I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.
I'm looking at the official chart top 40 online and have to go down to 7th place to find an artist I know (Taylor Swift). Only one song on my "Release Radar" is in the Top 40 list (Sixteen by Ellie Goulding).
I think you get what you look for with Spotify. If you listen to a bunch of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, you'll be recommended a things like Aria Grande and AVICII. But if you listen to An Horse and Houndsmouth then you'll aparently get recommendations for The Mountain Goats and Me Not You.
I've used a number of music recommendation applications over the last decade.
With Spotify, I've noticed that it will become "stuck" in what I describe as similar artist troughs and valleys. In other words, the Spotify recommendation engine will pigeonhole your recommendations into certain subgenres, niches, or related artists more so than say Pandora or Last.fm would.
It's super obnoxious. I wish they had a slider for "be more adventurous" versus "hew close to the line". Do I remember Pandora having something like that?
I thought it was decent.
Years ago, I would have spent a non-zero amount of time linking through friends on Last.FM / Audioscrobbler. While this can be enjoyable, having it done by an algorithm is perfectly fine for me and I'm willing to pay for it.
I can't speak to Spotify, but many years ago I picked up some agent software that does a rough analysis of the music I enjoy, then crawls the web looking for music that resembles it. I use that for recommendations.
The software is a bit crude in its analysis, but I think that's a feature, not a bug, because it ensures that in the mix of music that I certainly will like are random tunes that I would never have thought to listen to, and often those turn out to be gems.
Most of the music the crawler finds is from indie artists that aren't well-known at all. When I find a new one that I enjoy, I make it a point to seek them out and buy their music directly from them.
Anyway, this has been my solution for about 15 years now, and it works great for me!
This has been my experience as well.
I'm a big fan of the recommendation algorithms, so I set up a super basic site to wrap the Spotify API and let anyone get recommendations based on a single song link, rather than waiting for the Discover Weekly recs which are based off the blend of everything you listen to.
Warning: the site is really basic right now
The /recommend API I wrapped for the site is similar, in that I let it spit out 12 "similar" songs, but I'll probably only like one or two songs, but you can also re-submit to shuffle the recommendations. The site is definitely more for active discovery than passively listening. I made the site because:
1. I wanted to more actively discover songs
2. I'm a big Spotify fan and was curious about the guts of the recommendations algorithm
3. I had never deployed an actual site (I exclusively do backend programming at work) so it was good learning experience about things like setting up a little static site
I neither have the space, budget, or time to trade my music in the cloud for physical media. My online collection is much larger than either my Mp3 or physical media collection.
The algo isn’t the best, but it’s not awful or just giving you the most popular music around. For example they never recommended Billie Eilish to me which would be a win for their algo not just recommending popular things that are sort of adjacent to music I’m listening to.
Checking the playlists Spotify created for me, they seem pretty decent. Nothing to do with top charting pop music.
Last.fm syncs with Spotify seamlessly too and many other platforms.
Good news! Bandcamp is now offering artists an in-house vinyl pressing service.
That said, for a larger number of really major artists, I heard about something called HDTracks. I haven't tried them yet, but it seems that they sell FLAC in 24 bit audio.
My dad was huge into music and had a vinyl collection of 300-400 albums. As a kid, I used to check out the album covers and inserts as I ate breakfast. One that I distinctly remember is cover for "The Wall"
Their recommendations were miles ahead of anything Spotify, Apple or Google have ever managed. So last.fm killed off the radio, the streaming, then started playing random Youtube vids for each track - very often a poor rendition, or a cover etc.
I gave up years ago, but still miss that recommendation engine that drove the radio stations - I discovered so many brilliant new-to-me artists through that. Scrobbling listens into a different platform or recommendation engine is the least useful part of what they did.
I'm actually surprised the site's still there!
It's basically an indefensible position that we're not discovering more and paying for more 'long tail' type media in the digital streaming era.
My point is that music discovery, like all recommendation systems right now, is severely lacking in what made media discovery more meaningful in the 90s - that controlled chaos that led to surprises. Now everything collapses towards the mean of mediocrity. Sure you discover more 'bands' now, but they're belting out the same tracks with an extra half beat or a pitch shift, so I hardly call it 'discovery'. Long-tail used to be more fringe, but high-quality and related, unlike now, where it's the worst within the technical bounds of the algorithm. We're discovering more within our local minima, which is technically discovering more, but in the most frightfully boring way possible.
I would not have been exposed to at least half of the music I regularly listen to now if I had something like Spotify back then. I tried to use Spotify, Pandora, and Google Music, but after a month they each felt like I was listening to generic music station #342398 and I went back to purchasing albums. It's weird when a single album can be more diverse than a station with nearly limitless tracks to pull from.
And don't even get me started on how recommendation services have killed the idea of an 'album' - maybe the most rewarding facet of music production basically wiped out in less than a decade.
Their bookstores would likely also have had a few rock/alternative/electronic music magazines to offer choices outside of Top 40.
If they were lucky, they might also have had an indie music store in town where you could browse through the stacks and make conversation with the proprietors who'd turn you on to new stuff.
Many bands on Bandcamp offer bundles of vinyl, CDs, t-shirts, etc. with the digital download. One example off the top of my head:
I couldn't agree more. I have found new artists that I probably wouldn't have listened to with both spotify and last fm. But with last.FM radio alone I have discovered more genres.
Pick a few physical music venues nearby that you like, and make a list of all the artists playing shows there for the next month or two. Then take a song by each artist and chuck it into a playlist (could be youtube or bandcamp or spotify, whatever). Listen, and when you hear something you like, maybe listen to their latest release! If it's good, you've just found an artist you like, and guess what? They're playing a show nearby soon.
It is rare these days to browse anyone's music collection on their cellphone. The most we do is just search for music we want to hear or want our friends to hear.
That being said, indie music stores like Bandcamp are digital only, but offer one-click DRM-free MP3 downloads for purchased songs/albums. The UX is focused on buying music first and supporting individual artists, rather than commoditizing their sound into an algorithmic playlist where they're lumped in with everybody else.
I honestly find Spotify and Apple Music bad for music discovery if your tastes aren't really adjacent to Top 40 (is that even a thing today?) style pop music. Back in the day, Last.fm used your iTunes/Foobar play history to show you bands you'd like. The algorithm was based on user-submitted tags, and the recommendations weren't limited to bands that had deals with the platform. I discovered a ton of new music across very different genres there. Unfortunately it doesn't look like the site is very active these days.