More discoveries in Flow

Deezer Flow is an awesome feature when you don't want to choose which song to listen to among all the song you liked or put in your playlists.

But it has one big flaw :

More or less the same songs are played over and over again, even from day to day. And it's even worse on the same day : if you're listening music with Flow, and suddenly want to listen to a specific song/album, then run Flow again : the exact same song series is played again from start.

I, for instance, liked a lot of song, and have even more in my playlists, in a large variety of genre, so it cannot be just "bad luck" or that Flow has too few songs to choose from, it has literally hundreds choices but i'm always listening to the 30-40 same songs ( with 1 or 2 exceptions sometimes ).

It would be nice to have either a true random flow, or have a feature to "refresh the flow songs series" (since true random wouldn't be performance friendly I guess ).

The "inspired by" section is awesome though, but there i'm talking about the case of listening to my already known (and liked) music.

Thanks !

---

Hi there, sorry my late reply. Great suggestion, get more people too vor for it 😉

---

Yes, and I've also noticed that while it might do a good job about picking other artists you might be interested in, it tends to only pick the "radio hits" for that artist and not delve deeper into their works. If they are going to feed you a Dire Straits song it is going to be Money for Nothing, or Sultans of Swing...

As someone else posted as an idea, maybe there should be a slider for your flow which you can slide between "familiar" and "discovery". One of the things I like about the Google play "radio stations" is that I get fed songs I haven't heard before quite a bit, much more frequently than I do with my "flow" here...

---

yeah, it is exactly what I thinking every time when starting Deezer Flow. Would be great if you add some options to flow for randomizing playlists. I really don't want to switch deezer to anything else, but flow become a very predictable and boring 😞

---

Eric.Hutton wrote:

Yes, and I've also noticed that while it might do a good job about picking other artists you might be interested in, it tends to only pick the "radio hits" for that artist and not delve deeper into their works. If they are going to feed you a Dire Straits song it is going to be Money for Nothing, or Sultans of Swing...

As someone else posted as an idea, maybe there should be a slider for your flow which you can slide between "familiar" and "discovery". One of the things I like about the Google play "radio stations" is that I get fed songs I haven't heard before quite a bit, much more frequently than I do with my "flow" here...

Couldn't agree more. I am also frustrated every time I hear same song by artist I put to favourites. Altough this artist published 10s of albums. This should be fixed!

---

great idea! i hope more people will vote it

---

Hi,

I use Deezer quite a bit, but I find I have only a few real use cases when I do:

• Listening to something specific
• Listening to mix (of an artist) or flow (my favourites)
• Listening to new releases

Flow is great becuase I can just put it on an listen. But I thought it might be nice to have some sort of slider/fader system that allows users to "mix" the flow compositions.

I like new music, but sometimes I want to limit the number of "new" tracks I expect to see within my flow, and sometimes when I do a mix on an artist, it would be nice to get more new "new" music.

When I say "new" here, I don't necessarily mean new releases, but artists or songs that I have listened to or found or favourited (not sure which will give the best result yet).

Anyway, it is an idea.

---

Also to solve particular problem with repeats for same song(s) it would be great to have options like "avoid playing same song in flow for day/week/month"

---

Hi @shaw sorry for the very late reply. I have moved your entry into this one as it is kind of the same. Please vote for it at the top 😉

---

The Deezer algorithm plays it too safe. Whenever it's free to suggest a track it plays classic, middle-of-the-road rock. I like - even love - that music, but I have enough of it, and it keeps on offering the same tracks, again and again. (Yesterday: Fairy Tale of New York. Today: Bohemian Rhapsody then Fairy Tale of New York)

I also dislike that I can't tell it that there are certain artists and genres (pop, R'n'B, house) that I have no interest in ever hearing. The "Deezer recommends" panel on the homescreen has *NEVER* recommended anything to me that I've ever wanted to click on. That's impressive.

Unfortunately the Deezer bot plays the popularity game and assumes that the highest-selling artists (or perhaps the ones that have paid for exposure?) are the ones that I want to hear.

Look, I know there's no chance of any action ever being taken on this - I just want to vent my frustration. (My suggestion will be implemented right after Deezer brings in folder support for playlists... haha. 🤔) I'm just waiting for my 6 month free trial to end, so that I can go to Spotify.

---

Oh yeah - that's another thing that will be implemented before my suggestion above... gapless playback.

You can find requests for that since 2012. But don't worry everyone, Deezer will pass my thoughts on to the relevant team. Might even happen tomorrow... 😂

---

In addition to modifying options like favorites vs discovery, I'd like to see an option to limit repeats. I end up skipping the first 5 to 10 songs every time I start Flow because it's stuff it just played a day or 2 ago. An option to not repeat for at least a couple weeks would be awesome.

---

I'd like to be able to skew the Flow algorithm toward less popular tracks. I'm sure I can't be the only listener who wants to hear more than the title track from each album? This probably contributes greatly to the repetition folk have complained about.

I assume it uses ratings from something like Last.fm to play only popular tracks. If so it shouldn't be hard to introduce a version of Flow which treats the entire catalog without that bias.

---

Our devs are always working on improving flow and hopefully they will be able to implement your idea! 🙂

---

I’m surprised the “Discovery” mix, which plays nothing but un-favourited songs, hasn’t been mentioned here. Isn’t this what everyone is after?

---

That's likely to be the case because the feature is new, @teqteq so thank you for bringing it up here in this topic :wink:

---

Hi everyone, we have been working on improving our flow feature and bringing more new songs. Also, note that now we have the Discover tab just next to the flow tab and it's amazing! Let me know your thoughts! :)

---

So far so good! Loving it a lot more as of late. The only thing that I dislike now is how the “Not happy with your mix” button in flow or especially track radio works. 

For instance I start a mix on a metal song, the next song plays me Led Zeppelin, I LOVE Led Zeppelin, but they don’t belong in my ultra heavy metal mix. So I click the “Not happy with your mix” button and it offers: “Do not recommend this track, or “Do not recommend this artist”.

I would love to click “Do not recommend this artist”, but I know doing so will affect them getting recommended outside of this mix as well.

This causes a lot of strain because I know my mix isn’t learning anything from my lack of interaction. I could just skip the song, but it loses the point behind the “Not happy with your mix” button. 

I feel the way Roon handles it is much better:

You could even add a “I don’t like this artist” option to the layout. 

Overall, the algorithm has definitely improved A LOT! Great job everyone! This is just some feedback to hopefully improve the user experience. 

 

---

Hi there @solstice_outcry 

All of your feedback - across different topics - has been passed to our Recommendations team. Thank you for being so creative and elaborate, we'll surely use your feedback to improve the feature 

---