'Algorithmic fatigue'
The music app I've been using for the last 14 years recently decided that I'm obsessed with rainstorms.
When I last listened to my Spotify Release Radar playlist — which for years reliably curated a decent selection of newly released music informed by my favorite artists — the lineup quickly took a turn for the worse. After new songs by familiar indie pop names like Japanese Breakfast and The Marias, there was a five-minute recording of rain falling followed by a short, ambient instrumental by a little-known alternative rock artist. Then, for its remaining 25 tracks, my playlist delivered a succession of rainstorms, nature sounds, and brown-noise frequencies — not exactly the stuff of a killer music festival lineup.
When Spotify launched Release Radar in 2016, it promised "a weekly selection of the newest releases that matter the most to you." Not only was the feature designed to delight music fans upon first listen, but it would get better over time, the company promised.
So why, nearly a decade later, was my latest Release Radar delivering 85% noise?
Sure, my girlfriend and I had recently started listening to "sleep sounds" — things like ocean waves and the hum of an airplane's engine — at night, but that didn't fully explain the issue. The algorithm hadn't made such a crucial curation error before.
I'm hardly the first Spotify subscriber to notice that the gears of its music recommendation engine have gotten rusty. Over the past year, fans have taken to Reddit, LinkedIn, and other platforms to complain that curated, for you playlists like Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and Daily Mix have gone downhill, resulting in what many describe as an "echo chamber" that feels more repetitive or off the mark than it once did. Random tracks from white-noise playlists or kids' music albums are popping up where they don't belong, ruining the listening experience.
Molly Holder, Spotify's senior director of product for personalization, disagreed that the quality of these curated playlists has declined. "People are discovering more new music and spending more time doing so," she said in a statement, adding that the company listens to user feedback, continues to enhance personal recommendations, and that listener engagement metrics are up.
But after talking with former Spotify employees, it seems likely that a combination of layoffs and shifting business priorities has hollowed out the platform's music discovery product. Essentially, in a quest for profitability, Spotify broke its algorithm.
One of the features that set Spotify apart from its intensifying competition over the years was the platform's man-meets-machine approach to music curation, especially its personalized, algorithmically curated playlists. Discover Weekly promised to introduce listeners to new music that they might like, Daily Mix turned their tastes into themed playlists, and Release Radar highlighted freshly released tracks. For years, these features seemed to elicit near-universal praise online and gave Spotify a competitive advantage just in time to fend off competition from giants like Apple and Amazon. The music discovery features are likely one reason it's been able to lead the global music subscription market. A recent EMARKETER report found that Americans spend over nine times as much time on Spotify as the next closest competitor. Lately, though, those same features have inspired frustration.
For many, Discover Weekly has gotten worse at delivering songs that align with their musical tastes, sometimes including songs they've already listened to on Spotify. Other users report that Release Radar misses new releases from artists they like or mistakenly includes tracks that came out weeks earlier. Release Radar has also started including less relevant music from what one Reddit user described as "random artists with under 50k listens" that seemed to come out of nowhere, while others bemoan the inclusion of what sounds like "AI garbage."
The most audible groan of disapproval came with the arrival of Spotify Wrapped last year. While the personalized year-end recap playlist had historically sparked a tsunami of positive online buzz each year, the 2024 edition prompted a far more mixed reaction. Listeners said it lacked personality and interesting insights into their music habits.
Jeffrey Smith, a self-described "Spotify diehard" who leads marketing for the online music marketplace Discogs, has become so frustrated by the platform's declining music discovery feature that he's considering switching to Apple Music.
"Over the last couple of years, Spotify has met my needs less and less," Smith said. "It's not really reflective of my listening behavior as much as it is reflective of what they want me to listen to. It's just a listening machine at this point, not a music platform."
Smith's affinity for Spotify started fading when he noticed one song — "Back on 74" by Jungle — kept popping up on his personalized Spotify playlists. While it's possible that he had checked the song out at some point, it wasn't something he enjoyed or actively listened to. Still, the song made its way from one personalized music recommendation feature to another and even started inspiring Spotify's algorithms to play similar songs.
"It just continued until I finally said, 'I can't take it,'" Smith said.
As a music obsessive working at a major marketplace for vinyl records, Smith has no shortage of sources of quality music recommendations. But the days of Spotify augmenting his organic music discovery appear to be over. If he keeps his Spotify subscription at all, he says it will be for the podcasts and audiobooks the company has added to its premium tier.
