[FEEDBACK] What do you think of "Flow"? | Deezer Community, bringing music lovers together

Hi all,

We wish to collect some of your feedback on Flow, that's why we are opening a new dedicated thread for you to share your feelings on this feature.

Do you like it? Why? What do you think we are missing?

Please be as detailed as you can in your comments, cheers!

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I just started using Deezer today but, so far, I am really liking Flow. It is doing a good job of finding music I like. I am unsure how Flow continues to take influence from additional music I like. Perhaps there can be a way to see what is influencing Your Flow with ways to remove or add additional influences.

I have not tried Deezer in the car yet so I may have additional feedback after I do that.

Thanks for making a generally awesome service.

What bothers me most is that it plays too much of my songs marked as favorites. For that I can play just that. Flow should learn from genres, authors that I listen. And then play something similar. Maybe it would be good to have some settings, like: check if you would like that flow play your favorite songs, check if you want to hear only songs that you haven't played yet ... I know, that perhaps most of listeners like only to hear songs that they already now. I would like to find what I've been missing. What is good out there (in my taste) but haven't heard it.

Thank you for asking. Hope to see some changes.

I like Flow though a few ideas:-

use location to suggestion tracks e.g. if I'm in the gym then play upbeat

use gps to suggest e.g. if I'm running then play upbeat

Otherwise it's my go to if I'm not sure what to listen to 🙂

Hi @Roninnanaki and welcome to the Deezer Fam! All feedbacks are appreciated so thanks fro taking the time to share your view on our feature

Hi @Mirtma you're right, Flow learns from what you listen to and have added as favorite to your library to then create "the best mix" based on your music taste. Flow should recommend you new songs, genres or artists based on what you have actively told it you like/dislike, but it's constantly learning and needs you to keep adding to your favorites.

Perhaps you should try the "Discover" playlist within Flow, as it will bring you new music you haven’t heard before that we think you’ll love 😉.

Hi @Rob Igo that's a very good point indeed, it could be good to have some kind of setting within Flow to allow users to do that, it's something our Product Team could look at and determine if it's feasible 😉.

It seems like Flow takes my playlists into consideration. I would like to mention that I sometimes build playlists for other people, mix tape style, and that those playlists do not reflect my personal tastes. Best example I can think of would be the playlists my wife and I create for my 7 year old son. I also built a playlist of 80's music for a themed party. I tend to avoid Flow.

to be honest i don't think it's the best, either i have favorite everything i like either it doesn't know what to suggest

i mostly listen to rap and i didn't ever get a suggestion that i liked,for example i never knew i liked Joyner Lucas but after i saw the callab with em on kamikaze i searched him up i fell in love with Joyner but flow never gave joyner to me

i don't know how flow works but if it goes by"ok this guy is into rap,what kind of rap? 90's rap ok wu tang clan it is" if it only goes by the type of music you listen to i think it done wrong,i think it should be done by

1: artists you listen to

2: what other people that listen to the same artists also listen to (beside the ones you share)ex: this guy listens to em and Joyner Lucas, this guy also listens to em and Joyner but also listens to Dr. Dre and snoop dogg, lets but in the 1st guys flow Dr Dre and snoop dogg

3: location(as in country) like seriously i live in Romania listen to some Romanian rap but i only got like 2-3 Romanian rap songs

that's all i have, hope it hopes

I've been listening to Flow for more than a year now, and main issues in my opinion are:

