Found out Spotify's Discover Weekly is literally pulling from the same 500 songs everyone in my city listens to

I noticed this after talking to 6 coworkers and we all had the same random indie track pop up last week, so I checked a friend in another state and their playlist was totally different. Has anyone else caught their algo doing this or is it just our corner of the internet?

4 comments

4 Comments

sean_cooper5820d agoTop Commenter

Yeah my buddy in Austin sent me a screenshot of his Discover Weekly and it was like 60% bands I've never even heard of. Meanwhile mine is just the same 12 Arctic Monkeys songs shuffled with whatever local indie band is playing the dive bar down the street this weekend. Spotify's algorithm is basically just looking at your zip code and calling it a day. It's like they built it by asking everyone in a 10 mile radius "hey what are you listening to" and then just copy pasting that into our playlists. Honestly makes me wonder if the whole "personalized" thing is just marketing BS.

riley_wood8420d ago

Try clearing your listening history and starting fresh with a few weeks of intentional searching. I had the same problem with my Discover Weekly being all local punk bands I didn't care about. Went into settings, hit "remove all listening history," then spent a week searching for specific genres I actually like. Now it's way better, still gets some misses but at least it's not just the same five bands from my neighbor's playlist. You gotta train the algorithm like a dog.

kelly63820d ago

Huh, I always thought the algorithm was scarily accurate for me but now I'm second guessing everything... maybe it's just picking up on whatever's trending nearby and I never noticed.

grays1320d ago

Man that's a whole other level of lazy algorithm right there @sean_cooper58. So if you moved to a new city would it just start showing you whatever's popular there instead of your actual taste? Kinda defeats the whole point of "discovering" anything new.