I've found myself in a similar conundrum. After largely dismissing the 2015 launch of Apple Music as a then-satisfied Spotify subscriber, I recently decided to give Apple's music service another try. Since its debut, Apple Music has prioritized human editors over algorithms for music curation. Where it does use data-driven personalization, the results are pretty solid, and crucially, free of rainstorms. While Spotify's new audiobook library makes it tempting to stay, its playlists no longer feel like the best in the business. Once my free trial of Apple Music is over, I'm planning to make the switch.
Music subscription services like Spotify spend an extraordinary amount of money — last year, the company said it spent $10 billion — to license their massive music catalogs from record labels, publishers, and other rightsholders. These high costs make it more challenging to turn an enduring profit, something Spotify only managed to do for the first time in 2024.
From Wall Street's perspective, Spotify is killing it as year-over-year metrics like subscribers and revenue continue to grow. But in the quest to please investors, some ex-Spotify employees think it has abandoned too much of the human element that makes music and the culture around it so special.
Doug Ford was a Spotify executive who oversaw editorial playlist curation from 2013 to 2018. He arrived via Spotify's acquisition of Tunigo, a Swedish company that specialized in expert-curated music playlists based on different genres and moods. The next year, Spotify acquired Echo Nest, a music data startup founded by MIT grads that used a mix of machine learning and data filtering to build Pandora-style music recommendation algorithms. Both teams built out Spotify's man-meets-machine music discovery system, which helped the company successfully weather new competition from tech giants like Apple and Amazon as it started to explore the possibility of going public.
You need to be a successful business in order to offer this utility to people. But they've discarded some of the human aspects of it, for sure.
"That was a really beautiful moment in Spotify's history," Ford said. "That mix of the intentional algorithmic and human curation to make a really deep product was great."
The results spoke for themselves. Spotify said the 2015 launch of Discover Weekly yielded 1.7 billion streams in its first five months and generated a weekly wave of social media buzz when listeners' Discover Weekly playlists were refreshed.
"Our goal with Discover Weekly was to make something that felt like a friend or someone who knew you well was making you a mixtape," Spotify's product lead at the time, Matt Ogle, told me in an interview. To accomplish that feeling, the algorithm drew heavily from how real flesh-and-blood music enthusiasts were curating playlists on the platform.
"That's why that thing was so good," Ford said. "It was taking all the inputs equally and letting things happen normally with the audience. Now it feels a little bit different."
Ford said things started changing in the lead-up to Spotify's 2018 initial public offering and the ensuing pressure to prove to investors that profitability was possible in the notoriously tight-margined music streaming business.
"The culture changed because it had to become a business," Ford said. "You need to be a successful business in order to offer this utility to people. But they've discarded some of the human aspects of it, for sure."
One way the company shifted was by finding cheaper content to use. As the journalist Liz Pelly outlines in her book "Mood Machine," Spotify's pre-IPO years saw an increasing reliance on what is known internally as "perfect fit content," a euphemism for cheaper-to-license audio and mood-specific stock music that is optimized for longer listening sessions. As more listeners turned to streaming services like Spotify for "chill vibes" playlists and background music for studying, the company realized it could save money on royalty costs by populating those playlists with the cheap stuff. That would certainly explain the astonishing number of rainstorm audio tracks being released in a given week.
Ford watched with dismay as the platform became flooded with generic mood music. Around the same time, he said, respected colleagues started leaving the company. After what he describes as "a particularly bad stretch" of feeling frustrated by what he saw as a dramatic culture shift, Ford accepted an offer from YouTube to lead content for its music subscription service in 2018.
In the years since, Spotify's music programming strategy has only skewed more heavily toward automation. Pelly writes that by late 2023, the number of Spotify employees working on editorial music curation (about 200 people globally) was less than one-third the size of the team focused on algorithmic curation and personalization, according to an internal org chart. Notably, that head count was before Spotify laid off 17% of its total workforce in December 2023, a drastic cost-cutting measure that CEO Daniel Ek later admitted "did disrupt our day-to-day operations more than we anticipated." Holder said that there are now over 130 employees working on editorial music curation.
One of the more palpable victims of Spotify's 2023 cuts was Glenn McDonald, the company's data alchemist (his real job title), who came from the original Echo Nest team and designed and built much of the original data infrastructure and algorithms powering Spotify's music recommendation engine. He designed the system that identifies a song's genre, which was crucial to effectively sort and recommend music and understand listeners' tastes.
"The genre system was human-guided," McDonald said. "After they laid me off, they replaced it with a system that is not human-guided. It's just machine learning. It looks at patterns of words in the titles and descriptions of playlists. That's objectively worse."