Flow is very limited/boring in selecting tracks. It thinks I might like The White Stripes, but it keeps throwing "Seven Nation Army" at me over and over again, and that's it. It doesn't try to suggest something new if I skip, it doesn't offer more if I continue listening - just the same selection of 1-3 tracks for any given artist. This also leads to next 2 points.
Flow seems to have no respect for skipping. I don't want to dislike "Seven Nation Army", but I also got a bit tired of hearing it over and over again and skipping it each time. Especially that I'm not listening to The White Stripes (at the moment, at least).
Flow also seems to have little respect for listening history. I have listened to all (available) Phantogram albums, and have personal favorites which I'm sure Deezer is aware of, but Flow just keeps playing "Black Out Days" and 1-2 other songs, that's all.
Dislike feature seems to have no respect for artist being disliked. I don't like LP and I know I'm not going to listen to her. But disliking one track only leads to another one popping up, and I have to dislike that one too, and then the next one. And there's no way to dislike a band/artist in whole.
Flow seems to require "targeted" listening to stay actual. The longer I'm listening to Flow only, without listening to specific artist/album, the more far off the queue becomes, to a point where I have to skip every second track.

Another thing I'm not entirely sure of, but I think Flow is rather slow in learning. I think I started getting anything remotely decent only after I've had 100+ hours of "targeted" listening, and I've been mostly avoiding Flow before that because of poor track selection.

I wish flow can play music that are not already saved as my favorites so I can save songs I have not yet heard. Flow always repeat songs that I already have and that is not necessary as I can play songs in my favorites file if I want to.

Mostly positive!

I love the daily and weekly playlists. I think they're the best recommendations I have tried so far (Google Music, Spotify, Tidal).

I wish the general 'Flow' didn't feature as much music that seems to be just popular and instead more of my personal tastes.

As many stated here already it's mainly the really limited track selection of the algorithm that makes Flow seem so bad.

I maint hear songs there that I already have liked or are so popular that everybody knows them.

What would be an great addition is a bunch of rather unknown artists who could truly suprise the listener for ones. You could do so over the related artists and maybe choose some from the same genre but below 100 followers.

Greatings

Tom

flow is working quite bad last time, it's suggesting tracks that I was dislike many time, it's suggesting jazz, pop music but I had never like them! I'd like to be able to choose country and genres

Its amazing for discovering more and more music. But I do have a suggestion

Location

And Yes I mean location. I live in Asia for example and I don't want all my songs in "Road Trip" songs to be about some cowboy in west america. If you know what mean.

So depending upon the location where someone lives

Put in a domestic song after every 5th or 6th song, as a surprise
Make a department focusing on music preferences in different parts of the world and target the audience with that approach
People like surprises so bring in their favorite tracks when they least expect them

Well you'r the pros. So thats it

Thanks for making something so amazing and keeping it cheap!!!!

I am relatively new to Deezer, having come from Apple Music.

the flow idea is great, but it would be nice if as a user I could have several custom flows, like I used to have custom stations in Apple Music

I have a very wide taste range and would like a flow for EDM, a flow for rock, a flow for reggae and a flow for lounge for example... each independently influenced by my tastes in those genres and my choices in those flows.

Having just one flow that's trying to combine led zep, deadmau5 & bob marley into one mix does not end well.

I've been using FLOW for about a year.

I have about 350 songs and dozens of albums and artists in my favorites.

The biggest problem is FLOW keeps playing the same few dozens songs. It should play at least the number of songs in my favorites plus some new songs.

A second issue is the proportion of new songs to already liked songs FLOW plays. I realize this is a matter of personal preference, so the best solution is to make it a selectable variable ("% new songs" - 0-100).

Further to this, the ability to "seed" a custom flow with a particular song, artist, genre, playlist... and then have it evolve from there (pandora style) would be amazing

@S t e r e o : You should have more than one Flow station on your home page, maybe they are missing yet, because you are a new user. Normally you will have the original Flow, three "Inspired by..." stations which sort of aim at genres and a Discover playlist which is updated weekly with new and old releases you may not know, but like.

Concerning Similar Tracks Radio stations, it seems that they already exist in the Android beta version, as one Reddit user reported recently.

Thank you for asking for feedback on Flow. I find that the biggest problem with Flow is it seems to factor too much collective data regarding genres and what other people are listening to. The result seems to be a tendency for popular music that my ears are tired of hearing and nothing from the lesser known scenes that are related to the artists I actually listen to.

