Rockstar

[FEEDBACK] What do you think of "Flow"?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
January 16, 2019
354 replies
8225 views

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!

Pinned Reply By hpguru

I was also at first disappointed with the recommendations, but you need to learn Flow. Play play play, everything you love and give hearts to your favorite songs and playlists and albums, add as many of your favorite artists and play play play and ban artists you don't like and Flow will soon catch your note. I am very satisfied. But you have to make friends and devote time to it.

Yes, indeed. Let it learn.

On first day lame, now it is much better than Google’s Feeling lucky which was okay, but always played same favourites over and over and over again. On Deezer I hear new tracks, new favorites, old classics over and over and over again. Today I paid ONE YEAR in advance for this great service.

Pay 10 months and get 12 months is their annual discount. I paid years for Spottily and then GPM receiving no discounts for loyalty. This is my new home for hard dance music since 29.06.20.

They gave me option to keep 2 months I already had trial. They suggested next time I need to cancel with them, go free, and buy annual again with discounted prices unless they give better ways.

I like flow, I like mixes, this service is good bargain at 99,90 a year for this amazing quality.

It works like a charm when something is great.

This is great, worth to pay.

Show previous replies

S

Sirence

Guitar Hero

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.

bluezzbastardzz

Superuser

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

ZZee ya, Hans-Jürgen (Bluezz Bastardzz and Indigo Rocks, live album on Deezer, last.fm/user/hjbardenhagen)

Y

ymns3321

Hitmaker

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.

0

0x49D1

Guitar Hero

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.

bluezzbastardzz

Superuser

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.

ZZee ya, Hans-Jürgen (Bluezz Bastardzz and Indigo Rocks, live album on Deezer, last.fm/user/hjbardenhagen)

B

bdl

Roadie

The biggest issue, as mentioned by others, is Flow just seems to play the most popular track by an artist over and over again and makes you hate it even if you initially liked it. Like, when I start Flow I just click through the first 5 tracks because they are the same, and then I'm just waiting for the other usual suspects to pop up. And I don't really want to "dislike" the song but there is no other way.
So:

every band in existence wrote only one song, their main hit, no exceptions!
it pushes you towards popular music in general, which creates a feeling of listening to local radio station; it never tries to go from something more well-known in a genre towards something less popular, always the other way around.
it never forgives and never forgets, once it assumes you like some genre, it will be throwing at you band after band after band of that genre and there is just no way out of this. My bane is indie rock, I have no idea where I crossed the line but now it smothers me with those. Also, due to the initial issue it is the same "every band has only one track" syndrome, mind you.
it tries to force feed you some music, like, I need to dislike every Mumford and Sons track in existence to stop seeing them in my Flow.
it randomly throws some music in just because the artist is from my country.

H

helene.deezerAuthor

Rockstar

Thanks all for sharing your thoughts around Flow, we will keep monitoring this post in order to collect all your feedback and sending them to the team in charge 😉

A

Artem Litvakovsky

Roadie

My ideas on the Flow problems (and how to improve the service)

Most probably the real product problem is the choice of product metrics valuing total listens more than user retention when introducing recommendation changes.
I believe people generally don't generally care about new music and listen to the most catchy popular tunes they know, probably we can say the same even about Deezer users. Music just finds them this way or another (mostly through heavy marketing). Other people are more new music-hungry though. They subscribe to musical topics on FB, Reddit, etc., go through reviews and new album releases, use the discovery services such as Flow. Hence the music choice of the latter is more consistent with their own musical taste and more conscious. You can separate "discovery indifferent" users from the "discovery oriented" ones by the fact (or frequency) of Flow usage and value the listen events of the latter users higher when training the Flow algorithm.
Flow makes a playlist ignoring the idea of song sequence, e.g. a slow tender song can be followed by an angry crust punk track. I can see two product options for fixing that, each one needs a feature for guessing the tempo of a track (which is easy). Also the predominance of major or minor can be detected more or less easily. So Flow can either enforce the next song to not be completely different on both scales from the previous one or have a (killer) feature to set the approximate tempo and tonality for the whole playlist. The next feature to implement is global shortcuts for altering those.
My personal experience tells me that sometimes I want more or less recent music but sometimes I want a blast from the past. With "recent music" mean there were rather short 1-3 month periods when I generally explored genres of avantgarde black metal or early trip hop or Russian rap or just found a super-cool artist who dominated my playlist for a couple of weeks. It would be super-nice to have an option to mix two sources of recommendations: one calculated on the most broad time window technically possible, and the other one calculated on the last week or two. Depending on the recommending mechanism the mixing and filtering of the two sources can be done on server or on client
Probably Flow needs time to "get" my taste. I don't have that much time to listen through so a cool option would be to train it by hand. Let the Flow make a playlist for me - most probably I know 80% of the tunes there despite I do not have them in my history. Let me throw the songs I don't want to hear out of the playlist. This way I would be able to get a more or less good playlist in 5 minutes not in 3 hours of listening and clicking NEXT all the time
I guess Last.fm integration might be good for the Flow to make a heap of data to train on. Song identification can be a problem here though

Rafael.

Ultimate Superstar

thanks for the feedback Everyone, just to let you know that Android users can now block artists on Deezer! Please update your app to the 6.0.5.271 version!

To block an artist you need to open their page on Deezer and go to the 3 dots on the top.

E

Ezman

Guitar Hero

Works really well for me. Keep up the good work. Would like it if there was a option to exclude from flow recommendations - so I may have a track favourited but choose not to allow this to contribute to flow recommendations. Or have a personal flow playlist where I can add certain tracks into a playlist and it will create a flow from that.

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