Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's
worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need
to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than
one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been
poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and
they have a major artist conflation problem. When you first show up it asks you to pick some artists to seed your
experience with. I put in the first few bands that came to mind: I would also have included some bands like Nightingale and Nova, but
since these are common band names there wasn't any way for me to find
the right artist profile in search, so I left them out initially. I
also got bored quickly: please don't take this as an exhaustive list
of my favorite bands! I felt like I'd picked out a pretty clear "modern contra dance music"
cluster in musician space, so I was disappointed when these were my
first five "My Soundtrack" recommendations: These are... nothing like the cluster my selections were pointing at.
Recommendations should not be that hard anymore; a small cheap LLM
(ex: Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or Claude Haiku 4.5) would do far better.
Actually, let's try them. Asking "If someone liks Airdance, The Free
Raisins, Crowfoot, Perpetual e-Motion, Great Bear, Kingfisher, and
Buddy System, what other artists might they like?" Gemini suggests Pete's
Posse, Elixir, KGB, Hotpoint String Band, and Toss the Possum; Claude suggests Elixir, The Stringrays, The Moving Violations, Nor'easter,
Gallimaufry, Wake Up Robin, Countercurrent, and Giant Robot Dance.
These are great suggestions; I like all of these bands, and they're
clearly within the cluster. It's easy for me to just not use Amazon's auto-playlists, but it turns
out they're also pretty confused about artists. For example, here's
the search results I see for a band I know well: Makes sense! We're not the first people to think "Kingfisher" would
make a good band name. But then when I select what looks like the
right one, I see it's actually conflated us and another band: Getting these right can't be that hard; I've never seen this problem
on Spotify (and it gets this one right: us , them ).
It's also not just Kingfisher: part of why I couldn't find the right Nova is that they've been
mixed in with dozens of other artists, and incorrectly styled as
"NoVa": And "Great Bear" is mostly some other band with twenty AI-generated
covers: Crowfoot, Nightingale, and Buddy System too: In fact, of the nine bands I originally thought to include (Airdance,
The Free Raisins, Nightingale, Crowfoot, Nova, Perpetual e-Motion,
Great Bear, Kingfisher, Buddy System), only two (the Free Raisins and
Perpetual e-Motion) had a single coherent artist entity. I've started
the process of trying to claim the Amazon artist profile for
Kingfisher so I can clean our piece of this up, though I'm a bit
grumpy about needing to. This is mostly just me complaining, because I don't expect to use this
much (I usually listen to freely available podcasts if I listen to
anything), but it's depressingly low quality work from Amazon. I do
also wonder if some of the reason their recommendations are so off is
for kids under 13 to use a family account on a tablet it has to be an
Amazon Fire one.) Comment via: facebook , lesswrong , mastodon , bluesky