Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.
The "shuffle" alone on Spotify was enough to send me running. Have a playlist with 200 songs from 80 different artists? Well, we'll just play this one artist - the same album even! - back to back to back until you're annoyed enough to manually select the next song!
I understood people flocking to Spotify back when it was the only game in town that allowed you to play specific songs, make playlists, and "download" songs for offline (airplane) playback. But now Pandora does all this too - and has for the past several years. The two services are even priced about the same...
So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?
I recognize this isn't mainstream listening, and for all I know the ratios are reversed for more popular music.
I found the Pandora choices of songs annoying. I love Philip Glass; I don't want to listen to a bunch of other people playing triplets against eighths. It's derivative and boring in comparison. I do want to listen to his contemporaries that compose in different ways. Or let's take Nuut again. I came across her recently while surveying contemporary Estonian composers. Pandora doesn't let me do that so far as I can tell. I'm interested in what is going on there compositionally over the last 2 decades, I am not looking for another person that writes something that is very 'similar" (according to the Pandora algorithms).
Finally, I never use shuffle. So much of what i listen to are
I understand my use case is not the only one, but neither is yours! People select different apps because they provide what the person wants.
For instance, with Glass - there are 171 albums on Idagio. And it breaks them down with works, instrumentation, ensembles, soloists, genres (piano solo, chamber, secular vocal. etc.), conductors, and recording date.
If you want to compare the 22 piano solo albums that Jeroen van Veen has recorded of Glass's music - easy to pull all of them up quickly.
Their encoding is also vastly superior to Spotify or (yikes) YouTube Music. If you have a decent signal-chain for listening, high-quality components, and enjoy Classical... Idagio is head-and-shoulders above the rest.
I gave up on Spotify when they removed the widget functionality on Android. I know they returned it eventually, but not without complete uproar. It burned myself as a decade old (family) premium user though; I used to love them, but that complete disregard completely changed that.
Now, only a 3 month minimum (6 would help) completely free retrial would get me back. Thus far, none has been received.
(On the flip side I absolutely love YouTube Red or Premium or whatever they call it these days.)
The UI is the worst I've seen on any music service or player, but I'd found quite a bit of music I like through their recommendations.
I used to pay for Google Music and transitioned to YouTube Music but eventually gave up because it has so many issues. I also tried Spotify but didn't like it much so now I don't know what I will use.
The implementation and mixing music videos with other video content in my Youtube account is horrible on the other way.
Youtube Music implementation of Chromecast is spotless while Spotify every so often interupts with "Your spotify account is used on another device" (Not true just checking my phone). In general Youtube is also tolerant of using two devices with the same account for a few moments.
And no podcasts in the music app... Hurah...
Even now I googled "Pandora windows app", clicked a few times, and ended up on some Microsoft Store page. Interestingly enough if I add "mac" to my search terms I just get a download...
If you are in a highly competitive space that is effectively winner take all - you go where your customers want to be, not where your developers think they should be.
Anecdata, but I open Pandora in it's own window, then minimize it. This makes it pretty easy to find if you have a hundred+ tabs open at once like I often find myself with.
I currently have 44 tabs open, including Pandora in it's own window, and Chrome is only using ~2GB of RAM - perfectly acceptable to me.
That's exactly what I'm not looking for; I'm perfectly fine with making my own music choices. I know what I like, have an extensive "library" on Spotify, and play from just that.
The biggest thing I'm missing from Spotify (or indeed, most players, except the one I wrote myself years ago) is the ability to say "play random album from my collection". Play random track is too biased towards albums with 60 tracks vs. albums with just one track.
Quod Libet (https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) lets you do exactly that.
It's still the best music player I know of though, even when running with Wine on Linux.
see: https://i.imgur.com/zL0oZsx.png
You can customize this feature in Advanced Preferences. Then, go to Playback -> Shuffle -> Album grouping pattern.
I guess Spotify is still the only game in town :(
The rest of the comment still stands for all US based users, however.
You can see here[1] that Spotify has made agreements with specific labels for international rights. What a thing... only licensed to stream a song in some select set of countries... absurd in 2020/2021 and being an internet based service - but that's record labels for you.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203324/spotify-warner-ag...