Suppose there is an artist A0 and A1, A2 and A3 are the artists related to A0. Also suppose that there are other artists B0, C0... Z0. Suppose that these are the artists I have been listening to, I would like to hear music from the intersection of the artists belonging to A, B, C ... Z sets. With the greatest priority given to music that has not been played before and that is not on the charts as I would have already heard it before from other sources. Factors such as listening frequency and how recent the listens would be need to be included as well. I would like the ability to ignore my location or any other general detail. The more I listen to this other music outside of Flow the more the sets are expanded to include the related artists of those related artists. Thus my music appreciation and taste grows. The selections by Flow could begin from what other users listen to most on your platform (not the charts) and specialising to more personalised selections as it learns more of my listening history. The favouriting business is too much effort. I am not going to favourite every release I enjoyed. Most of the time, I would have enjoyed it too much to think about favouriting.

Another issue is the way Flow is marketed. It seems Flow, based on the way it functions, was *designed* as a shuffle feature for mostly a blend of favourites and popular releases in the genres I have been listening to in a manner it all *flows* in a nice way. However, it is advertised as a music discovery feature. What is being advertised creates an expectation of what you find in the domain of music discovery. There is a place for the way Flow works but if I'm being advertised the wrong product, I'm going to be a frustrated user. So a clarification or correction in advertising on the intended use of Flow would be welcome!

Other general issues include being able to ban an act from ever being included in Flow, not just the track. I use the word 'ban' because 'disliking' is not enough.

For the most part, i love Deezer. Sound quality is excellent and vibrant wherever I listen. I like Flow. I want to love it, but i feel like it could do a better job. For instance, it will start to mix genres too much. If i'm listening to a flow based on Mumford and Sons, Vance Joy, I probably don't want to hear Carlie Rae Jepsen. Also, it constantly tries to suggest french and spanish songs in my flow. It would be great if there was a way to block this completely, only because I don't understand either language well enough to enjoy the music. I want to understand what i'm listening to, which is why I don't listen to instrumentals. Lastly, I will mark "do not play" on a song and then it will pop up again in my recommendations and it clearly shows a blue "do not play" icon which means i have clicked it, but it's still playing it.

I'm contemplating switching to Spotify because they just get it more accurate - granted they have a lot of years and the database of users to pull from, but there's got to be a way to improve the accuracy of your algorithms.

Thanks.

The way dislikes are handled right now definitely needs to be changed.

The 24hour / 3 strikes system is absolutely flawed.

If I hate a song, I want to dislike it and have it be blacklisted immediately and not come back after 24 hours. Having to dislike it 3 times on separate days is way to much work.

On top of that, there needs to be a way to see all songs that were disliked, and a way to undo it.

By the way, there are at least two older long threads with feedback for Flow which might still be relevant:

https://en.deezercommunity.com/music-culture-games-17/flow-faq-112

https://en.deezercommunity.com/ideas/553

It's not clear what and how my actions are affecting the Flow from (adding tracks/albums/artists to favorites/other playlists). Also it usually plays some songs which i like, but just don't want to listen to them this much. I don't want to dislike them Flow, but also i just want to hear them less often. And the dislike button shows on Android "We won't recommend this track to you again", but it appears again even after more dislikes. I can't say for sure, but it feels like the longer i listen to it without interruptions the less relevant it becomes and starts to recommend the same songs/genres which i usually dislike.

It would be also great to have a separate Flow with only the songs which i've never listened.

The most hated thing for me about the Flow is that it plays classical composition after some death metal track! That's just I don't know just how to even call such transition... I understand that there is no "mood" kind of thing there, but at least some volume normalization factors can help to transit from calm to loud/aggressive music.

Another one: flow suggest way often the SAME liked tracks, so that I even have to just skip them.

Actually I like randomised mixes including classical music and some loud rock or pop song afterwards, but that is just me. 😉 But there is a volume normalisation option in the audio settings popup menu in the lower right corner of the player bar, did you already try out if that one helps? If not, you might use the one available in your OS sound card settings like on Windows 10.

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