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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   2835 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

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Have any of you tried feeding a list of your favorite songs to ChatGPT / Claude and have it analyze your music taste?

I've long been bothered by Spotify's utter garbage recommendations, so I sent my 500 track 80s playlist to ChatGPT and had a long conversation with it about other examples I like and don't like. The result is frankly eerily accurate and manages to simultaneously explain my distaste for all post-1996 popular music and how Kraftwerk, trad Irish music, 80s pop and mid 90s Eurodance all fit neatly and consistently under the same "me like"-umbrella.

I haven't gotten any good recommendations.

It really really varies what you like. Personally the best place to find new music is on SoundCloud and basically see who the artists you like are listening to, because usually there's some overlap with what they do. And then just repeat until the end of time.

I also tend to search Desuarchive which is an archive site for 4chan's /mu/ board. 4chan itself is complete trash, but I've found a lot of nice recs by searching for a specific album and seeing what else is posted alongside it. But /mu/ has a certain taste, so it doesn't always match up.

Algorithms are hit or miss, I've had some great recs on YouTube and SoundCloud, but AI had been garbage.

Yeah, I've tried, multiple times. The recommendations were even worse than Spotify's.

To be clear, I use AI a lot and find it very useful, but I don't think it understands music very well.

The recommendations were even worse than Spotify's.

How? Seriously?

For me Spotify's recommendations are so garbage that it keeps suggesting different variants of songs I already have on a playlist and songs I've disqualified a dozen times. It could be trivially improved by multiple orders of magnitude without even requiring any intelligence and all that could probably be done by a fresh junior level programmer if they just added "don't recommend this song ever" and "don't recommend this artist for this playlist". As it is, Spotify keeps shuffling the same two or three dozen songs over and over in the recommendations, none of which I like, just because they're "popular" among people who listen to the artists I have on my playlist.

I don't think it understands music very well.

It doesn't directly understand music (*) and I ran into that when I asked for recommendations about "guitar music" within 80s pop rock genres, as that would have required it to actually listen to a bunch of tracks and analyze specific sub-attributes in them.

It does however seem to have a good understanding of what's been written about music and coupled with being able to follow instructions ("If an obvious major artist isn't already on my list, assume I don't like them") that worked wonders for me in honing out my true music preference profile and then getting recommendations both within the 80s rock & pop genres (more new additions than I'd found in the last 6 months by myself) and in completely different genres ("You don't like any classical music but do like Thomas Tallis? Check out these renaissance sacred polyphony polyphony composers." / "You hate all jazz but somehow don't mind Don Ellis' Whiplash? Try these specific tracks in that same composed, odd-meter, riff-driven corner of Jazz.").

Basically a combination of "analyze the common patterns across a large tightly curated playlist and ask me questions to further hone in on them" and "use prior analysis to suggest compatible music in genre X or across subgroup Y".

YMMV of course.

*Edit: It can analyze uploaded mp3s on some level but doesn't seem to have much internal detailed musical knowledge of existing songs as such.

For me Spotify's recommendations are so garbage that it keeps suggesting different variants of songs I already have on a playlist and songs I've disqualified a dozen times.

This has literally never happened to me. I wonder how we can have such different experiences. Are they A/B testing or something?

It does however seem to have a good understanding of what's been written about music

Absolutely, i considered writing that in my previous reply. My issue with this is that what is being written about music is often useless or even anti-information about the music itself.

Perhaps i need to give it another go but I tried with Sol and it was as bad as ever IME.

For me Spotify's recommendations are so garbage that it keeps suggesting different variants of songs I already have on a playlist and songs I've disqualified a dozen times.

This has literally never happened to me. I wonder how we can have such different experiences. Are they A/B testing or something?

See the attached image (top for my playlist and second from bottom for identical suggestion). It's never been able to understand that song A from artist B is the goddamn same song, nevermind whether it's from the album or any of half a dozen compilations.

If it's A/B testing, it sure is persistent as I've had the same problems since I started building that playlist back in 2018.

/images/1790572703547444.webp

That isn't the only duplicate in those recommendations, btw. Alive and Kicking is also already on the playlist, just from different a different variant of the same album (regular instead of super deluxe).

Bizarre.

Btw, I didn't downvote you.

It truly is bizarre. How do you even make a recommendation system that bad without immediately recognizing the problems and coming up with some halfway decent fix for them?

