To this point, I've been using Qobuz as an alternative and it's recommendation engine is laughably bad, but the experience is somehow better. I'll get the most random songs pop up in the list, and sometimes it's a very pleasant surprise.

In the world of music discovery a bad recommendation engine is maybe better than a hyper-fine-tuned one.

FWIW good old Pandora now has options to influence their how their stations explore (so, you can for example pick “discovery” to have it try and find similar artists it hasn’t shown you as often).

> if I have it on in the background, which then in turn feeds the algorithm that it made the "correct choice"

I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.

I have something worse. One morally questionable video popped in my Instagram that showed some disabled person doing something outrageously stupid capitalising on their disability for engagement.

I didn't like it, I didn't share it, I didn't do any other thing than just stare at it in shock.

Big mistake.

For over 6 months that became +50% of my feed. Incredible and depressing amount of people monetising the disability of their friends, siblings, children, or their own. Really effed up content that makes you stop and say wtf out loud. But they also earn a living. But they should do it in a honorable manner. But maybe they don't have the chance. So I flag as not interested but that just swaps those videos with new BRAND NEW "content creators" of this kind that I hadn't yet seen. Wow thanks Instagram.

At some point they changed something in the algorithm and now those videos rarely pop anymore, and I'm wary and scroll away fast.

>I have a very horrible case of this. One day at night, I slept listening to lofi playlist. The next week all my recommendations were screwed. Horrible assumption on the part of algorithm.

None of the music services seem to understand that just because you like multiple genres, that doesn't mean that you want it to randomly jump around between them without any consideration for how they flow together.

That's something I'd actually pay good money for - a streaming music service with a library as extensive as the major contenders (or better yet let me bring my own!), which learns my preferences not in isolation, but tracking how they affect each other and environment - this song is normally followed by that song, or this song usually gets skipped if playing while driving etc.