I think back when I ripped my 350+ CDs to FLAC. In retrospect, it wasn't worth it.

I don't see any advantages of spending time and effort curating a library, which harks back to the days of physical media.

Some artists really put effort into developing their albums or EPs as a coherent expression. If we all were to change to experiencing music like you describe it would inevitably result in a sea change in how the art is created in the first place. Artists will look to optimize for that particular method of consumption, in much the same way we have a large focus on individual track releases now in the streaming dominated world. I feel this limits the expression of the artists in general

I think that this would lead to further stagnancy or homogeneity in the most popular genres, as the playlist generation will look to optimize for the most listeners. This would come at the expense of artists who are not already in the public's sphere of consciousness, and would deeply hurt genres which have infinitely deep pools of sub-genres and micro-scenes; the world of Heavy Metal comes to mind specifically here. I think this damages the overall health of popular music in totality.

More interestingly because music in general is an incredibly subjective experience, opinionated tastemakers can be crucial for exposing underground or breaking through artists to a larger audience. Historically people like John Peel, and more recently Anthony Fantano (TheNeedleDrop) bring new music from underground artists in a wide range of genres to people's attention. It can feel like a minor triumph when you discover a new album that just speaks to you in a style of music you have no grounding in, especially when it's recommended to you by someone you know or trust.

While you may listen to more music in the way you describe, I don't think it would invoke nearly the same level of connection that I feel now, personally I find that to be a bit bleak, and self-defeating in the long term.

I make use of it a lot for albums and songs not available on Apple Music. AFAIK, Spotify doesn't really have an answer to this.

Also, the Spotify Chromecast integration is utter shit. It has been utter shit for a while, but it seems it's just getting worse? It's laggy, it randomly pauses during my playlist for no reason. I ended up buying a bluetooth receiver to hook to my AV system so I could get reliable playback. What the fuck? Why isn't this getting fixed?

That's what I use to get more in-depth than the tiny amount of new releases Spotify features in its official playlists.

The really aggravating thing is that we know they have the tech to do better. There was that demo of a 2D embedding of genre-space that actually did a pretty decent job of grouping similar-sounding songs together, but their recommendations all seem to be based off of what was popular at the same time, or what came from the same label.

E.g. when I ask for recommendations for a song like "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness," I should get "Avril 14th," not "Bullet with Butterfly Wings."

Not nit-picking, just piqued my curiosity about how you would connect those artists.

I would listen to those two songs in a row and be completely satisfied by the transition.

I've worked and interviewed for companies that do music analysis to find moods, atmospheres, similar timbres, chords and structure to mix and match automated playlists for business needs (restaurants, cafés, retail stores and so on), would like to see what kind of similarity scores they could get between the songs you mentioned.

I found a lot of the release radar and other recommendations are spot on and I end up liking a lot of the songs it suggests.

I think I read something about that which turned me off instantly.

I understand everyone’s doing it and you as a company feel entitled to a slice of whatever podcast pie.

What I don’t understand is how that can take focus when your audio player has been getting steadily worse - corrupted offline download, buggy buffering, choppy audio after jumping back 30s.

If your bread and butter - what I’m actually paying for - doesn’t work I’ll gladly save a few bucks and go to the public library.

There should be an option to turn off simple things like that: turn off podcasts, pause learning from my music for then next 30 minutes, etc.

I always thought the advantage of standalone apps like Spotify(updated anytime) vs something like Apple Music(updated on big iOS releases) is that they can iterate faster. But seems like they are throwing more eggs in content creation basket than UX.

They state that private listening 'may' not influence your music recommendations.

https://support.spotify.com/us/article/private-listening/

Apple has gone a similar route recently with reducing the Activity/Fitness app to just two/three tabs, mushing all sorts of content together. I hope this doesn't become another user-hostile UI trend.

Personally they keep advertising podcasts by people who I find morally or politically objectionable, which makes me quite unhappy that I cannot hide or remove their content (and podcasts as a whole) from the Home Screen.

I started falling asleep to comedy a couple months ago to manage poor sleep based on a generally negative attitude. It was fine on YT Music for a while, but now a lot of the community playlists are garbage, or most of the clips have been pulled (I assume some copyright issues).

I'd move to Spotify for that, and pay, if they had a catalog of decent standup comedy.

The podcasts I listen to from comedians is more along the lines of interviews, like WTF, or a few people spitballing on various topics. Not well formed jokes.

Their D&D podcast is probably my favorite of the genre as well.