Compared to what? Genuinely asking, because I like Spotify's recommendation system yet I always have the feeling that it can be better... even with the recent enhanced shuffle playlist and efforts to provide more contextual recs.

YouTube music, Pandora, I'm sure there are others.

Spotify likes to feed you back stuff you liked even if it's only tangentially related to what you're asking for. It also repeats the same recommendations for things like radio over and over again.

I feel like it's been improving with them offering more ways to discover music that sounds like what you heard but not the same artists.

But yeah I still feel more can be done. Their new Hi-Fi package is supposed to have more options too.

I had the same experience you describe with Pandora for years, has it improved recently?

That is borderline tragic to hear. Pandora acquired __the__ music streaming service when it came to discovery, rdio, and did absolutely nothing with it.

You describing your experience with Spotify is my same experience with Pandora. It's awful, they have like 10 songs

Real, living breathing DJs. They are a way better way to discover new music.

Listen to a set and pull out Shazam whenever you hear something you like. It can even dump all that into a spotify playlist

For me its the only way to fly

I listen to music a lot, but never got algorithmic recommendation systems. It just seems too soulless.

Personally i still listen to the radio (streamed online obviously), in the UK NTS Radio (nts.live) and Rinse FM (rinse.fm) are good. Very few adverts, NTS is pretty much listener funded, not sure what Rinse do as I rarely hear ads.

The shows get archived on SoundCloud so you can ID tracks and find them on Spotify later if they were that good.

yep. Add wfmu.org which also has archives and has live chats every show.

I would also add dandelionradio.com. All their streaming shows are uploaded to mixcloud. I'm a little worried though because their DJs always point to their artists' bandcamp pages to help you find the music.