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

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.

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 😉

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

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.

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.

I m one month with Deezer, I am tired of fabricating playlists on Spotify especially as I love tons of music styles but particularly German electronic music. I took’ deezer only for slightly better sound quality and for flow. The flow app would be perfection only if it was not playing the same songs over and over again from the top tracks. I had to block songs I like because they are playing too often. I also get too much of the top charts songs (which I usually hate) and not enough of what I do actually listen. I am also sad that you can only like up to 2000 songs, it’s very blocking. But Appart of that I am happy

Flow choices seem to stay stale with no way of dismissing a flow selection. You end up with the same 5 flow playlists for eternity with barely minimal switching up over time. Would be useful to have the ability to dismiss a flow queue and refresh for another one.
Also, random songs that show up despite never having listened to the genre.

Thanks helene.deezer for starting this thread!

I find Flow to be bafflingly repetitive, and there are plenty of posts on numerous threads expressing similar dissatisfaction, some dating back nearly a year.

With 962 favorite tracks, a playlist with 481 songs, 99 artists and 23 albums in my library, this certainly would not seem a lack of data issue as is often suggested by replies, but rather the algorithm is fundamentally flawed.

It would be nice to know if this is even considered a known issue by Deezer, and if so, is there an ETA for a fix?

When I am using flow and if I click on the Don't recommend this track link, and if I restart the app/client, or if I come the next day, I find the same track in my queue. I cannot figure out whats the purpose of this feature if the song that I do not want to hear again is queued.

Deezer needs to work on the logic using which Flow queues up songs based on the users taste, since I have been hearing the same old favourite without any change. Songs are queued up even though I click on not to recommend the songs anymore. I had read the webpage on the logic Flow queues up songs, but I do not understand how repeating the same songs that a user has requested not to queue, help out.

I have tried all possible tips given under the FAQ and the bug still persists.

Flow was perfect a while ago. Used to love the way it sorted out songs and gave me recommendations according to my taste. This was until the last few months Flow totally changed its logic on giving recommendations.

I am almost on the verge of cancelling my membership with Deezer due to this flaw

Flow is awesome, that's what made me start paying for Deezer. I recently canceled my subscription and wanted to switch to Spotify but I came back because of flow. However, there are the things Flow and Deezer can do better.

2,000 favorite songs cap is too small. I already filled it up which means I can't like new songs to improve flow so I just block lots of artists I don't like instead which is not convenient at all. If you can't make it unlimited, you should at least level up with Spotify's 10,000 cap.
In flow, you can dislike a song but you can't dislike a song outside of flow, not even in flow generated playlists.
I recently started getting lots of Nigerian songs suggestions which is weird because I rarely listen to Nigerian songs. I guess your developers thought people will likely listen to popular songs in the country they live, well that's not always true so please stop suggesting Nigerian craps to me or give me an option to dislike all Nigerian songs, maybe not all but like 99%.
It'll be great to be able to dislike a whole genre. I love rap music but I'll like to dislike anything trap or mumble rap or whatever it's called and other genres I don't like.
I mostly listen to music when working or walking home so it's very inconvenient to click like or dislike button, it's usually easier to press the next button on a headphone. I believe it'll be better if flow considers songs I don't skip and ones that I skip within a few seconds (say 15-30 seconds) as possible likes and dislikes. I know it might not always be the case but I believe most times when someone skips a song within a few seconds, they just don't like that song.
Flow for genres and moods will be great. It'll still be the flow we all love but more streamlined.

Not exactly flow related but are we by any chance going to get a Linux app for Deezer? My friend and I wanted to make one but we realized your API doesn't include the link to the song, just 30 seconds preview 😥

Hi there @hemor

Thanks for the great feedback.
About your Linux query, have a look at this topic for example and leave your vote! 😉

Late for the party but still 😉

When I started to use FLOW over 2 years ago I was amazed! I loved it. At the beginning I got suggestions for things I didn't know, listened to favorite and even felt like I'm in time capsule while Deezer throw some good oldies I used to listen to. However after a while things changed. My favorite thrown at me too often and songs I used to love got boring. Moreover, FLIW didn't suggest anything I didn't know. Even songs that were played in the first time were songs I knew already. FLOW is a great option to use when I'm not sure what I would like to listen to, but it should be better. Suggest more new songs and play an extensive songs from our favorite and not only 50-100 out of 800.

