I’m a fan of symphonic metal, and something about that is telling YouTube Music that I must fucking love repetitive, soulless AI slop featuring guitar sounds.

It’s probably just time to set sail, but I do appreciate the convenience of streaming. Seeding a playlist with a single song has let me to a lot of music that would have otherwise flown under my radar, but every fucking time it plays something I haven’t heard before nowadays, it’s just more AI slop. Thumbs-downing them doesn’t seem to do shit.

Youtube Music is the only service I’m aware of that work doesn’t block (which… honestly why would they disallow Pandora, but leave Youtube?? I digress…) so that’s what I’ve been using. But I do have my phone, so I could run an alternative off of that.

The obvious answer would be YT with filters, but… I don’t actually see a way to set a filter - you just search a song and it does its thing. If I could just block every channel made after… idk, 2022, that would pretty well solve the issue… Is there a way to do that? That’d definitely be the easiest option.

Otherwise, is there better streaming service (which for me means decent selection of metal / actually categorizes its subgenres, and active ban of AI slop)?

The convenience of running this from my workstation just isn’t worth the amount of garbage flooding YouTube.

  • emb
    2·
    3 days ago

    If I could just block every channel made after… idk, 2022, that would pretty well solve the issue… Is there a way to do that?

    When searching, you can add before:2022 for this effect. I realize that doesn’t help with the recommendation engine, but it’s something.

    • Murse@slrpnk.netOP
      3·
      3 days ago

      First hit was AI slop from 2026 Q_Q

      If that used to work, they patched it. I hate enshittification so much.

      • embEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        I played around with it, and it does seem to work sometimes. I don’t get it… I tried filtering searches for ‘heavy metal before:2010’ and ‘slop before:2021 after:2018’, and results appeared accurate. But if I try “openai before:2022” a good majority of the results are from the past few days or weeks. It makes zero sense all around why those filters wouldn’t be absolute.

      • emb
        2·
        3 days ago

        That sucks, sorry! I had read that it worked, but I honeslty don’t search much so I thought it still did.

        Amazing how Google used to be a good search engine company, vs how terrible YouTube search is.