Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M paid subscribers

Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by spywaregorilla on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:13PM (#34605856)

what do people mean when they say spotify rabbitholes them? My new music from spotify is either from manually clicking links of related artists to artists I like, or clicking stuff from the release radar of new content released every week. Where are you getting these stale recs?

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by woodruffw on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:23PM (#34605931)

This is just speculation on my part, but I've wondered if it's because of listening patterns: I tend to listen to entire albums at once and did most of my discovery on Spotify by starting "radios" from songs or albums. Spotify would then rabbithole me on those even when refreshed; they'd slowly converge on the same set of songs, unless I moved to a completely different genre (and even then I'd sometimes end up with playlists with all kinds of discordant stuff mashed together).

I got fed up when I looked up while working and realized that I had listened to Circles by Dag Nasty[1] like 8 times in a single day. I used to like that song, but now I can't listen to it anymore!

I've switched to Last.fm, Bandcamp, and my friends (bless them) for discovery.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyx4JeyMJE0

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by rcme on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:23PM (#34605932)

Discover, artist radio, auto-playlists after playing a single song, etc. Pretty much everything in the app is a terrible recommendation.

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by prawn on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @11:39PM (#34606446)

I find it works brilliantly for me and always find new stuff. What styles do you favour? FWIW, I started my Spotify era with things like Chemical Brothers, RJD2, etc but then have a lot of very different genre mixed in besides that (anything from black metal to pop). I'm always surprised when others have a bad experience with Spotify as a discovery tool.

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by poglet on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @10:33PM (#34605990)

I like to find a new genera of music and if I like the song I will choose the radio option. Spotify says "Get a collection of songs based on any artist, album, playlist, or song, with Spotify Radio." but in my experience the radio playlist is not (only) based on the song I'm playing because it also mixes in a bunch of recently played songs that are normally unrelated to the song genera I'm listening to.

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Re:Spotify is first music streaming service to surpass 200M ... by sph on Tuesday January 31, 2023 @11:13PM (#34606261)

That's the thing about Spotify's (and other music streaming services) recommendation engines: they're terrible DJs.

It puts completely unrelated songs together in the same mix, be it because of different genre, mood, energy. Only human-curated playlists and albums are good to play-and-forget; but at that point why do I need Spotify at all?

I pay Youtube begrudgingly to avoid ads, I might as well use their music service which has the exact same problem, rather than paying Spotify on top.

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