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556 points greenie_beans | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.637s | source
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legitster ◴[] No.42466978[source]
This article is fascinating. But what's on display here is less of a nefarious plan from Spotify to replace famous Katy Perry with AI - instead we get to see something much more specific: a behind-the-scenes of how those endless chill/lo-fi/ambient playlists get created.

Which is something I've always wondered! How does the Lofi Girl channel on Youtube always have so much new music from artists I have never heard from?

The answer is surprising: real people and real instruments! (At least at the time of writing). Third-party stock music ("muzak") companies hiring underemployed jazz musicians to crank out a few dozen derivative songs every day to hack the algorithm.

> “Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch,” he explained. “And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.” With the jazz musician’s particular group, the session typically includes a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer. An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction.”

I think there's an easy and obvious thing we can do - stop listening to playlists! Seek out named jazz artists. Listen to your local jazz station. Go to jazz shows.

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chrisweekly ◴[] No.42468523[source]
Interesting take.

For my part, I'm grateful for Spotify's "exclude from taste profile" feature. This lets me leverage my personally-curated "Flowstate" playlist ^1 for hours at a time while I'm working -- tracks that I've hand-picked to facilitate a "getting things done" mindset / energized mood / creativity or go-time vibe, and can stand to listen to on repeat -- without "polluting" my regular music preferences. It's apples and oranges, mostly - there's music I want to listen and attend to (as a guitar player and lifelong avid music listener across many genres including "serious" jazz), and there's audio (which could as easily be programmatically generated / binaural beats, whatever -- eg brain.fm) that I use as a tool specifically to help shape my cognitive state for focus / productivity.

I think it's kind of funny how some people get confused about the fact that there are many reasons to listen to many kinds of music.

When it comes to music discovery on Spotify, the "go to radio" option from a given track or album is a reliable way to surface new-to-me things. I usually prefer this proactive seeking to the playlists spotify's algo generates for me. (shrug)

1. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...

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1. dmonitor ◴[] No.42473840[source]
> For my part, I'm grateful for Spotify's "exclude from taste profile" feature

This is my first time being made aware of this. Fantastic option that more websites should adopt

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2. klabetron ◴[] No.42478272[source]
Anyone know if YouTube has it? The number of times I switch the YouTube app to Incognito just to avoid whatever links my friends send from influencing my recommendations…
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3. m5l ◴[] No.42482966[source]
Removing videos from my watch history seems to work for this. The note on this page[1] seems to indicate that watch history is what's driving your recommendations (they disappear if you don't have enough history):

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725