Spotify is a fantastic service hidden behind an increasingly unusable interface.

Staff picks still make up a huge % of my personal listening

Same here, most of my musical taste stems from their picks in some form or another.

The problem with recommendation systems is that they're overwhelmingly based on what you already know. I'm not really interested in that much of the time; there's lots of music that I "should" like based on liking similar things but that just doesn't "jibe" with me, and vice versa.

And for entire new things it tends to gravitate towards the more popular "classic $genre" stuff within a genre. That doesn't mean it's bad music, but a jazz playlist with John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong isn't really very interesting, nor is a metal playlist with Metallica and Iron Maiden. The thing that what.cd offered was that you could discover things beyond that.

And all of this is so subjective in the first place. I recently watched all of the Alien films, and I felt the third Alien film is the second-best (after the original), but the "rating sites" have it listed as the lowest-rated of all of them. I'm probably not the only one who likes the film more than the ratings would suggest, and this kind of stuff gets lost in these algorithmic recommendation systems.

I feel Spotify recommendations are pretty good for my account, but homogenous. They tend to stick the same type of music I’ve been listening to recently and it gets bland after a while.

Trevor Something - Death Dream