There's been a tradeoff in favor of high metrics, long listening sessions, and music that's just 'good enough.'
McDonald said the ripple effects of this change could be felt across Spotify's listening experience. Music was often misclassified, like when Swedish folk-metal bands were suddenly lumped in with all other folk artists. He said it took Spotify engineers a year to fully deactivate and replace the genre system he built, according to data output from the company's public API. One of the many data-filtering tools he built during his tenure at the company was a set of filters designed to fine-tune the music recommendations presented by Discover Weekly and Release Radar — and crucially, prevent things like nature sounds and ambient noise frequencies from showing up where they don't belong.
"They would have been flagged as anomalies on those dashboards, and I would have followed up with the teams in charge of those recommendations," McDonald explained. "Without those dashboards, probably nobody is even watching for these issues."
Holder said that Spotify's approach to classifying genres and subgenres has "evolved" from the legacy system built by McDonald and other Echo Nest engineers, but declined to get into technical specifics of how it works now or what advantages the new system introduces.
"We're always laser-focused on continually enhancing personalized recommendations," she said. Recent updates include improvements to genre accuracy and Discover Weekly recommendations, she added.
Ford said the changes at Spotify are part of a broader industry shift away from costlier human curation. "There's been a tradeoff in favor of high metrics, long listening sessions, and music that's just 'good enough,'" he said. "It's happening everywhere."
The result is what Ford calls a "rampant wave of algorithmic fatigue" among listeners, who are clamoring for more meaningful cultural experiences as online platforms become increasingly hyper-automated.
While the occasional bug and ongoing iteration are to be expected in any product, some longtime subscribers find it odd that Spotify would need to fix or enhance features that worked so well in the first place. My Release Radar delivering mostly white noise and rainstorms, for instance, feels like a fundamental failure of what that feature used to do so well. Over the course of reporting and writing this story over the last few weeks, I've checked back with my Release Radar. Each week, it has a few new songs, but it's still mostly rainstorms.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
What you need to know about Summerfest 2025 tickets, lineup, parking, bag policy and more
From Devo to Japanese Breakfast, Joy Oladokun to Hozier, Megan Thee Stallion to Saxsquatch, Summerfest 2025 is bringing about 600 performers from across the music spectrum to Milwaukee's lakefront. Once again, the format will be Thursday-through-Saturday weekends of entertainment at Maier Festival Park. Of note: The 2025 festival takes place on both the Juneteenth and Fourth of July holidays. Summerfest 2025 takes place June 19-21, June 26-28 and July 3-5 at Maier Festival Park, 200 N. Harbor Drive, in Milwaukee. Noon to midnight each day the festival is open. Visit General admission: $30 for a single ticket for one day. Tickets are not valid for admission to American Family Insurance Amphitheater shows, which require separate tickets. American Family Insurance Amphitheater: Tickets for these headlining shows vary by performer, and include general admission to Summerfest. These can be purchased through BMO Pavilion reserved seating: Reserved tickets (which include general admission to the festival) can be purchased through Prices vary. Level Up Viewing Deck at the Miller Lite Oasis: Buy these through the Summerfest store online. These tickets, which list at $75, include general admission to the festival and two beverages. Browse the complete lineup and find out about last-minute changes at the Journal Sentinel's Summerfest portal, The site includes both a traditional listing by date, time and stage and a separate guide to the daily schedule by musical genre. Yes. No cash is accepted at the box office, ticket windows or on the grounds. At cash-to-card locations, festivalgoers can convert cash to a reusable debit card with no additional fees. Outside the festival grounds, cash-to-card spots are at the North Gate, Mid Gate, and Summerfest box office. Inside the festival, cash-to-card spots are at the box office and inside American Family Insurance Amphitheater gates. Summerfest offers detailed information about parking at and near the festival at its parking page online, Parking in Maier Festival Park lots starts at $40. No tailgating is permitted. Parking in a dedicated motorcycle lot near the Mid Gate is $20 per day. An equally relevant question: Do I want to park at Summerfest? It can get crowded in the area immediately surrounding the festival. Summerfest encourages parking in downtown structures and lots, then walking to the grounds. Find more info on the festival's parking page. More: From the country music Lasso Lounge, to new food and merch, here's what's new at Summerfest Milwaukee County Transit System will operate shuttles every 15 minutes from the College Avenue, Brown Deer Park and Hales Corners Park and Ride lots. The shuttles are cashless. Roundtrip fare is $12 for people 12 and older, $6 for youth 11 and younger, seniors 65 and older, and people with qualifying disabilities. Also, the MCTS Connect 1 BRT line, which runs every 10 minutes, will stop at The Couture on Michigan Street and Lincoln Memorial Drive, a