Even off the top of the charts, this seems to happen all the time on Spotify on their automatically-generated playlists, especially the "song radio" lists. It plays Lucinda Williams's "Fruits of My Labor" for me all the time, which is a good song – I'm not gonna skip it but, you know, I like a lot of other songs by her, too. That song has nearly twice as many streams as her next most popular one, which just doesn't track for me. It seems like maybe their algorithm becomes self-fulfilling.
And then you get stuck with something you hate. For a while it kept feeding me Wayne Shorter's "Porta de Areia." I love Shorter, but it's not typical for him and it's definitely the kind of song where if you don't like it, you really really hate it. It's taken me a long time to convince Spotify not to play it for me.
I just played Sweater Weather on YouTube. I don't think I've heard that song before. It's so weird when a song can be so popular, yet I miss it entirely.
Even off the top of the charts, this seems to happen all the time on Spotify on their automatically-generated playlists, especially the "song radio" lists. It plays Lucinda Williams's "Fruits of My Labor" for me all the time, which is a good song – I'm not gonna skip it but, you know, I like a lot of other songs by her, too. That song has nearly twice as many streams as her next most popular one, which just doesn't track for me. It seems like maybe their algorithm becomes self-fulfilling.
And then you get stuck with something you hate. For a while it kept feeding me Wayne Shorter's "Porta de Areia." I love Shorter, but it's not typical for him and it's definitely the kind of song where if you don't like it, you really really hate it. It's taken me a long time to convince Spotify not to play it for me.
Fascinating read. Just ordered the book. Great work, thank you @chris
Thank you!
“Bless the Telephone” 😭
I just played Sweater Weather on YouTube. I don't think I've heard that song before. It's so weird when a song can be so popular, yet I miss it entirely.
I just searched "505" on YouTube and it has 695 mln views.
That’s odd. Link me. Still significantly fewer streams than Spotify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU9mHegkTc4
Thanks. It’s says it’s unavailable for me. Guess that’s why it didn’t appeal. I’ll try to update with another example.
I feel like most people listen to music passively, so won’t notice unless recommendations become tremendously bad