Thx.

IT needs to circulate more (new) songs

Hey @amoraluv and @Noam Asulin

You've all got a point here - I also share it should be more about discovery. So many artists I didn't know existed, then became favourites because of Flow.
Our devs are fully aware and they're working on Flow as we speak. Some users already have noticed a difference - so keep bringing feedback - it's always useful to improve our user experience.

+1 from me, I neither used Flow very much anymore, as it tends to play too many well-known hits and favorites of bands in my library - like Foreigner: of course "Cold As Ice", AC/DC: you bet "Highway To Hell" etc. which gets boring very fast. So maybe a switch for "Discovery Mode" in Flow would help for people who feel more adventurous than others. ;)

Lately I tried Flow again after mainly listening to my self-created large playlists with classical and baroque music for a long time, and the algorithm has at least picked up that change, so there is a lot of classical music in Flow now with occasional appearances of "Cold As Ice" again.

Just as others have already said, Flow is just a mixture of songs from your playlists, massive hits and the odd random throw in that the listener hates but can't dismiss because the reject button still doesn't work after years of complaints. I've just given it a go and it played the same tracks it played every single other time I've ever tried it. It's totally useless and it's very, very boring.

Thanks @simonali

I get your point. I'll pass the feedback on.

I wrote here.
https://en.deezercommunity.com/got-an-idea-9/delete-all-your-favorite-tracks-from-the-flow-and-mixes-57115

Hi there @SkipperSnail

I can't seem to find that topic - is it related to this?

I like Flow, because it allows me a 1-click-personalized experience. I would appreciate though, if it would fee more like a personalized radio station. What does that mean? I would love the opportunity to not only have music, but also spoken word as part of the flow stream. Spoken word should be made up of two components in my view:
1) news podcasts, i.e. hourly (this can be pulled from a news podcast into the stream, i.e. (I'm in Germany) the Deutschlandfunk Nachrichten (https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/podcast-nachrichten.1257.de.podcast.xml)

2) "Radio personalities" - I would love if Deezer would not only sign longform exclusive Podcast creators - but also "short form" spoken word, that could be sprinkled into my Flow stream - I think of this as like a radio DJ, I would subscribe to, who would get sprinkled into the flow feed. I assume there will be wildly different preferences among Deezer users, so a lot of people will like no "DJ" at all, some will prefer i.e. more comedy, some more serious - but something like this in combination with relevant news sourced from podcast would make a hyper personal radio station out of flow.

I used to be very happy with the Flow feature in the Android app. It used to serve me a mix of songs I had favourited and unfamiliar songs that the app believed I would like. I found lots and lots of new music that way.

About six months ago the Flow feature changed dramatically. It no longer mixes in any new suggestions. It doesn't even cycle through all my favourite songs. It just plays the same ~40 favourites over and over, even though I have favourited over 600 songs. I am super disappointed! The Discover and Inspired By features aren't anywhere near as good as the old algorithm.

For me it often doesn't work correctly. I don't listen to pop and I always get some pop songs in my Flow. Also I have pop playlists in the recommended playlists.

The Flow is crap. It just plays the same 40 favourited songs over and over. No music discovery, not even all of my over 600 favourited songs.

But then I tried "My music" and "Mix my music". And it's amazing! It plays all of my favourited songs, it plays other songs by the same artists, it plays random songs from my 250 favourited artists (which are not the same artists as when playing my favourited songs), and it HAS MUSIC DISCOVERY, playing good songs by bands I've never heard of.

So my advice to every Deezer user is this: "Ignore the Flow, use Mix My Music".

Thanks Martin for suggestion. You mean "Shuffle My Music"? I cannot find "Mix my music" button anywhere.