You're not okay with recommendations? That's 80% of why many of us use Spotify in the first place.

if that's what Spotify considers a recommendation, then I don't want any

Consider canceling Spotify then.

80%? That doesn't include me. I'm a reluctant payer to avoid ads, and so I can play my choice of music anywhere.

The recommendations were nice because it meant you didn't have to manually curate playlists while you're out and about (but you could still search out a specific track if you want to). I viewed them as part of the value of a subscription and didn't mind if they were promoting artists via homepage links and such.

However, in just the last few weeks I've noticed the recommendations have gone from surfacing old favorites and interesting new (to me) music and is instead pushing stuff like that big podcast guy they signed.

Correct. Is any Spotify user seriously going to maintain that "Premium" does not mean "no ads"?

Honestly, the only thing I care about is audio interruptions to my music. If a record label wants to pay spotify to place a text widget on my screen that says "check out this new album", I am OK with that because it's very ignorable.

That is, what I'm paying for is "no audio interruptions".

Do you feel the same way about Netflix recommendations? I'm curious where you draw the line.

I can't stand Netflix's interface, and it's recommendations are absolutely terrible.

We're approaching the One True User Interface: search bar and recommendations. And it's awful.

Netflix never gave me a popup or played recommendation of anything between two episodes of a series.

I think that's what most people mean. They want to listen to an album/several/playlist and not hear anything else. (should add: and also not see any popups. Netflix doesn't give me popups, the only place I see stuff I do not want to see is the landing page)

Or YouTube? The homepage and literally every video are full of recommendations.

Thanks to various plugins for Firefox, my experience of the YouTube homepage is a blank page apart from the search bar.

That's so much worse than actually YouTube though. If I've been watching programming, physics, or history YouTube it absolutely surfaces excellent creators I'd have no other means of discovering.

YouTube isn't Wikipedia. I don't go into it wanting a specific narrow thing. Like how do you even find content you'd like otherwise?

Absolutely. I've found probably 20-30 great channels thanks to YouTube's recommendations successfully recommending me stuff I actually enjoy.

I do use it like Wikipedia, I guess. Or actually more like Google.

I'm really not into doomscrolling "content". Life's too short.

Definitely don’t sign up for Hulu then. Even worse