Amazon Music's Artist Conflation

Jeff Kaufman

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Amazon Music's Artist Conflation

July 20th, 2026

music, tech

Our kids like listening to music on their tablets, and we decided it's worth it to pay some money so they can make playlists and don't need to listen to ads. A family account makes sense if you're more than one person, and we ended up with Amazon somewhat randomly. I've been poking around: the personalization features are pretty terrible, and they have a major artist conflation problem.

When you first show up it asks you to pick some artists to seed your experience with. I put in the first few bands that came to mind:

I would also have included some bands like Nightingale and Nova, but since these are common band names there wasn't any way for me to find the right artist profile in search, so I left them out initially. I also got bored quickly: please don't take this as an exhaustive list of my favorite bands!

I felt like I'd picked out a pretty clear "modern contra dance music" cluster in musician space, so I was disappointed when these were my first five "My Soundtrack" recommendations:

These are... nothing like the cluster my selections were pointing at. Recommendations should not be that hard anymore; a small cheap LLM (ex: Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite or Claude Haiku 4.5) would do far better. Actually, let's try them. Asking "If someone liks Airdance, The Free Raisins, Crowfoot, Perpetual e-Motion, Great Bear, Kingfisher, and Buddy System, what other artists might they like?" Gemini suggests Pete's Posse, Elixir, KGB, Hotpoint String Band, and Toss the Possum; Claude suggests Elixir, The Stringrays, The Moving Violations, Nor'easter, Gallimaufry, Wake Up Robin, Countercurrent, and Giant Robot Dance. These are great suggestions; I like all of these bands, and they're clearly within the cluster.

It's easy for me to just not use Amazon's auto-playlists, but it turns out they're also pretty confused about artists. For example, here's the search results I see for a band I know well:

Makes sense! We're not the first people to think "Kingfisher" would make a good band name. But then when I select what looks like the right one, I see it's actually conflated us and another band:

Getting these right can't be that hard; I've never seen this problem on Spotify (and it gets this one right: us, them). It's also not just Kingfisher: part of why I couldn't find the right Nova is that they've been mixed in with dozens of other artists, and incorrectly styled as "NoVa":

And "Great Bear" is mostly some other band with twenty AI-generated covers:

Crowfoot, Nightingale, and Buddy System too:

In fact, of the nine bands I originally thought to include (Airdance, The Free Raisins, Nightingale, Crowfoot, Nova, Perpetual e-Motion, Great Bear, Kingfisher, Buddy System), only two (the Free Raisins and Perpetual e-Motion) had a single coherent artist entity. I've started the process of trying to claim the Amazon artist profile for Kingfisher so I can clean our piece of this up, though I'm a bit grumpy about needing to.

This is mostly just me complaining, because I don't expect to use this much (I usually listen to freely available podcasts if I listen to anything), but it's depressingly low quality work from Amazon. I do also wonder if some of the reason their recommendations are so off is that they're extrapolating from very poorly-defined clusters.

(We've since unsubscribed due to a different set of problems, where for kids under 13 to use a family account on a tablet it has to be an Amazon Fire one.)

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Amazon Music's Artist Conflation

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