Aside from having nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free, their recommendations have helped me find a lot of great songs. I don't personally listen to the curated playlists but many of my friends love them.
I subscribed to Rhapsody in 2004. It gave me access to "nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free". As 2 examples of things it did better, instead of using a shitty recommendation system that when I pick some electro swing band it recommends death metal, instead for every artist it showed their lists of who influenced them and who they influenced. I found tons of great bands that way. Way more than i've found on Spotify's crappy system
And that's just one example. The now dead Google Play Music's recommendation system actually worked where Spotify's does not.
It's just your personal experience that is different. Same for the other guy, same for me.
I've been on a paid accounts for Apple Music, Google Music, Yandex Music and even Youtube's adhoc solution for music. At least 1 year each (almost for entire time since the launch of Yandex music).
Spotify beats them all. Both recommendations and content (though we have to agree that content part can vary based on your location). Never had a chance to try Rhapsody.
>that when I pick some electro swing band it recommends death metal
That's how Google Music worked for me though, not Spotify.
Yandex had best UI but worst recommendation system (and lack of content).
Apple's recommendations are about as bad as Google's. Better UI but again - did not have music I wanted.
Is this a new thing?
"Everyone else's opinion * objectively * sucks".
Just because you write "objectively", doesn't make it so.
It is literally impossible for you to just sort the list of stations you have created. If you have 120 stations, you have to s l o w l y scroll through them in random order until you find the one you want. And even though there are thumbnails next to them (presumably to make them easier to identify), the thumbnails change. There's a hundred different usability problems, and as far as I can tell, all of them minor features that could have been implemented years ago.
If you don't pay for the premium version, it's a nightmare of pop-ups to prompt you to pay, to the point that you develop reflexes to pass the prompts. Then there's the actual ads, which sometimes seem to disappear for a while, only to barrage you intermittently for a half hour.
The whole thing annoyed me so much, and I complained on their support channels so often, that I dropped them and just started buying music. And of course I then had to pirate the same music I purchased because there's no way to just buy some MP3s so you can move the music around.
1. Spotify
2. Pandora
3. No matter what, rickroll you on the next song
Cleary 3 is far superior to the other two! ;)
So if something can be objectively WORSE, there must be the possibility of something being objectively better.
It doesn't matter how good the tech is if business/legal can't keep up with the competition.
Aside from amount of content (which wasn't an issue earlier), I suspect the primary reason is that Pandora isn't available in Europe. I loved it so much (>5 years ago?) that I used as VPN, but this didn't quite work on my phone and ended up being too much of a bother.
Spotify's big advantage, like most monopoly-focused 'startups' is their monopoly. Not actually providing the best to their customers.
I can use Spotify without a VPN, it has a lot of stuff Pandora doesn't have, and I can share stuff with friends because everyone else also uses Spotify. It's difficult to compete with that.
IIRC, these algos were part of a project called ~Muse which later forked, and there was a schism between the algos and clickstream data or the personal data and anonymized cohort data. Will have to review / re-search.
The trove of our searches, listens, and skips Pandora has / had did a good job informing recommendations and was an effective moat for my use.
At least someone's still at it, and all this helps me find my notes from that time.
https://github.com/LDugar/MusicGenome/raw/master/Decoding-th...
[0]http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp [1]https://github.com/omgDB
Pandora wants to get rid of those features. All their advertising now is "if you pay for a premium account, you can play whatever music you want, on demand".
This reminds me really strongly of how eBay decided that (1) customers prefer to buy things at a fixed price [completely correct]; so that (2) they should try to prevent people from listing ordinary auctions, because customers don't like those. [No!] Instead, the goal was to just be the place where people would go if they wanted to buy something online.
Except of course that that completely undermines the concept of eBay. They were an established auction site that intentionally drove auctions away. And then they complained that people preferred to buy things from Amazon.
In both cases, it looks like a popular company with an established brand sees a rival that's even more popular, and concludes that the only path forward must be to implement features the rival offers while discontinuing or discouraging any features where they're doing better than the rival is. How does this make sense?
Spotify generates some decent genre based playlists based on my listening history. Not as good as Pandora was.
Lately with the pandemic, I've created a super-chill, ambient play list (I started with Moby's Long Ambients and expanded from there) to relax before bedtime. This has been really helpful for unwinding in these stressful times.
