Re:How bad is your Spotify?
by klmadfejno on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @05:39PM
(#25523110)
I haven't used Pandora in a decade, but when I did, it strongly preferred to play mainstream artists, and within artists, only a handful of specific tracks. They weren't bad choices, but I got pretty bored of them.
Spotify takes a lot more risks and I think its highly preferable.
A decade is a long, long time. The catalog is definitely on-par with any service out there today.
Re:How bad is your Spotify?
by klmadfejno on Thursday December 24, 2020 @06:01PM
(#25532338)
I would believe they've improved over time. But my comment wasn't that pandora had a poor catalog. It was that they wanted to play mainstream songs instead. Perhaps not even mainstream, but just very specific songs. They had a lot of artist's whole discographies but only a subset would ever come on. I can still remember a few of them for me:
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
I loved Pandora back when they were experimenting, but then they stopped providing service where I live and Spotify is the only game in town :(
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.