HACKER Q&A
📣 mrobins

Why is Spotify playing so many covers?


Over the past few months I’ve noticed Spotify’s algorithm playing more and more covers, especially on my Discover Weekly playlist. I first noticed it with a bad “Harvest Moon” version the week after Neil Young pulled his catalog. Since then the volume of covers has increased substantially, a mix of straight covers and instrumental or jazz renditions of indie/rock songs. A couple weeks ago it got to the point where my Discover Weekly played 6 covers in a row.

Is this intentional on Spotify’s part? Do these covers have cheaper royalties than the originals? Have I somehow trained their model to think this is what I love? Does not skipping songs tagged as covers quickly enough train the model to think I like them? Maybe because I listen to lots of rock, jazz and classical the algorithm thinks a jazz interpretation of “Iron Man” is what I love? It feels like if you “over trained” and ruined a good Pandora station way back when.

Spotify used to be an excellent source for music discovery but these covers are straight up aggravating. Between this and their hostile UI changes pushing podcasts (I will never use Spotify for podcasts) I’m becoming motivated to jump ship.

  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
Personally I go looking for covers on YouTube all the time. I think how Yello Magic Orchestra’s cover of ‘Fire Cracker’ is much better than the original or how Richard Cheese got the emotional tone of ‘Fight for your right’ correct.

I remember finding out that Freebase knew about 200 tracks titled ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ and these were copies from greatest hits collections, live versions, remasters, covers, etc. Finding the ‘right’ track in this case is challenging if only because of the large number of candidate tracks.

👤 speedgoose
I have a conspiracy theory that expensive songs have very negative weights in their recommendations engines.

But people still like popular songs so we eventually ended up with all these covers being listened and recommended again and again.

👤 recursivenature
The Verge had a write up on this years ago that answers your question [1].

I only remember it because I had the same reaction you did!

The short version is - different royalty rates + algorithm preferences.

While it may seem immaterial to each user, the ability to lower the royalty cost on billions of plays is likely material to Spotify's margins, which are already caught between the cost of the platform and the strongly defended royalty structure on most music.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/8/9260675/spotify-cover-song...

👤 HardwareLust
Just curious, but if you "jumped ship", where would you go? I'm also about at the end of my rope with Spotify and the others I've tried, like to the point where I'm about ready to switch back to ripping CD's and putting tracks on my phone or an Ipod but I would sorely miss the recommendation algorithm, even as bad as it is.

What other streaming service is even comparable?