In the 90s, I discovered a lot of great music because it was playing at a listening station at a record store, or because I was browsing through the ska-punk section and liked the cover art, or by flipping through a friend's CD collection. A lot of my early tastes came from gems I found in my parents old records.
It was also really common to buy an album for one or two songs and then "discover" more songs you liked on the album. The scarcity required you to actually give new songs a chance. I feel like streaming caused my music taste to stagnate because there is no reason not to just skip an unfamiliar song.
It is so easy to expose yourself to new music on spotify. Far easier than relying on whatever handful of records happened to be in the listening station.
Fair enough, and yet I probably never would have listened to "Chocolate and Cheese" without seeing the album in front of me.
> (and is accessible on spotify).
It's not the same. Come on.
> It is so easy to expose yourself to new music on spotify. Far easier than relying on whatever handful of records happened to be in the listening station
I agree, and yet, something about choosing from albums curated by store staff felt better to me than being fed music curated by an algorithm like a goose being stuffed for fois gras.
I never bought records, only CDs. My memory is small and low resolution cover art. Browsing album covers on spotify on anything bigger than a tablet will show the art at a bigger scale with better colors.
They're merely "good enough" IMO. I can go to "Song Radio" or "Artist Radio", and browse through related artists and the like. But the latter still requires a significant amount of effort on my part, and the autogenerated radio playlists are nothing to write home about. I think it's fine that things like the "related artists" features exist, they emulate to some extent the old ways of discovering music, but they're also obvious and they would be part of a music service MVP nowadays. What I miss are solid automatic recommendations, more intelligent than those that are available.
As I remember, Pandora blew Spotify's automatic recommendations out of the water as far back as the mid-2000's. The idea of analyzing the song itself is so powerful and I think Spotify barely does it or weighs it way too little, favoring instead social aspects (such as the preference of other users). I discovered insane amounts of music with Pandora when I was able to use it, like dozens to hundreds of songs per week. Whereas with Spotify I go through these bad droughts that last weeks where I'm not discovering anything new that really clicks. I'd definitely pay for Pandora if it was available here in Spain.
It's weird to me that Spotify being the kingpin is so far behind Pandora in this regard. Is it that they don't care because users don't know any better or demand it? Or that what Pandora did was a technical miracle and can't be replicated at Spotify scale? Maybe it's some business model decision (eg, intelligent recommendations would stray users too far away from Taylor Swift)?
Maybe someone on HN can shed some light on this. And if anyone has any ideas for music services with intelligent recommendations available in Spain I'd be sure to give them a try.
It's a vastly inferior method to Pandora's song analysis method IMO. I'd definitely use Spotify more if it had that, maybe significantly more - I can use it for 6 hours on a given day but then I often give it breaks because I'm on a discovery rut.
Maybe that's just me, and they know on very certain statistical terms that for most users that's not the case and music filter bubbles work much better.
Or maybe they're completely wrong in their approach and they're making a massive mistake at scale. We've come to develop this bias that tech giants "must know what they're doing" but I think it's often not the case. In ten years we could be reading how a competing service took over by offering the same catalogue with much better recommendation tech or other bells and whistles layered on top.
The story I linked also has a similar feel, the music is basically avant pop and neo soul, and instead of forwarding this cluster to someone with a musical/cultural background, a techbro comes up with their own label that comes off as basically "it reminds me of my favourite thing".
From the outside it seems they are really only approaching it from a purely technical point with a subconscious arrogance, ie they are adding the value not the musicians.
Their programmers probably make more money than most musicians on their platform and that's frustrating as fuck.
People who might in the past have gotten their new music from such deeply passionate music lovers and experts as John Peel, or any number of other DJs, are now often using algorithms in their place. And there is a sense that those algorithms are created by people with no real love for music or personal investment in it as part of our culture, which is kind of sad.
I think this is a big part of why music discovery through Spotify feels so soulless, especially compared to something like Bandcamp Weekly.
I guess their next step would be to start creating the music itself with algorithms. You would simply turn on Spotify and it would start playing a continuous stream of algorithmically created music to match your profiled tastes.
Spotify by comparison will also often recycle stuff I've already heard, but there's still always some new stuff in their weekly recommendations. Sometimes it's a hit, sometimes not, but at least it's something I haven't heard before.
I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing collapsed under the weight of some stupid policy of the rightholders (eg, make sure it plays Taylor Swift every 5 songs, or else!) or some other commercial consideration.
I stream from my computer to my phone when I'm at home over the local network in the browser and thru a cheap vpn from my computer when I'm not (and/or just copy a random sample to my phone when I don't wanna pay for the bandwidth) if I know long enough a head of time.
Deff wont show up in billboards stats… nor have to deal with the misalignment of incentives when listening to music on the soundcloud trying to push a song from their algos an artist/agency paid them to do (or ads).
The music I like I can't really find anywhere else to higher degree and ease (occasionally I might find it on youtube, just available on bandcamp, or have to message the artist) so its not really applicable.
> It was pleasant to see this whole world of artists just doing their thing
This is what I like the most, reminds me of FOSS: artists all over the world doing their own thing and occasionally doing it together.
This way when I play the music (e.g. at a dinner with friends) not only do I know what it is going to be, but I can also tell them a little story about it.
there's nothing stopping you from having both!
I havnt done this yet but im thinking about cancelling my spotify subscription soon and only signing up for a few months out the year just to discover new stuff, then put the rest of the money I would have given spotify that year towards buying the music I want to keep.
I won't have to worry about songs disappearing anymore or my playlists not being downloaded offline and more importantly you are giving an artist some money and not just a fraction of a cent
Actually it seems the entire music industry including the distributors don't want sales - they seem to prefer streaming.
I remember when apple music came out and I couldn't listen to my music anymore
Though maybe you're saying something differently.
I think the music industry is perfectly happy to sell you music at $1/song and even physical CDs if you like. It's just that, for most people who don't already have large curated collections, it apparently makes sense to subscribe for $10/month rather than buy albums for $10. For me it makes sense to subscribe and occasionally also buy something to add to my owned collection.
I think the music industry doesn't care anymore about selling music - why sell you a song for $1 (that you might copy for your friends) if they can sell you the same song again and again every month?
This is pretty much my favorite recommendation by Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9982wYPPm0
One of my wishes is that I could tell Apple Music/Spotify that I don't want its playlists/discovery to ever play me music from $X genre because I just don't like even if it's considered really good by the standards of the genre.
That and radio were my discovery processes and it worked great.
For years before Spotify went mainstream – going all the way back to the early millennium! – discovery was already provided by services like Last.fm where you could see what your friends and neighbors were listening to, and filesharing communities where you could then freely download the music.
In comparison, spotify will find and play hundreds of fresh songs similar to any song I like. And lots of songs I don’t like - but that’s fine, because more music I’ve never heard before is a click away.
I miss owning my music collection, and I’m very frustrated whenever spotify is missing some of my favourite music. But any scarcity of musical variety you feel is entirely artificial, self imposed and ridiculous.