The other day, on a whim, I clicked on the Ditch The MuuMuu Radio option that is available in Spotify.
If you're not familiar with this feature, Spotify provides an auto generated playlist of 50 songs for every artist in their incomprehensibly vast library.
According to Spotify, “Spotify Radio is a feature that creates a playlist based on any Song, Album or Artist you select. The playlist also updates over time to keep fresh."
How does one find it? Simple: Go to any Song, Album or Artist on Spotify, select the three dots icon, then select Go to Artist radio.
While I have no idea precisely how the algorithm works, it essentially put 7 songs from our debut CD “Worth Its Wait” into a playlist with 43 other songs by various artists - many known to me but others completely off my radar.
You can see the start of the list in the screen shot above. DTM's “Bumpy Road” is followed by The Nails (new to me), JJ Cale (a legend!), a very odd version of “Father And Son” by Johnny Cash and Fiona Apple, John Mellencamp, and Yusuf/Cat Stevens before spinning another DTM tune called “Flag”.
A partial list of known artists includes: Mark Knopfler, Pretenders, The Waterboys, Tom Petty, The Traveling Wilburys, Cracker, Bruce Cockburn, Guy Clark, Neil Diamond, Commander Cody And The Lost Planet Airmen (!) and The Rolling Stones.
Lesser known or flat out new to me: Dave Dobbyn, Tommy McClain, The The, Neil Murray, Archie Roach, Hamilton Leithauser, and John Waters.
So… what do I think of the Ditch The MuuMuu playlist? Having invested 3+ hours listening to it from start to end, I can say with total confidence that most of the songs are ones that I enjoyed. But why the various artists were chosen for Ditch The MuuMuu Radio, I have no clue!
Does the algorithm sift through the millions of songs in the Spotify library to find ones it thinks are similar to Ditch The MuuMuu in mood/vibe? In genre? In tempo, In lyric content? In vocal style? In instrumentation?
The answer seems to be “Mood” - but that is a very, very vague criteria, right? One thought, posted in Redit by pavarottilaroux is “any possible piece of discernible data that Spotify collects from artists and users. There are likely several dozen if not hundreds of data points that they use to generate your related artists and artist radio. Some of the datapoints can be more straightforward like your music genre, tempo, key, etc. some can get way more detailed like your audience’s location, age, gender, genres they listen to, top songs, the list goes on.”
Regardless - given that Spotify pays artists roughly $0.002 per stream, Tim and I won't sacrifice too much sleep pondering this mystery. We're just glad that our enormous worldwide popularity is generating so much income for all those well known and new artists in the Ditch The MuuMuu playlist. Glad to help!
Eric
Boston
July 3, 2024