alt Hacker NewsThe best ”algorithm” for discovering new music was digging through profiles on last.fm back when the social functions of the site were still active. Sure, it was a lot of manual work, but the results were amazing. It wasn't completely blind, I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres. Sometimes people were nice and took the effort to recommend based on my profile. I got introduced to varied music, different genres and even a bit from different countries.
The worst was Pandora, which did recommendations based on breakdown of musical instruments and elements in the song. It did what it aimed to do pretty well, only it was a bad idea. It gave you a lot of uninspiring music that sounded like a bland copy of something you actually liked.
Spotify's recommendations are not super awful, but definitely feel closer to Pandora's style. I wonder why is the result like that even though I'm sure they train their model based on listening history.
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The best way to discover music nowadays is RateYourMusic. I go to an album I like, read a couple reviews to find like-minded people and check out their profiles. They often have lists with their favorite albums.
The album chart queries are also incredible. The site has a very detailed system of genres and descriptors so you can find exactly what you want.
what.cd was the world's greatest music discovery mechanism. You could always ask for recommendations in the forums or in the comment thread of the albums pages. The community always delivered. I miss that type of camaraderie. I also spent more on music as a member of that community than since it has been disbanded.
My favorite manual discovery/social was Napster, for that moment that you could view other user’s entire shared music folder and use the chat function to talk to them about their tastes!
Shameless plug: I'm building volt.fm for Spotify (3M users) which like last.fm lets you find people with similar taste.
You can even save their top songs as an auto-updating playlist. It's a great way to find new music that is not controlled by algorithms.
Here's my profile if anyone wants to have a look: https://volt.fm/soheilpro
> I found that people I had high similarity with, it was more likely I'll like what they like, even across different genres.
This has been until very recently the modus operandi of most recommendation engine algorithms. If an algorithm is essentially doing what you do, would you not like that?
In my experience Spotify's song/playlist recommendations are not great, but the album recommendations have a pretty high hit rate. I'm not sure why this would be.
You can still do exactly this on bandcamp!
Fond memories of browsing my downloaders on soulseek
I found so much indie electronic music I loved to listen to back then, via last fm. I don’t listen to any of it any more. Or have any interest to
So, all I’m hearing is that, when we actually took the humans out of the loop and replaced them with algorithms, all the humanity disappeared?
”If take human out … why human there no more???”
It’s shocking this species is able to come up with such advanced technologies when the above is the existential question that plagues them in the macro.
Aren't these social features still active?
I used to pay for their radio service, it was a bit like Pandora. I found it when they added it to Xbox 360 as an app.
I really liked their original profile pages that had sort of a MySpace style customization & vibe. You could have your favorite musicians and tracks analyzed through their API by these 3rd party services that would create very cool graphics & charts to show off to friends and visitors what you were into.
But, then I guess they ran out of money and were really trying to get scooped up by Spotify. They turned off their music player, disabled all the profile customization, alternative services quit having built in scrobbling to it.
I remember I had to download an app that would constantly have my microphone open and it would ID the song I was listening to via some kind of Shazam service and send it to last.fm. I never considered what a security risk that was because I was more interested in keeping my last.fm music tracked.