short walk from Summerfest's North Gate. Check for details. Many bars both north and south of the festival are running shuttles to Summerfest, included McBob's, 4919 W. North Ave.; Milwaukee Brat House, 1013 N. King Drive; Steny's Tavern & Grill, 800 S. Second St.; and Dale Z's, 3585 S. Howell Ave. Browse Alex Groth's detailed list of bars with shuttle plans at Yes, you can ride your bicycle to Summerfest. Bicycle parking spots are near the Mid, North, and South entrance gates. For more details on transportation to Summerfest, visit the festival's Getting Here page at From noon until 6:30 p.m. each day of the festival, wristbands to leave and re-enter are available at all gate areas. They are valid for single, same-day re-entry until 7 p.m. No re-entry wristbands will be issued after 6:30 p.m., and there are no re-entries after 7 p.m. Totes, purses and cinch bags can be no larger than 9-by-10-by-12 inches. Backpacks and any bags larger than 9-by-10-by-12 inches are not allowed. All bags are subject to inspection before entering Summerfest grounds. If you have privacy concerns, medicine, medical equipment and diapers can be placed in a small bag within a clear bag. But the small bag is still subject to inspection. For more bag infomation, visit the festival website's security page. Umbrellas, strollers, disposable and small cameras are permitted, though umbrellas and strollers are not allowed inside the American Family Insurance Amphitheater nor at the BMO Pavilion, and strollers are not allowed at the Miller Level Up Deck. Professional grade camera and video equipment are not permitted. On the festival website's security page, Summerfest has a detailed list of items visitors are not allowed to bring into the festival. In addition to backpacks and large bags, this list includes but is not limited to picnic baskets, outside food (unless needed for infants or medical reasons), cans and glass containers, coolers, drones, alcohol, drugs, fireworks, selfie sticks and tripods, skateboards and stadium seats. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Summerfest 2025: Lineup, tickets, parking, bag policy and more
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Spotify Stock Has Soared 57% in 2025, but Here's 1 Big Reason Investors Should Be Cautious
Spotify operates the world's largest music streaming platform, and it's investing heavily in technology to maintain its edge over the competition. Spotify continues to deliver strong financial results, driving its stock to a 57% gain in 2025 already. Spotify stock is now extremely expensive by at least two widely used valuation metrics, which could limit its upside from here. 10 stocks we like better than Spotify Technology › The S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) was down by as much as 15% earlier this year on the back of simmering global trade tensions, which were ignited by President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs in April. The index has since recovered its losses, and it's now sitting on a modest year-to-date gain of 2%. But investors who bought Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) stock at the start of the year have earned an eye-popping 57% return as of this writing (June 18). In fact, the stock never dipped into the red at all, despite the turmoil in the broader market. Shares of the music streaming giant are now trading at a record high, and while the company's future looks extremely bright, there is one glaring reason investors should be cautious from here. According to Statista, Spotify has a 31.7% global market share in the music streaming industry. It's a long way ahead of Tencent Music in second place, with 14.4% of the market. Most music streaming platforms feature very similar content catalogs, so they have to compete with one another on price, technology, and by offering other content formats. That's why Spotify invested heavily to become one of the world's top podcast platforms. Plus, during the first quarter of 2025 (ended March 31), the company said users spent 44% more time watching video content compared to the year-ago period, so it introduced a new compensation model to encourage creators to make video versions of their podcasts to capitalize on that engagement. This new system paid out over $100 million during the first quarter alone, which could result in a flood of new content from creators who want to earn more money. Spotify is also investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver the best user experience from a technological perspective. AI is a big part of the platform's recommendation engine, because it quickly learns what each user likes and feeds them more of it. But Spotify has also launched a series of user-facing features powered by AI like AI Playlist, which can generate a list of songs based on a simple prompt from the user, whether it be a movie, feeling, animal, or even a color. These AI features are designed to keep users engaged so they spend more time on the platform, which increases the chances Spotify becomes something they can't live without. At the end of the first quarter of 2025, Spotify had 268 million paying subscribers, and 423 million free users monetized through advertising. The paying subscriber base is growing slightly faster, which is a big positive because it accounts for 90% of the company's revenue. According to Wall Street's consensus estimate (provided by Yahoo! Finance), Spotify could generate a record $20.5 billion in revenue during 2025, which would be a 13.7% increase from the prior year. Analysts then expect revenue to come in at $23.7 billion