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Re:How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month by toast0 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @03:24PM (#19504925)
So, for me, I want to listen to good music, but I don't want to curate a collection. I certainly don't want to deal with the hard parts of starting a collection where I have to buy a bunch of albums at once to have variety; I also don't care to do the work of finding new things to listen to.

I want a radio experience, where some nice person somewhere else (or an algorithm, whatever) picks music for me. Bonus points if they don't come on after every song to tell me all about whatever. I'm not worried about the cost or inconvenience of using cellular data services to stream music, that's the primary reason I have a data plan.

I use a curated streaming service, but I can see the appeal of Spotify, because thanks to the mandatory licensing regime, they can literally stream any released music in a radio context; and having access to everything is amazing. When Launchcast was a thing, it's recommendation engine was pretty great, although they lacked depth in the genre's I want to listen to; I strongly suspect Spotify does too.

Re:How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month by stareatgoats on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @04:05PM (#19505405)
Just curious; what genre(s) would that be? I have found the most surprising things on there ...
Re:How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month by toast0 on Wednesday March 27, 2019 @04:25PM (#19505640)
I was listening to Vocal Trace for a long time. Most commercial services might have the studio albums, but the DJ mixes are better IMHO, and I've been listening to Digitally Imported streams for nearly 20 years at this point, so I'm used to their curation [1]. Lately, I've been listening to their Synthwave channel; I don't know how widely that music is distributed, it's basically new music in the style of 80s synth and video game music (the reddit community is r/outrun); I'd guess this could be found pretty easily on Spotify/others, since it's all originals and most likely the artists are submitting it everywhere.

[1] https://www.di.fm/vocaltrance

Re:How Spotify and Discover Weekly Earn Me $400/month by stareatgoats on Thursday March 28, 2019 @02:15PM (#19514953)
OK thanks - always interesting to get acquainted with a new genre. I counted to 80 Spotify playlists when searching on the term (with a few hundred followers as median), so it is at least represented to some degree.