How to Train Spotify's Algorithms for your DJ Sets
The recommendation algorithm doesn't have to be a one-way street
Hello! I’m back after a little (unexpected) break to tell you about a super useful ‘hack’ I discovered when travelling last year. While the much-and-rightly-maligned recommendation algorithm is doing nothing for the health of the music industry, it’s not going anywhere soon. I decided to try and work with it, not against it and the results were surprisingly effective, especially if you’re a DJ and already have endless playlists that represent your taste and genre preferences. If you’re not a DJ you can still use these steps to improve your recommendations and Discover Weekly. If that sounds intriguing, read on…
Declan x
The Week in AI
UMG and YouTube have announced a vague partnership on a new ‘YouTube Music AI Incubator’ that includes various artists including ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus and the estate of Frank Sinatra. It’s not clear exactly what the outcome will be, but Nilay Patel of The Verge outlined the underlying contradiction pretty well in his article ‘Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright’.
Somewhat related to the above, the NYTimes has blocked OpenAI’s scraping bot from its websites using its robot.txt file. That means OpenAI can’t scrape the New York Times for content used to train its various products. Interestingly, they haven’t blocked Google from doing the same.
Infinite Album, an AI platform that creates endless copyright-free music largely designed for gaming and streamers, is now out of beta.
The Washington Post has written another exposé on the realities behind the AI boom – digital sweatshops.
A Better Algorithm
Last time around, I really went for the algorithm. Of course, it’s easy to blame the faceless ‘black box’ for the woes of the ’net, and it’s definitely a simplified take. But I thought I’d come back to the table this time in defence of our opaque friend. Well, not quite a defence, more of a can’t-beat-em-join-em scenario.
This newsletter is all about how to maximise Spotify’s or your streaming platform of choice’s algorithm, and how to ‘train’ it to give better recommendations. It’ll focus more on using this technique for DJs, but it works for anyone. In the past, many of us relied on iTunes, now Music, to store our tracks and spent years creating intricate playlists for our DJ sets, friends’ birthdays, afterparties and other curatorial scenarios. Now, despite the love and effort we poured into them, they sit offline, dormant and siloed as iTunes becomes more and more a relic of the past.
But fear not – there’s life in the old boy yet. It’s possible to use those playlists (and others) to tell Spotify what you actually like in order to get better recommendations and find new music for your next DJ set or event. You can even sync these newly made playlists back into rekordbox DJ, and they’ll automatically be updated every time you add a track in Spotify. It only takes a few steps to set up and is free up to a point, so it’s definitely worth experimenting with if you feel you're stuck in an algorithmic feedback loop.
(If you’re more interested in a literal step-by-step process to this, I’ve included a TL;DR at the bottom of this newsletter).
Tune My Music
Last October I travelled through South America for seven months and intentionally left my laptop behind. While I didn’t want to bring my computer to avoid even thinking about emails, I did want to take my music collection – more than what I could get on Spotify – ideally my whole iTunes which I started building in 2008. It actually already is inside Dropbox so it’s stored in the cloud, but I wanted to have everything in one place so decided to investigate importing iTunes playlists into Spotify.
I came across a site called Tune My Music – it’s a third-party service that lets you sync playlists between lots of different apps including Spotify to TIDAL, Apple Music to Deezer, SoundCloud to Beatport, etc – there are loads of options, though no rekordbox sadly.
To convert your iTunes playlists you have to first export them, or your whole library, as an XML file. Click on File, Library, Export Library in Apple’s Music app. For playlists, it’s the same process except click Export Playlist instead of Library – just make sure you select XML instead of TXT. Then, back inside Tune My Music, select the destination, in this case, Spotify. If you’re not logged in it’ll ask you to sync your Spotify account and once you do it’ll show a progress bar and eventually, a new playlist will appear inside Spotify with your tracks from iTunes ready to play. Great.
It’s worth pointing out that Tune My Music uses text references to find tracks, so it’s not always the right song and often not the right version but there’s a good 70% success rate, depending on your music taste and how well your iTunes is organised. You’ll need a subscription to Tune My Music to do more than 500 tracks, which costs $4.50 a month, but it’s well worth it, even more so for what’s coming next. I created a folder inside Spotify and put all my iTunes playlists and library in there to have it separate from my Spotify-only playlists and that was that.