in 2026, representing an accelerated growth rate of 15.7%. But the real growth story is on the bottom line, because Spotify is carefully managing its costs to drive profitability. The company's total operating expenses fell by 2% during the first quarter, which helped send its free cash flow soaring by a whopping 158% year over year to $615 million. Wall Street thinks Spotify will deliver $10.33 in earnings per share (EPS) in 2025, which would be a 63% jump from last year. Analysts will then look for $14.88 in EPS in 2026, representing a further 44% growth. I've painted a very positive picture of Spotify so far, but investors need to carefully consider its valuation before buying the stock. It's trading at a price-to-sales (P/S) ratio of 8.6, which is uncharted territory, because it's the most expensive level since the stock went public in 2018: Plus, based on Spotify's trailing-12-month EPS, its stock is trading at a hefty price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of 119. In other words, it's an eye-popping five times more expensive than the S&P 500 index, which trades at a P/E ratio of 23.7. Even if we value Spotify stock using Wall Street's forecast EPS for 2025 and 2026, the stock is still trading at forward P/E ratios of 69 and 48 for those years, respectively. In other words, if you buy Spotify stock today and the company's financial results come in exactly as Wall Street expects, it will still be twice as expensive as the S&P 500 in 18 months from now. That doesn't leave much room for upside. Simply put, Spotify stock just doesn't seem like a great value for investors who want to see gains in the next couple of years. But the picture might look a little different for investors with a longer-term horizon, because CEO Daniel Ek previously issued a forecast suggesting the company could achieve $100 billion in annual revenue by 2032. That would be a fivefold increase from where Spotify's 2025 revenue is expected to come in, so its stock actually looks cheap right now from that perspective. However, several things can change over the next seven or eight years -- new competitors might emerge, and technologies like AI could change the way we consume content entirely. As a result, buying Spotify stock at the current level still takes some resolve. Before you buy stock in Spotify Technology, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Spotify Technology wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $659,171!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $891,722!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 995% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Anthony Di Pizio has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Spotify Technology and Tencent. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Spotify Stock Has Soared 57% in 2025, but Here's 1 Big Reason Investors Should Be Cautious was originally published by The Motley Fool
Hamilton Spectator
18 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Don't regulate us like radio, music streamer Spotify tells CRTC
OTTAWA - Music streamer Spotify says Canada's federal broadcast regulator shouldn't impose rules meant for radio on streaming services. Appearing before a CRTC hearing Friday, company representatives compared regulating Spotify like a radio station to treating Uber like a horse and buggy operation. 'To apply yesterday's tools to today's platforms risks dulling Canada's success on the global music stage,' said Xenia Manning, Spotify's director of global music policy. 'It is essential to assess whether a real problem exists that justifies regulatory intervention. In our view, the evidence is clear. There is no market failure in audio streaming that would warrant intervention by the CRTC.' In its written submission, Spotify argued the CRTC doesn't have the jurisdiction to extend rules governing commercial negotiations and disputes in the broadcast sector to online players. Spotify said the Broadcasting Act doesn't give the CRTC the authority to 'regulate the terms of trade between online undertakings, including good faith negotiations and commercial disputes.' It said the CRTC's proposals 'would see it imposing dispute resolution and commercial negotiation requirements on online undertakings that are plainly outside the scope of broadcasting.' The CRTC is holding a hearing on market dynamics as part of its work to implement the Online Streaming Act, which updated broadcasting laws to capture online platforms. During the hearing, large telecom and broadcasting companies like Bell and Rogers called on the CRTC to loosen existing rules for traditional players. They took aim at regulations governing how cable channels must be packaged and disputes about carriage of cable channels. Bell, which appeared Wednesday, asked the CRTC to get rid of the rule the regulator implemented nearly a decade ago requiring companies to offer a $25 basic cable package. In its opening statement Friday, Rogers asked the CRTC to dramatically reduce regulation of cable companies. Colette Watson, president of Rogers' media division, said less than half of Canadian households now subscribe to cable, satellite or IPTV service. 'Canadian ownership groups cannot survive another decade of disproportionate regulation,' she said. The CRTC is holding a series of hearings as part of its work under the Online Streaming Act. Spotify, along with Amazon and Apple, is fighting in court an earlier order requiring streamers to make CRTC-ordered financial contributions to Canadian content and news. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 20, 2025.
