Ask HN: How does Spotify select songs for auto generated playlists?

3 points

2 years ago

I was recently looking at the "Viral 50 - Ukraine" playlist automatically generated by Spotify. I'm wondering how the algorithm works to generate such a playlist. Because it seems like it's possibly gamed for various reasons.

The current top 3 are:

1. A song by an artist with one song.

2. A remix of a 70s italian song.

3. And the most egregious is a Russian song titled "Yes, I'm Russian" with lyrics that talk about how they don't care about american sanctions.

For reference this is the playlist link. There are however some songs I could see making sense on this playlist but the top 3 are kind of indicative of most of the list. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZEVXbLwLH0YjrtGb?si=63680e0bfd264419

1 comment