Until I got thinking. What if I could import my rekordbox playlists into Spotify? What if I could create a backup of my rekordbox, while also being able to access them from anywhere? What if I could then add Spotify tracks to my rekordbox playlists while I was on the road, from my phone, and have them available in rekordbox when I got back? And what if I then used my rekordbox playlists to tell Spotify the kind of music I DJ’d so that it would recommend me more of the same? Well, my friends, all of this is possible. Let’s find out how.
Rekordbox to Spotify
As I said before, Tune My Music won’t let you export straight from rekordbox BUT, it supports M3U8 files, which is what rekordbox exports its playlists as, so it will still work. Simply go to rekordbox and right-click on the playlist you want to export select Export Playlists, give it a name and choose M3U8. Choose a playlist that represents a lot of what you’re playing at the moment, or one that represents your taste and what you want to find more of. You can of course import your whole rekordbox library, it’ll just take a while depending on the size. I found this works better by genre or style, but it’s up to you how you do it.
Next, go to Tune My Music and select Upload File in the bottom right. Find the M3U8 and upload it. Then select Spotify as the destination. Give your playlist a name and Start Transfer. Once it’s done, the new playlist will appear inside Spotify with your tracks hopefully intact. It’s very likely there’ll be some missing or mislabelled tracks so have a quick scan and delete any mistakes.
Now we want to tell Spotify to find new music based on these playlists.
Spotify Recommends
Yes, yes, Spotify’s algorithms are bad and are creating a more homogenised music industry that rewards pastiche and deflects originality. I wrote about it last time out, and many others have too. But what they can be good at is recommendations, for better or for worse. Spotify’s ultimate goal is to keep you on the platform, keep you consuming so it can learn more about you, and tailor your personalised experience, which keeps you on the platform and so the cycle continues.
At the bottom of every playlist in Spotify there’s a Recommended section where the platform pools music together that it thinks matches what’s in the selected playlist. By uploading your rekordbox to Spotify, you’re essentially telling it the kind of music you want to be recommended on a playlist-by-playlist basis. Of course, it’s limited to what’s actually on Spotify, which means very few edits, remixes and deep cuts, but it still can throw up a surprising amount of gems, especially if you continue to tweak the playlist and hit Refresh, which re-loads a new list of reccs.
Eventually, start deleting the original tracks you added. I decided to delete one from the top of the playlist, every time I added a new track from the Recommended list. After many weeks of doing this, my playlists eventually only had tracks recommended by Spotify and none of my original rekordbox tracks (if you want to keep your rekordbox playlists just make a duplicate before you start this process). Now, the recommendations were one step removed from my own library, and off I went again, refreshing and adding, refreshing and adding. This process can be hit and miss, and sometimes it’ll recommend the same things over and over, but I really did find music I probably never would have found and the more I ‘trained’ Spotify on what I wanted, the more successfully it spat out the kind of music I was looking for.
It should also be pointed out I was creating ‘Balearic’ and ‘Italo’ playlists – neither genre is particularly pertinent on Spotify but that sound could crossover with disco and post-disco, as well as early RnB, electro-funk, plenty of 12-inches and even some more avant-garde ’80s pop so there was plenty of variation. I did try it with housier genres, especially Chicago and piano house and it worked really well too. Again, you’re limited to what’s actually on Spotify so bear that in mind.
So now I had playlists of tracks I really liked, built from and based on playlists in my rekordbox, but how do I get them back there? Time to go back to Tune My Music.
Spotify to TIDAL
While Spotify isn’t supported as a streaming platform inside DJ software, TIDAL is – and luckily for us, Tune My Music can not only transfer playlists from Spotify to TIDAL, but it can also sync them. Once you transfer them, you can set it up so that they sync every 24 hours. Syncing also allows you to take advantage of TIDAL’s own recommendations – it has the same ‘recommended’ feature at the bottom of each playlist. TIDAL tends to recommend more esoteric tracks and definitely feels less obvious than Spotify. There’s no reason you can’t do exactly the same thing I’ve outlined here in TIDAL only, I just happen to use both. Just remember that if you’re using Spotify to sync, even if you find a track you like and want to add on TIDAL, add it on Spotify instead so that it syncs to both.
