Option to remove karaoke versions or tribute bands from search

I'd also remove collections, compilations, remastered, etc. from search.

Yes, this is good to add. All this takes up so much space and makes searching harder.

I honestly do not see myself wasting time on Studio Allstars Karaoke or In the Style of Cascada Tribute Band, these add no value to my life taking time searching for what I listen.

Also you can not shuffle search and expect artist music only as it will shuffle from these tribute and karaoke bands also. Not even including remastered etc. in search. Big issue.

Yes, PLEASE do this.  It’s so annoying to continually weed out karaoke and tribute bands.

I mean, I LOVE cover songs and I actually collect really awesome covers….but most of these bands are very vanilla and generic and know that they are. Keywords like Karaoke and tribute should be very obvious to filter out unless someone specifically wants this kind of music.

As someone who worked in the past on developing search engines, I want to comment that usually it’s better not to remove things from the search, but instead of have smarter ranking (order) of the result, and in fact this is how Google won out over all the search engines which preceded it:

You searched for “cascada miracle”. What (I think...) is bothering you is not that there are 50 different covers, remixes, etc. - once in a blue moon these versions might even be interesting. The bigger problem for you (I am guessing) is that the “good” versions you wanted to find were hard to find between all the “bad” versions. The traditional solution, then, is to rank (i.e., sort) the results based on “goodness” of the song, not just on textual match to your search words. Just like searching for “deezer” on Google finds the best site (i.e. Deezer’s homepage) and not some silly site which repeats the word “deezer” 100 times in sequence.

A search engine calls the inherent “goodness” of a result - unrelated to the particular query - a “static score”, or “boost”. Google, for example, uses the PageRank algorithm to decide which sites are more “important” than others - for example deezer.com is important as a lot of other sites link to it, while my.home.page/my/thoughts/on/deezer.html is less “important”, and the search “deezer” will return it lower in the list of results.

So, how would Deezer know which of the “cascada miracle” matches are more “important” than others? Deezer could implement some basic heuristics - e.g., that the words “kareoke” or “in the style of” reduce a song’s importance. But Deezer can do something even better: it knows which songs are liked by many people (hearted, saved in playlists, actually played, etc.), and can boost the scores of more highly liked or more highly played songs. It is very likely that you are not the first person searching for this song, and most of the previous listeners probably ended up finding the “good” one and playing it to completion, and/or favoriting it - so Deezer can automaticaly build on that knowledge.

Using the popularity of a song as its static score - instead of some naive heuristics like “kareoke”, can also help when the difference between versions is more subtle than the obvious kareoke vs regular. For some songs, there are multiple official versions from the original band - sometimes various masterings, a few slightly different mixes or edits, re-recordings, and so on. It is not always obvious which version “better”. Here too Deezer can benefit from the wisdom of the crowd: The “better” version is, quite simply, the version which more listeners listen to, add to their favorites, and so on. If Deezer’s search brings this “better” version first on the result list, it becomes much easier to find the right song.

what the heck, not one comment from Deezer on this topic! I feel Deezer is trying to cheap out and not pay royalties for original songs so they play BS like right now my favorites are selected and Deezer decides that “ A Freylekhe Nakht In Gan Eyed - The Klezmer Conservatory band”  is now one of my favorites? I never heard of this and I would not have added it

I’m so angry at Deezer as it plays so many covers in Flow. I’m not all the time next to the computer/phone so I have to go for it to change the song since I hate covers. I’m so frustrated that if it’s not gonna change I’ll quit Deezer and choose Tidal/Spotify.

Yula, you merged two completely unrelated requests :-( Did you actually read the questions and the answers before merging?

Hmmm.

The request (complaint) in this thread :

“Songs in my deezer playlist (Flow) are being replaced by the deezer algorithm with songs of the same name, but from a different artist.”

The request (complaint) in the merged thread:

“Songs in my deezer playlist (any) are being replaced by the deezer algorithm with songs of the same name, but from a different album.”

I don’t know enough about the deezer algorithm or software to know if these issues might be solved by a similar, or even the same, software adjustment by the deezer developers. Do you?

GropplerZorn, it seems you didn’t understand the issues either :-(

The request in this thread: “I’m typing ‘cascada miracle’ in the search box and getting a long list of silly Kareoke versions of it”.

The request in the other thread: “I put a specific song on a playlist, a song which I found in a specific album, and a while later, when I go to look at the playlist, it forgot which album it took the song from and tells me it’s from a compilation album (it’s not a kareoke version, it’s exactly the same song and singer and same version, it just refers to a different album that contains that song)”.

I see absolutely no connection between the two requests.

and that seems to be our problem.

cheers

Hi @Nadav Har'El !

If I understand you so well here is two issues :
1.issue - long list of karaoke versions and not original performer versions of some song (for example cascada miracle )
2.issue - one song of original performer is on few albums (for example Cascada Miracle is on album Miracle (remixes) and album Everytime We Touch)

I agree that is karaoke version of some song need to remove from search box or put in some other version of search .

Some performers have single version ,album version and compilation album version and is possible that one song can be on all 3 version of edition .

When I look on Deezer in discography on of some performer there is :

Top Tracks
Latest Release
Albums
EPs
Singles
Splits
Featured in

When you put song in your playlist need have some time to find which edition you want .

Otherwise, if Deezer remove all editions of original performer it not will be right .

Conclusion is that need remove only Karaoke versions , and for choosing song from editions of some performer need be letting to user who need put effort to find what we want . 

II agree with the idea of better ranking instead of removing, but original vs tribute/kareoke is such a binary decision that users should be able to turn it on or off in preferences

i for one hate the non-originals so much that it’s a deal breaker for me

I agree that “kareoke version” could be made a binary flag, but what will you call “tribute”? There is quite a number of songs which got different versions by different singers over the years. In some cases, the popularity of the “cover version” came close to the original one, or even exceeded it. Will you exclude the new versions, because they are a “tribute”?

My proposal does things better, and automatically: For example, consider the song “Beggin’”. Its original version was from 1967, there was a new version from 2007 and yet another version by Måneskin in 2017. When you search for “Beggin” today, you’ll want to see all three versions, with the version that is most popular today (Måneskin’s?) on top. You wouldn’t want to see only the (now mostly obscure) original 1967 version with all other versions hidden under a “see also kareoke and tribute versions” button.

At the same time, if there’s another recording of someone singing Beggin in the shower, it will naturally be ranked low (because, presumably, nobody “loved” this recording or even bothered to listen to it), so it won’t bother the user who will see the top-three versions of Beggin first on the search list, so who cares what’s in the 20th place on the search list?

Finally, please note that with your “binary flag” suggestion, as soon as you enable “cover versions”, you’ll get both Måneskin’s very popular version and the someone-singing-Beggin-in-the-shower version as equally “cover versions”. You’ll still need some sort of ranking to show the Måneskin version first. So I suggest just use ranking in the first place - without that “binary flag” at all.