This year I cancelled and moved to Spotify.
For $2/month it was a great product and a great deal. But the product didn't change over a 5 year period. I found stations got stuck into the same set of songs and would stop adding new ones. I wonder win the last time the Music Genome Project was updated? More infuriating, their buggy Adobe Air desktop app was never fixed or updated.
Three years ago the price moved to $3/mo. Two years ago it moved to $4/mo. This past year they got rid of any grandfathered discounts and charged $5/mo. I was sick of paying more for the same product and jumped ship. I do miss my radio stations, but Spotify's prebuilt playlists are pretty good replacement.
There was this odd bug on some stations that caused unrelated tracks, at least from a human standpoint, to play. Most notorious were some classic rock stations. After a couple hours of play, they'd start playing comedy. I could understand if there were some parody bands or musicians like Spinal Tap or Tenacious D seeding the stations, but these stations had none of the sort.
Eg, why are we still using playlists? I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags, ranging from "cool" to "energetic" to "happy". Ie, a string tag, a tempo tag, and an emotion tag. I want to be able to filter queries to an arbitrary number of tags and genres. I want to be able to filter by who it was produced by, who played in it, per album or per song.
Most of the features i want don't require any complex content recognition algorithm. And yet, like it's 1990, most of the music apps i use (spotify, google music) lack what i consider to be basic features.
Why did Gmail "pave the way" with tagging instead of folders, and yet i'm still stuck using Playlists in Google Music? Why does Spotify support a nice rich community for playlists, but seemingly won't let the community add meaningful data to songs, albums, etc and then let me query my song collection from that?
I know, i'm sure there are plenty of mp3 players and etc that do this just fine - but i use Spotify, and i want the features in there. I want a streaming collection of on demand music. I like the variety. I'd kill for my above features with a Spotify-like package.
Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre.
Are those all the same artist? The same album? The same genre?
My point in the above questions is that of course a single field won't perfectly fit to all songs in existence, but "fit" is subjective. If i want "up tempo" music, and i don't request anything else, then give me all up tempo music. Rage rock, rap, symphony, all of it. I can refine the filter if i want.
This allows me to query "play me all up tempo music from Dave Matthews Band". "Play me all happy music from Dave Matthews Band's album Live at the Rocks", and etc.
> Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre.
Clearly that's not what i want, as i am extremely dissatisfied with Playlists.
Expecting all music to somehow be grouped into non-flexible folders (which is all playlists are) seems silly to me. Do you think i shouldn't be able to Search Google/Internet for custom terms?
Why can i not search music for custom tags, but i can search for genres? Having tags doesn't mean Playlists can't exist, but it can allow me to refine my UX to exactly what i want. I'm sick of curated Playlists, and i'm tired of trying to remember all song names in existence to build my own. I want better data to build collections of songs.
Who wants to follow Van Halen's "You Really Got Me" with the Endaro Mahaanubhaavulu? Answer: nobody. So you need to define genre. OK, you select "Rock". Now "You Really Got Me" is followed by "Non E Per Sempre." Oops. Still the wrong genre - and also the wrong language.
So you specify "English" words and try to tighten the genre. Now this is harder: is Van Halen "hard rock" or "metal" or "glam rock" (answer: could be any of the above). Pick the wrong one, and you'll accidentally expunge "You Really Got Me" from your listening experience, or include a bunch of Poison and Tesla songs, and you really hate those bands because you think their lyrics are dumb.
Uh-oh. Now you need a way to categorize the thoughtfulness of the lyrics.
The fact is that the requirement that most listeners have is something much more intelligent than a database search. If you've attempted to use the music genome project to find music, you'll know what a difficult process it can be. The music it returns is extremely hit-or-miss - and it is exquisitely tagged. By the way, I do think that the music genome project will solve your particular requirement "show uptempo music from Dave Matthews Band."
I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm saying it requires next-gen AI to (A) adequately categorize music on all needed dimensions and (B) assist the user in forming meaningful queries.
