To be fair, they paid good money for Songza's radio stations system. But yes, the browsability is awful. I don't mind the radio stations approach, but I can't even find good listings of what radio stations they provide... and when I do find a radio station I like, I find it has a rotation of like 12 songs.
Re:Netflix and Fill
by Something1234 on Friday August 12, 2016 @02:53PM
(#12277915)
This seems to be true of like at least 90% of music streaming services, just with varying numbers of songs per station. Like with slacker it was 50 songs, and then a small number of extras put in. Or amazon music playing the same song 2 or 3 times during the same listening session.
Re:Netflix and Fill
by mattmanser on Thursday August 11, 2016 @05:53PM
(#12271864)
Just to echo Pxtl, but much more explicitly, I don't think this had anything to do with caches or scalability, it was because they bought Songza.
If you've any evidence, please do share and I'm happy to put my hands up and admit I'm wrong, but the announcement was that the change was supposed to be because they now had these amazing hand curated playlists.
> Google looks forward to bringing back those genres/subgenres, and even microgenres, once they've had a chance to improve them and make them more scalable around the world.
That is a comment from a top contributor in the product forum. Thread is here https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/play/i9meVy...
Re:Netflix and Fill
by CamperBob2 on Thursday August 11, 2016 @07:33PM
(#12272463)
Wow, that thread is angrier than the Maps forum. Pretty impressive achievement on Google's part.
Re:Netflix and Fill
by chipperyman573 on Friday August 12, 2016 @01:28AM
(#12273545)
What's so bad about the maps forum?
Why not both? Maybe Sognza's playlists were a caching solution.
Re:Netflix and Fill
by mattmanser on Thursday August 11, 2016 @07:00PM
(#12272288)
Occam's razor.
dlandis is suggesting a pretty over-complicated, anti-consumer reason as to why google started pushing curated lists.
Or you can buy into the incredibly simple "because google bought Sognza to compete with spotify's curated lists".
This is similar to what happened with Google Play Music. They used to have a really nice feature that enabled you to browse through all genres and continue to drill down several levels into very specific sub genres. It was a great way to discover new music.
The problem was people were streaming way too much music that was not optimally cached and it was causing scalability issues for them. The solution? Remove the subgenre browse feature and transition to a radio station-based approach. You now have the choice of a limited set of predefined radio stations, each with a limited number of tracks, which I assume are all cached in an optimized way, but you cannot drill down nearly as far into the sub genres.
If you browse the google forums there have been thousands of comments about the reduced functionality over the past year or so.