I’m the opposite of everyone here. Spotify is so good for discovery. My discover weekly consistently finds me awesome little bands I never would have found anywhere else. The mixes and playlist generation are terrible. The service is good. Offline mode is terrible.
I still send music I think is cool to my friends and vice versa. Being able to see what your friends are listening to is also great.
I’m still switching to my own music library using listenbrainz for discovery. Hopefully i can still find good music.
Yep, same here. The difference is, you need to use Spotify for some time so it learns what to show you. I consistently find amazing obscure bands out there.
The only good thing about Spotify is that you can control the algorhythm with a bit of work instead of the other way around.
I’m feeding off the weekly recommendations that are filled with the 6-8 genres I like. I don’t get any mainstream garbage in my recommendations, and am finding New Songs every week.
I bet those articles come from the 3 big Labels
For me the recommendations have been circling the drain for a while. It’s just the same songs over and over again, and it seems to have decided that I only like ambient electronic music and indie pop, both of which I actually find quite boring. No matter what I do, and no matter how much I like songs in other genres, that’s what it serves me, along with the occasional '80s hit because it has figured out I’m old. It was good for a few years but then seemed to get stuck in a rut.
So you have
Discover Weekly
and
Release Radar
and
daylist which generates vibe based playlists every 4 hours
and
An endless search of all songs and artists and playlists matching any number of random playlists featuring random songs across all genres
limited to your imagination
and going back to the beginning of recorded music
and then at the bottom of those playlists you have recommended songs based on the playlist
then if you click on any of those songs you get more songs by that artist
then if you click smart shuffle it’ll inject songs related into the playlist
It’s kinda hard for me to sympathise but I have heard this complaint a few times now
For me the biggest complaint against spotify I have is payola
More or less same, or random bands with the same name, I mostly use bandcamp for discovery these days, for now it’s still great being able to follow small labels, bands and user tags.
I’ve been very cautious over all the years that ive been using it. My rule is to only like what I wouldn’t mind listening daily to, and do playlists for all the other stuff that I don’t want to get bombarded with.
It has worked out for me.
I used to like some of the old bittorrent clients seeing what other users were seeding. You would see someone with a lot of known killer music and something you had never heard of. It was a great way of finding new music.
that was limewire and kazaa, also cheers for bringing back a memory that I didn’t know I had lol
Imo music discovery on Spotify is best done by pursuing playlists posted by musicians you like or just hopping by related artists/album features.
The article hits the nail on the head when they say to listen to human curated content - whether it be curated by yourself or someone else, it’s the best way to find something new/good.
Switched to deezer some years ago. I tested all music streaming services beforehand and found that Deezer an Applemusic have the most relevant music recommendations for me.
Both deezer and apple have all the spotify features my family wants plus lossless audio if youre into that kind of thing (like me). Since distribution is handled by tunecore etc the catalog is the same anyway. Decided on deezer because I use android. Also a neat little backdoor in their servers Ü.
I think algorithms overall are affecting music and how it reaches people. The rise of songs as background music for things they have nothing to do with is becoming blatant. “Messy” came out of know where and suddenly everyone knew about it and it was in tons of videos. I had never heard of that woman before (which could be for a number of reasons) but suddenly, boom, it’s everywhere. Now it’s “Anxiety.” I used to (naively) think that people were just naturally coming across music and things were just popular. But without the charade of people “calling” in to request a song, the act of discovering music feels very soulless. It’s like, “here, please choose your new favorite song from these preselected songs.”
This is why i only listen to music recomedations by Anatoly Bannano the internet’s busiest music nerd ™ and laurie my punk transwomen psychotic co-worker.
Oh what the hell time to hijack this thread… GIMMIE YOUR FAVORITE PLACES TO FIND NEW MUSIC!
Nts.live Dubspot Radio I’ve replaced streaming services with music nerd internet radio.
I love internet radio as much as the next boomer, But what ever happened to music blogs and independent music fans? I like the kind of fanboy that is both a critic and a bridge to new genres.
I get the impression people of that sort have mostly ended up on RateYourMusic.
just stop listening to automated playlists
Music industry destroyed music way before Spotify. The second it became industry.
I find articles and takes of this sort to be kind of “storm in a glass of water”, not really an issue if you just take a step back, and with somewhat made-up problems, e.g. pop songs used to go on for 3 or maaaybe 4 minutes, now the author complains they are just 2 mins - but the format never was conductive to “telling a proper story” at all.
If someone thinks Spotify is that bad, idk just stop using it? I’ve never used it and I’m doing just fine. There’s plenty of other ways of discovering and accessing and living with music.
Tidal is better
fuxk spotify
Yeah Spotify sucks, I just recently deleted my account entirely. The only thing I liked about it was making playlists. Then one day I had a Fuck This Shit moment and decided I was done.
I have a collection of digital albums that is far better than anything I could get at Spotify, lol
deleted by creator
I used to really enjoy spending one afternoon a month spending my absurd grandfathered-in emusic quota on weird new folk and adjacent stuff.
Then they changed the deal and I switched to streaming. It’s just not the same.
Podcasts and playlists on mine. Been a spotify user for 15 years.
Playlist are usually genre specific. With a GrabBag playlist and “comedy” playlist. Spotify is good at throwing me new songs on a solid genre playlist. Pretty easy for my house/techno, rock, and my wayback (pre-2000s) playlist.
A mix of songs kind of throws it off, like too many different types of music and it doesn’t really get “taste”.
If you use spotify, make playlists separated by genres. That’s the best I’ve seen for music discovery with spotify.
Frank Zappa put it this way [paraphrased]
In the 1960s the music execs were into Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington. They had no idea what was going on, so they just threw money at any band that came along. You had a wide variety of music.
The first set of execs hired young guys who ‘knew what the kids want.’ Those guys played it safe, so in the 1970s you had stadium rock and disco.
Now AI ‘knows’ exactly what people want.
The story of how Zappa and the Mothers got a contract is amazing. Basically a label guy walked into a gig as they played Trouble Every Day, their only song ever with conventional commercial potential, and signed them on the spot.
Once they got to the studio and started playing some tremendously weird stuff it was too late to stop them.
exactly like yes Spotify is bad but are they thinking we had some natural occurring perfect system for music before?
The bigger issue is are artists being compensated, no they’re not.
I feel like the oldest man in the thread with about 100gigs of self-ripped music to which I still own the CD’s… Also with the signature look of superiority, of course.
Right there with you…I still rock one of these.
I have that same CD player. Like having my own streaming server. LOL