I'm also saying that the experience of radio broadcasting over the last 50 years is that listeners almost always want something that feels extremely familiar and highly curated....
Of course, that's why you combine filters. You keep speaking of single queries.
tag:uptempo tag:epic instruments:guitar genre:electronic
I'm not saying it will be perfect. I'm saying right now we have nearly no useful ability to discover music. I'm extremely dissatisfied with music discovery, and i have no control in most applications.
> I'm also saying that the experience of radio broadcasting over the last 50 years is that listeners almost always want something that feels extremely familiar and highly curated....
Which sucks, because it's clear most popular products (Spotify/etc) agree with you - and i detest it. I have been given zero, completely zero meaningful features to interact with. At best i have magic in the backend to "hopefully maybe implement what i might want". There is no interaction to allow me to try and shape this with any meaningful feedback over what each interaction does.
What does this Heart do? Is it permanent or is it just temporary? How do i build a dynamic playlist off of a mood? How do i remove certain artists/genres/instruments/vocals from the mood?
Most music playing services give me absolutely nothing. And it's terrible, to this user at least. I just want features, and no one is implementing user facing features.
edit: To be clear, i'd settle for community tagging. Hell, i'd setting for the ability to tag posts myself, with no other contribution. I can't even play music by a tag i define. I promise you, i can manage to tag some music myself - but i have no ability to do that. The best i can do is build a playlist, which is like 1990's Mail folders. Completely useless for dynamic applications.
About 99% of "innovation" these days seems to focus on logistical non-issues instead of the essence of things.
It may not be the correct term of "disrupt", i don't follow the startup culture too closely - all i mean to say is, most products i've seen have bare bones discovery methods and don't let the user help inform the platform about what discovery they want. It would be like Searching Google if the only thing it gave you was precompiled lists of sites you might like.
So, i long for someone to "disrupt" this space by providing obvious (to me) content discovery and categorization methods. If you could provide me with a Spotify-like solution, and throw in meaningful ways to search, filter, discover, etc content? I'd switch in a heartbeat and i'm sure music lovers would spent quite a bit of time on that platform in the same way that they contribute to Spotify.
There's recommendations at the bottom of individual playlists now so I can look there but still a pain that I can't get a nice mix in my discover weekly.
And you can fill the gaps in their catalog by uploading your own music.
Tldr: I really don't see the case for pandora in 2017.
It does a great job caching songs ahead while you're on Wifi, so you can minimize data usage while out and about. Plus, with the caching it also works offline perfectly well.
I feel a bit sorry for all the other services, but on a technical level Google Play Music has outplayed them all entirely.
It's ok, there's Spotify now, which doesn't arbitrarily ban users for living in the wrong place. Spotify has become a much better, much more flexible service. Even if Pandora were to lift its ban on foreigners, there is no longer a market for their service here. Sorry Pandora, you had the momentum, but threw it away.
#2: It is the case with ALL music and video streaming providers. Apparently you lucked out with Spotify, but that could be the opposite for someone else.
Stupid, yes... but the bad guys here are the record labels rather than the streaming services.
But that's all ignoring the actually source of these restrictions. They don't come from the services themselves. They come from the outdated music industry structure that hasn't kept up with the internet-enabled globalized world.
The last one is something that no other service I have encountered even considers (maybe Spotify has some recording info?). Also their API was a joy to use and very helpful support staff.
Sorry for the rant, especially when comparing your observation to something that no longer exists.
Edit: but one can hope that Pandora will put all of that wonderfulness together one day in to their own product.
Google play music actually works great for both of these functions, but the app is extremely unstable on my phone (Moto X running 5.1), so it isn't an option for me.
Pandora's model of not having that feature will always outweigh their music matching algorithm.
I know I'm sounding like such a fanboy but I discovered some of my favorite bands and artists after hearing them first through Pandora's recommendations. I've often heard songs I liked at random places, shazammed them, and created a channel on Pandora, which has led to some really good artists that I would've never heard through other media. So for music discovery, Pandora is where its at. I really hope this company sticks around.