It had the exact opposite effect for me. I used Spotify for a couple of years and basically only listened to the same playlists over and over again. Only when they forced people to use Facebook to log in I stopped paying and using their service and suddenly a whole new world oppened for me. I started using SoundCloud, Jammendo and YouTube to find new music from outside of the mainstream and never looked back.

This was four years ago, in the meantime i built up my private music library mostly with Vinyl + MP3 download codes and went all the way to mimic Spotifies technical solutions and can stream my library from a Raspberry Pi at home https://jeena.net/private-music-streaming

I just want to point out that they don't force you to use Facebook. I use Spotify without a Facebook account without any issues.

I listen to BBC Radio 6 for new music (mainly Lauren Laverne) and the blogged 50 radio on Google Play. When I hear something I like I just add it in google Play.

Spotify didn't stop you from finding new music, your own habits/place you were in in life did that. I went through a phase of only listening to all my existing mp3s for a few years, but the last year has been an orgy of new stuff.

I wouldn't attribute it to listening/not listening to a streaming service.

Google Play slightly annoys me at times, the app is pretty horribly designed and slow at times, but spotify was blocked on a network I regularly used and I'm used to its quirks now.

I don't buy music any more. At the moment there's simply no point with a Google Play subscription. The only band I've noticed missing is Placebo's old albums.

Spotify is very bad for music discovery.

It has no random feature, the channels they offer are either hand crafted or based on popularity. The music selection excludes many smaller, and indie, labels. The search functionalities are very limited (the metadata is too low quality).

I wanted to love Spotify, and I really gave it a try. I just couldn't keep using it, all it did for me was to make me angry. In the end it's mostly good for listening to what the major labels think you should listen.

I have personally found Spotify's Browse>Discover feature to be be useful and worthy, I've found a lot of interesting music in there.

My use case though is that I most often go on Spotify to listen to a specific album I had in mind, either I knew already or heard of it from a friend, blog, local gig, etc. But those times (20% maybe?) I feel like trying something new, I always find something good on Discover.

I wish their UI was better though. The desktop app spawns 7 SpotifyHelper processes that each eat 40mb of RAM and the whole thing feels way slow on my 10ish year laptop. The web app uses flash, and while it consumes less ram, the playback is choppy on my pc. At least the desktop app plays fine once it's started.

Do you ever select an artist or song and make a "Radio Station" from it? I find that to be a great way of finding new artists to enjoy.

You can do the same for playlists too. Makes the seeding even broader.

I craft a playlist of new tracks that I like and then hit 'start playlist radio' to let Spotify find me other emerging bands that sound like this.

This is a pretty solid way to discover new music, but you do need that jumping off point to enable you to say to it 'find me stuff like this'.

You used to be able to use apps like Last.fm which would add random functionality, but they discontinued apps, which made me ditch Spotify.