However, an unintended consequence is that Spotify now thinks I listen to soothing ambient more than 50% of the time. My year in music is all ambient and my suggested play lists are all wishy-washy now. Apparently there is no "ignore this playlist when tracking usage." You can only manually disable tracking under "Settings > Social" and it times out after every session.
Spotify takes a lot more risks and I think its highly preferable.
royksopp - this must be it
trapt - headstrong
ladytron - destroy everything you touch
Some sort of remix of the hand that feeds by Nine Inch Nails (I think it was the photek remix or something)
I got these songs a lot on many stations, and nothing else by those artists ever, haha.
I don't hold a grudge from 10 years ago though
Programming along, with background music playing - when suddenly I become "aware" of the song playing and how good it is. That's when I give it the "Thumbs Up" in Pandora, then go back to work. Might happen once a session if I'm lucky.
In addition I have several playlists, as a song might suit the current playlist, and another song might fit playlist B instead. So any playlist might be seeding several other playlists at a time.
Sometimes I go through many, many recommendations, listen to a song in short pieces quickly by skipping most of it. It sounds weird but that way I can pretty accurately tell if the song is shit or not (read: if I end up liking it). If the song passes my filter, I put it to some playlist. I just do this quickly and finally go back and listen to the new ones.
As for "dislike", there isn't one per song but there is a "Don't play this" per artist. I sometimes play children's songs or pop as requested, and after some time the recommendations include music I truly never want to hear again in any recommendations (Marcus & Martinus I'm looking at you).
Also, it feels like only the first songs in a playlist actually matter for the recommendations. I don't know if this is really the case. I'd hope the recommendation engine took a random sampling of the entire playlist and recommended based on those.
Edit: there's a "hide" for a track.
SoundCloud Weekly[0] recommendations have been solid for months specifically with ambient: ~85% Good tracks with ~30% Resonating enough to Favorite. My other contexts / use cases include listening by Album and Artist, Genre, Mood- and Mind-Setting, and Discovery.
Spotify works well for Albums and Artists. HypeMachine is my go-to for Discovery and Genre. SoundCloud and BandCamp work well for diving into artists and labels discovered. Playlists and Favorites across these are best for Mood- and Mind-Setting, as are "special purpose" options like Brain.fm and Ragya.
[0]https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] [1]https://www.ragya.com/
I take a similar approach, but I've found that the recommendation algorithm is pretty bad, so as an extra step I click on the artist and spend a bit of time listening to their other songs (and add those too, in the hopes it'll affect the algorithm).
> This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.
That's one of my main issues with the 'recommended' algorithm. 90% of it is stuff I already have in other playlists, or stuff I keep skipping. I really wish the algorithm did a bit more with all the data it has, but I imagine they optimize for sales (to us or promoting artists/labels) over our actual desires.
There's no way to prevent songs from getting suggested (other than maybe blocking a song entirely?). My recommendeds don't seem to get updated until the playlist has changed dramatically. And repeat songs get added to the section even if I haven't added it the umpteen times it was suggested prior.
Is the experience different on desktop or am I doing something wrong?
You can at least for radio playlists. You can specifically say to never play this song or artist again. They used to let you thumb up or down on tracks which I think was a much easier UI.
Skipping songs doesn't seem to do enough for songs in your playlists so you have to go through the whole right click -> never play again workflow. I really wish I could just downvote individual songs as they play and tailor it that way since sometimes I'm just tired of a particular song, but maybe I like the song or the artist and don't want to click on 'never hear this again'. It just seems to repeat certain songs way too much based on your listening history.
Though maybe I should say the majority of the playlist consists of songs I've imported into iTunes. Apple does a decent job at letting you seamlessly integrate your personal library with stuff from their streaming catalog.
> effectively, I manually make my own playlist.
Which button is that?
I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs.
Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends.
If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great.
Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist.
This has the effect of subtly changing the recommendation algorithm for that playlist over time.
Eventually I end up with a playlist with about 100 songs on it, and recommendations that at least roughly align with the mood.
I tend to get bored of songs pretty quickly though, so when a playlist gets too stale, I will prune the old and tired songs from it.
This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.