was going on.  80% of my "music" listened to is now nature sounds and thunderstorms.  

I realize that we are currently voting on the ability to delete items from our recently played.  People have been kicking around this idea since 2019 it seems.  This is a paid service for me.  The idea that a need like this is so incredibly obvious I find that in borders on insulting that you think this is an option that needs to be voted on first. Come on seriously.  What is the true reason this doesn't exist already?

Is it possible to at least designate tracks or songs that you do not want to be applied to your Top Tracks for 20XX?  Or my years in review? Or any of my listening algorithms?  

[ahensley106648]

This isn't a matter of can't, but won't.

My husband was in the hospital over 4th of July weekend. It's a poor time to need to leave the dogs alone because my neighborhood is pretty enthusiastic about their fireworks. I spent as much time as I reasonably could with my dogs but I also needed to focus on my husband so I played dog-friendly videos and music on YouTube to hopefully muffle the sound of any fireworks or fire crackers when I couldn't be at home. Afterward, I got pretty tired of suggestions of farm animals grazing in fields while peaceful music played in the background so I went into my history and deleted every single video and.... the suggestions stopped immediately.

Pan over to my husband: The hospital was an incredibly stressful environment so my husband listened to spa music on Spotify to help him relax. This is not something he would ever listen to on his own out in the world. He was in the hospital for 10 days. It never occurred to either of us that Spotify would have no mechanism to wipe that music from his algorithm so now he gets spa music suggested to him and included in his playlists. So much FUN to be rocking out to songs you really enjoy and then... spa music. We use Spotify Premium. We PAY for this service. Now I have to ask myself why.

This admin explanation of "awe shucks guys. too bad so sad, we just can't do that. and by the way, it's really your fault that you're getting these bad suggestions because you assumed we would have this common-sense feature and didn't think to use a private session" is dismissive and insulting. It's total bull and you know it.

[CMul]

"Funny Fart" has sat there in my "Good morning" suggestion every day for the past few months, my son and a friend figured out they could make the google speaker play fart tracks one morning. They literally did it once. Now I'm cursed with fart track suggestions for an eternity... thanks Spotify, super clever algorithm you've got there 😂

[dazaisasshole]

 not good enough. we need this to change, we shouldn’t have to vote. my attached should speak for itself.

[Danman696938263]

They most definitely are not recommendations from what you listened to, pull your **bleep**ing heads out of your ass. I paid for your service, i removed my card have fun canceling my membership. There’s no reason I can completely and utterly block an artist so I can never ever see it ever again, but you’re too lazy to do that. You want to cause anger, well have fun canceling my membership **bleep**.

[Danman696938263]

Good this ad blocker is like $5 and YouTube is free!

[lpark]

I'm actually quitting my paid account because of this. 

[pj29]

I have to add my 2 cents. My wife asked "hey Google" to play Church hymns while we were in our car, with her Spotify account configured on Android Auto, and my mobile also reacted, and started playing hymns on my account as well. My mobile volume was quite low, and totally covered by the car speakers and traffic noises, and I only found out when I parked... and now I have a good deal of Church hymns in my algorithm. Nothing against that, but it's not the kind of music I listen to, and I'd like to clear those off my playing history. 

[bbeckner-ca]

Not one person has "Liked" this Solution.

Please listen to your paying customers!

[Woodz1]

Zero likes on a solution, 👍 

[eyeeye13]

We recently took our nephew and niece away and played children’s songs and kids pop favourites. I am now stuck with this auto playing when I put my phone on android auto. It will no doubt make my algorithm look like I am 8 years old instead. If I close my account and sign up with another id I will lose the list I have been accumulating for some time. I closed all my other accounts to stay with Spotify and would be very sad to leave but this is diving me mad. Also if I am looking for a song and it’doesn’t play the one I thought it was I am left with an unwanted song I may never play again cluttering my recent plays.

As this is a community forum will someone from Spotify.com please reply.

Thx

[Vasil]

Hey everyone 🙂 

Thank you for the feedback.
Just wanted to let you know that, while the ideas are still up for voting, you can always use a Private Session to make sure anything you're playing doesn't get recorded in your history in the first place! Once enabled, this setting is active for 6 hours or until switched off and it carries over to Android Auto and Connect devices as well.

Another function you can take a look at is Remove from taste profile. With this function you can exclude a playlist from your Taste Profile which means that past and future listens from that playlist will have less impact on your taste summaries and recommendations. 

Hope you'll find this info helpful 🙌🏼

[Rufusjcat]

Hi Vasil. Thanks for trying, but that suggestion is not relevant. This isn't about making our listening private, it is about not using some songs that we listen to for future listening suggestions. Let's say I have my brother over to visit, and he's a big bluegrass fan, so he wants to listen to bluegrass for three hours, so for the rest of my life spotify's algorithm is convinced that I love bluegrass. So I have to guard my spotify listening, and simply not allow him to listen to what he wants. So I don't listen to spotify, we listen to Some Other Music Service (think something fruity, or something about a moving body of water or something a pre-vocal child might say) instead. And that severely limits spotify's value to me. And since I'm the one giving spotify money in exchange for a service, one would think that spotify would CARE what I find to be valuable, and simply fix their service to allow me to remove songs from my history after the fact so that they won't be used by spotify's algorithm to recommend songs to me. Why is that so damn difficult?

[pplayer0814]

The exact same problem happened to me. It's going to be infuriating seeing a song I'd usually dislike pop up on Spotify Wrapped and not being able to do anything to fix this problem. Seriously, are the hackers giving Spotify hush money or something? I can't really think of any other reason why Spotify would let these hackers ruin their consumer's algorithm

[StevieG2]

It's not just other people's taste contaminating the algorithm.  No one else uses my Spotify account.  However, as I am a human being, I listen to all types of music have the capacity to like multiple genres and subgenres that don't necessarily have anything to do with one another.  I don't want the fact that I listened to Bach one afternoon to start influencing playlists that Spotify offers me.  I played a goofy polka version of Happy Birthday yesterday; so now, Spotify, in all of its machine wisdom, will start offering me all sorts of Bday songs, or God help me, polka.  I can't seem to influence my Discover Weekly algorithm; it's decided for me that all I want to listen to for the rest of my life is '60s garage bands and soul.

I can't imagine what benefit there is for Spotify to not allow users as much control as they want over the music they listen to.  Perhaps it's just the culture of AI and computer geeks, who are so in love with the technological world they inhabit that they can't imagine that others just don't care (as much), and that they value individual, human choice, and that they would at least like the option to circumvent the oppressive algorithm when they want.  The lack of choice is not helpful; it's arrogant.

[Katesspotuser]

No. This is not an answer.  Nor is this issue a nice to have feature looking for votes.  If you want user history to be used, it will only be accurate if you allow users to prune.  This issue has several aspects to it.  1. Brings in annoying music, podcast, book, whatever you do not want to see.  2. Users don't always know ahead of time when they choose something that they never want to listen to again.  3. As Spotify can be played in a more public setting such as a car with passengers, it seems to be a privacy issue. You are storing data the user no longer wants stores.  Ability to remove after the fact is basic functionality. Your response suggests you are not user focused here. All I case say here is shame on you Spotify for thinking this answers the questions and hiding behind requiring votes as a reason.