Once you’ve got your Spotify playlists syncing with TIDAL, you can then open rekordbox and log in to TIDAL to access them. Then, you can analyse your tracks, set up cue points etc as you normally would. Every time you add a track to Spotify, it’ll appear in these playlists within 24 hours. Very handy for prepping mix ideas and sets in the same place you also listen to music.
Side note: another feature that I feel is overlooked for track discovery for DJ sets is Song Radio in Spotify, which is called Track Radio in TIDAL. Use this to create a new playlist based on any track and use the same techniques – a combination of deleting tracks you want ‘less’ of, and adding the Recommended tracks you want ‘more’ of.
Buying Your Playlists
All of this is cool, but you can’t export tracks from TIDAL to a USB for obvious reasons. It’s true that one day streaming will be the dominant format for DJs, but that day is not today. I wish there was an easier way to quickly buy tracks from a Spotify playlist on Bandcamp. The only one I’m aware of is Merch Table from HypeM, which was launched in 2020 to support artists during the COVID pandemic. It allows you to paste the URL of a Spotify playlist and will show you the links to buy each track on Bandcamp, if they’re available. It’s not perfect – a playlist of 228 tracks only returned 30 releases on Bandcamp – but it’s a start. If anyone knows of a better alternative, please do comment. You can of course manually search for and buy the tracks, wherever you usually do.
Alternatively, you can use Tune My Music (again) to convert playlists from Spotify/TIDAL into Beatport. Those playlists will then be available in your Beatport account when you log in so you can buy each track, or use them inside Beatport Streaming in DJ software or even on the CDJ-3000, though that comes at an extra subscription price. This essentially allows you to DJ from your Spotify playlists straight into the CDJ, if those tracks are also on Beatport, of course.
Algo Acceptance
I’m not saying this is a replacement for record hunting in your usual spots, clicking around Bandcamp, Beatport, Juno, or wherever you buy your music. It’s simply an acceptance that streaming platform algorithms are going to recommend things either way, so we may as well show them more of what we want to hear. Once you start doing this more regularly with other playlists, your Discover Weekly usually becomes a lot more refined too. I found that my Spotify experience became far more positive across the board.
And if you don’t use Spotify, you can still do this with Apple Music and TIDAL as Tune My Music supports both.
The biggest downside is trying to remember what tracks are on TIDAL, what tracks are on your hard drive and iTunes/Music, which ones are in rekordbox and what tracks are on your USB. If you struggle already with keeping track of where your music is, this may add another layer to that frustration. But I feel like it’s worth it – I have genuinely found some of my favourite new tracks this way, and it works really well as a way to keep your recommendations generally more attuned.
If you’re not a DJ, you can do this just to make the algorithm more aware of your taste across the board. Try it with any genre and see what results you find – Tune My Music will let you do up to 500 tracks for free so it won’t cost you anything to experiment.
The recommendation algorithm doesn’t have to be a one-way street. Take back control, and find some new faves in the process.
TL;DR
Is the above too long for what you need? Here’s a summary of what to do.
Moving Playlists from rekordbox to Spotify:
Use Tune My Music to convert rekordbox playlists (exported as M3U8 files) to Spotify playlists.
These playlists serve as backups and help train Spotify's algorithm to recommend music based on your DJ preferences.
Using Spotify's Recommendations:
Explore the ‘Recommended’ section at the bottom of Spotify playlists, which suggests tracks that match the content of the current playlist.
Continuously tweak and refine your playlists based on Spotify's recommendations to improve the algorithm's understanding of your musical tastes.
Syncing Spotify Playlists with TIDAL:
Transfer your Spotify playlists to TIDAL using Tune My Music.
Set up automatic syncing between Spotify and TIDAL playlists to leverage TIDAL's unique recommendations.
Accessing Playlists in rekordbox:
Log in to TIDAL within rekordbox to access the synced playlists.
Analyse tracks, set cue points, and prepare mix ideas in rekordbox using the tracks from your Spotify playlists, via TIDAL.
Purchasing Tracks:
You can't export tracks to USB directly from TIDAL, but you can use tools like Merch Table from HypeM to find purchase links for tracks on Bandcamp.
Alternatively, you can convert playlists from Spotify or TIDAL to Beatport using Tune My Music and access them within your Beatport account.
Algo Acceptance:
This approach acknowledges that streaming platforms' algorithms will provide recommendations regardless of how you engage with them.
By actively shaping your playlists and preferences, you can make these algorithms work in your favour for music discovery and DJing.