Apple Music can offer useful recommendations for artists or new music you might like based on your previous listening history. Under normal circumstances, these recommendations are usually reasonably good, and in the past, they’ve helped me discover new artists that I really like. However, the algorithms base their suggestions on any music played from your Apple Music account, and since my kids have started requesting their own music choices through our smart speakers, my recommendations have been ruined.
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My Kids Play Music Using My Apple Music Account
I have an Apple Music subscription, and often play music through the Amazon Echo devices around my home. It’s a cheap but effective way to get multi-room audio that syncs around the house. By linking my Apple Music account to Alexa, I can access my full Apple Music library through any Echo device.
The trouble is, so can my kids. It didn’t take them long to figure out that shouting “Computer, play music” would work as well for them as it does for me, and even less time to figure out that they could specify exactly what music they wanted to hear. Since it’s my Apple Music account that’s linked to the Echo devices, the music is played from my account whether it’s me asking for it, my wife, or my kids.
Their Music Is Part of My Listening History
There’s a major downside to this. Since all the Echo devices are linked to my Apple Music account, any music that gets played on those devices automatically becomes part of my Apple Music listening history. Apple Music doesn’t know whether it was me, my wife, or my kids who requested specific songs on Echo devices. All it knows is that the music was played via my Apple Music account.
For the most part, this isn’t really a huge problem; the listening history for individual devices such as my iPhone isn’t affected, for example. I can look back through my iPhone’s history, and I’ll only see songs that I played on my iPhone in the list. There’s one area, however, where the songs my kids listen to have a significant impact on my Apple Music experience.
The Impact on Apple Music’s Recommendations
Apple Music recommendations appear to be based on your listening history across all of your devices. How do I know this? Because the recommendations in my Apple Music account have all been severely tainted by the music that my kids have been listening to.
The clearest example of this is myApple Music Replay. This is a playlist of my favorite tracks of the year, updated weekly. If I take a look at my current Apple Music Replay, the top song isBaby Monkey (Going Backward on a Pig)and is closely followed by a song calledPoo Bum Poo BumbyPoopy Man. For the record, I did not listen to these songs, and I’m assuming it wasn’t my wife, either.
It’s clear that the songs listened to on my Echo devices are tracked as part of my account-wide listening history, which means Apple Music now recommends music I have no interest in. For example, my daughter listens to aPure Meditationplaylist on her Echo Dot to help her get to sleep. The tracks from this playlist are saved to my listening history and impact what the algorithms recommend. The “New Releases for You” section of Apple Music, for example, is mostly filled with ambient sleep sound albums that I would never listen to in a million years.
It’s Not Possible to Turn Off Listening History for Echo Devices
The real problem here is that currently, there’s no way to turn off listening history for Echo devices in the same way that you can for Apple devices. For example, I’ve turned off listening history for the Apple Music app on the iPad that my kids use, so that none of the songs they play on there will influence my recommendations.
On Echo smart speakers, however, you’re able to connect your Apple Music account to Alexa and make it the default music service, but there’s no way to turn off the listening history. It means that anything my kids play through any of our Echo smart speakers will always become part of my Apple Music listening history, whether I like it or not.
I Exported My Apple Music Replay Playlists as Text on My Mac
In the good old days before my kids were old enough to know how to play music through Alexa, I used to find new artists by listening toApple Music’s Discovery Station playlist, which recommends music based on your listening history. When I liked a song I heard on the playlist, I’d find out who the artist was, find one of that artist’s albums, and check it out. I discovered a lot of great music using that method.
Unfortunately, my Discovery Station is not what it used to be. I just tried playing it now, and the second song that played wasAgadoobyBlack Lace. If you don’t already know this song, I urge you not to play it, as it’s both horrific and an earworm. This is a song that my kids would love, so the algorithm is still working, just based on their music as well as mine.
I really wanted to find some new artists to listen to, and my tainted recommendations weren’t cutting it anymore. I decided to see if I could use ChatGPT to strip away the kids' music from my listening history and offer some suggestions based solely on the music I’d listened to.
The first step was to find a way to export my listening history. The most effective way I could find to do this was to export my Apple Music Replay playlists, which include the songs that have been played the most each year. While many of these are songs my kids have played, a lot of them are also songs that I’ve played myself. In the Apple Music app on Mac, it’s possible to export these playlists as text.
Exporting Apple Music Replay Playlists as Text
to export playlists as text, they need to be saved in your Apple Music library. By default, the Apple Music Replay playlists aren’t saved in your library, so you need to save them first.
Click the “Home” menu and scroll to the bottom of the screen. Hover over one of the Apple Music Replay playlists and click the three-dot icon. Select “Add to Library”. Repeat for as many Apple Music Replay playlists as you want to add.
Click “All Playlists” in the left-hand menu, and you should see the Apple Music Replay playlists you downloaded. To export the playlists as text, select a playlist and click File > Library > Export Playlist. In the “Format” dropdown, choose “Plain Text” and give the file a name, then click “Save.” Repeat for any other Apple Music playlists you saved to your Library.
ChatGPT Was Able to Offer Useful Recommendations by Ignoring Kids' Music
Once I’d exported the playlists, I uploaded them into a ChatGPT conversation and asked it to provide me with some recommendations for artists that I would like based on my listening habits, ignoring any songs that were for kids or were meditation or sleep tracks.
The results were genuinely very good. None of the suggestions were for artists that I had listened to before, and upon listening, they were all artists who had similar styles to other artists I like. Not all of them were artists I chose to listen to more than once, but many of them were intriguing enough on the first listen for me to explore more of that artist’s music.
I then asked ChatGPT for recommendations specifically for new music, and it recommended some albums that had been released in the last few months or were coming out soon. Once again, the results were very good, and I discovered some excellent new albums that matched my tastes. Most importantly, none of the recommendations suggested kids' music or sleep sounds.
Overall, the results were on a par with Apple Music’s own recommendations from before my listening history became tainted and were far superior to what Apple Music is currently recommending. The method isn’t ideal as it involves much more work and doesn’t generate a useful discovery playlist like Apple Music does, but it is an effective way to find music recommendations when Apple’s own recommendations are no longer much use.
None of this would be necessary if I could have stopped my kids' listening from being added to my listening history in the first place. While it’s possible to turn off listening history for specific Apple devices, currently, there’s no way to do so for Echo smart speakers. There are other workarounds, such as giving my kids their own Apple Music accounts or using different streaming services for the Echo devices, but without a time machine, these methods can’t improve my current situation. Until Amazon lets us turn off Apple Music listening history on Echo devices, using ChatGPT (or a similar AI tool) is the best workaround I’ve found for getting useful, personalized recommendations.