The result is frankly eerily accurate

Well, what is it?

This is the closest "top 10 things I strongly care about in music"-list I've managed to work out with ChatGPT. You'll have to excuse me pasting it directly from ChatGPT, given that you literally asked for it.

  • 1. Strong melodic identity and contour — memorable, shaped lines with recognizable peaks, turns and resolutions; melody should be one of the main carriers of the track’s identity rather than an optional layer over groove or texture.
  • 2. Strong harmonic movement and contour — meaningful chord movement, voicing, voice-leading and harmonic trajectory; harmony should contribute real musical identity rather than merely support rhythm, vocals or production.
  • 3. Clear musical objects — riffs, motifs, melodies, bass lines, chord figures or other substantial things to grab onto.
  • 4. Development with memory — worthwhile ideas recur, evolve and return rather than constantly being discarded.
  • 5. Clear arrangement hierarchy and breathing room — foreground/background roles, pauses, decay, handoffs, and instruments knowing when not to play.
  • 6. Spatial depth and contrast — a strong sense of acoustic space, with dry/wet, near/far and intimate/huge contrasts rather than everything inhabiting the same plane.
  • 7. High musical information with low perceptual clutter — richness is good, but the important ideas must remain separable and intelligible.
  • 8. Rhythmic character throughout the musical material — rhythm is especially rewarding when melody, phrasing, riffs, accompaniment, bass, percussion, articulation, syncopation, or their interaction contribute recognizable shape and propulsion, rather than rhythm being reduced to a generic beat underneath the track.
  • 9. Production and timbre reinforcing rather than replacing the music — distinctive voices, guitar tones, synth textures, reverb, delay, drums and distortion should expose, intensify or dramatize strong musical ideas rather than substitute for them.
  • 10. Contrast and selective emphasis rather than permanent fullness — not everything should be loud, sustained, dense, wet, foregrounded or emotionally maximal all the time; big moments work because quieter, drier, simpler or emptier states exist around them.

Quite a few of them I already knew but couldn't articulate so well while some of it was genuinely new revelations (like "melodic contour" - I always knew I liked strong melodies but that's more detailed and accurate and describes why I strongly dislike some changes in covers while having no problem with others).

The interesting thing is that those had largely solidified by the age of 12 or so with only their relative strength changing after that. Since then my musical taste has expanded a lot but mostly through exposure to more and wider music. It also explains why good music starts dropping off a cliff around '89-'91 (dry, flat, in-your-face style replaces arrangement hierarchy and spatial depth) and completely craters around '96 (groove, vocal delivery and modern production tricks replace melody, harmony, riffs and other pitched musical objects). I never quite understood why so many people get mad when I articulate why I dislike almost all modern music.

So I end up liking songs ranging from 90s Eurodance to prog rock with extremely strange parts to celtic folk to 80s pop while being simultaneously very selective about what I listen to.

Cool. Would be interesting to try this myself, I suspect I'm the opposite in some ways (I care way more about rhythm and groove than melody, so I think the 90s were actually a great time for music). Did you just dump your playlist into chatgpt?

Yes. I've curated a large 500 song "Best of 80s" Spotify playlist since 2018 which I exported to .csv and just dumped to Spotify with "analyze this and suggest additions that ". Then I gave it feedback on those additions and continued with free form conversation (eg. "I've been a huge fan of Mark Knopfler since seeing him on the Live Aid broadcast" and "I notice sharp decline around 89-91 and complete stop around 96. Explain why") so it ended up asking me a bunch of clarifying questions. It probably helps that I can usually articulate why I like or don't like some song (even if it's just "The song has nothing for me to grab onto" / "it's too bland" / "Catchy AF and I love how intentionally cheesy it is"). I set thinking to high so it wouldn't do only cursory analysis and spent some actual time doing the analysis.

The limitation is that ChatGPT doesn't seem to have much (if any) builtin understanding of the actual musical details of individual tracks, so if you want "guitar riffs exactly like in song X", it can't help you much if nobody has written a review that talks about said riffs in other songs. It does seem to be able to read tabs / sheet music.

The prog link goes to the same song as the 90s Eurodance link.

Goddammit. I swear the copy functionality is broken in my windows for some reason... Here is the fixed link (and updated in the original). Thanks for pointing it out.

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