I'd argue however that Spotify's song recommendation engine is one of its differentiating factors. I'm always hearing friends rave about how much they love each weeks discovery weekly playlist.

AFAIK all of the major players have this feature and even developed it a while ago :

Google Music have been displaying some kind of 'I feel lucky' button for ages (it is not random but based on your listens). They also had artists maps years ago.

Deezer has its Flow

Apple Music has 'for you'

Etc ..

There are many variations in how these recommandations are surfaced to the user though.

I would be hard pressed to recommend one service over another as far as their quality. It is just all over the place depending on your tastes, listening styles and how much new tracks you want to listen to.

IMO Spotify has mostly found a sweet spot in how to present these results to the user.

Spotify has years of my listening data and preferences, other services don't. So if I compare Spotify's recommendations to others, it will always be better, and I'd have to put in a lot of hours into another service for it to catch up.

The Apple Music 'for you' section was something I never really bothered to check. I found the recommendations were poor. I love Spotify's auto-generated playlists. They have a slight problem where if you decide to listen to a new genre for a couple days it suddenly assumes that's all you want to hear, but that's a minor issue

Spotify's is based on machine learning working on the actual audio tracks.

It seems to me that Google Play Music's recommendations are based on what artists you like, based on machine learning, but not using the actual music, just pattern matching with other people.

I use Google Play Music, and am actually considering trying Spotify to get better recommendations.

Do you have sources on this ?

Always interested to read more about how these recommendations work.

This is the article I read that talked about it. Sources are a the bottoms, and they seem legitimate.

https://hackernoon.com/spotifys-discover-weekly-how-machine-...

Spotify's radio is a 10-song loop, another service w/ better radio and same price would definitely steal some users.

Google Play, for the kind of music I listen to, seems to have the best radio feature.

I've always had great results from Google Play Music. There are a couple things that could be improved, but I'm big user of it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee (but I've been using Play Music since long before my employment)

Pandora?

Pandora is only available in the U.S. right now