alt Hacker NewsI do wonder how people can be satisfied with automatic music playlists. I was entertained by this for maybe a few hours when Pandora was new, but they all seemingly always devolve into either playing weird shit, playing the same 50 songs over and over again, or playing whatever new release shilled crap the record companies are paying to promote. Yet it seems like everybody else these days is a Spotify addict. I guess most people are fine with it.
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I listen to a lot of old music - 1950s, 1960s. I don't really have peers who listen to it so discoverability is a real issue. Pandora was amazing for me ~20 years ago, it introduced me to songs I never would have heard. Especially in the 50s you had a lot of "one hit wonders" so just listening to a band wasn't a great way to find other songs that I would like.
I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best replacement so far.
Spotify's discover weekly was genuinely good when it first came. It was on another level from other recommendation services. Maybe 90% of the music I've bought on Bandcamp, I would never have known about if it wasn't for discover weekly (Bandcamp's own recommendation/discovery features are lousy).
But somehow, probably from a combination of rights owners gaming it and Spotify gaming it, DW is a pale shadow of its former self.
I've been working on and off on something [1] that tries to address this problem through somewhat manual curation. You choose what genres you're interested in, and get auto updated playlists created from your music library.
I have a few other experimental features in the pipeline that will expand the music selection, but they are not there yet.
My observations are that the average person is bothered by the slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it.
Personally I dropped playlists long ago for YouTube dj sets which are a million times better than Spotify’s AI dj. Some of this is not a tech failing but the DJs have access to unreleased tracks, their own private edits, and are more willing to do more bold things. The AI DJ will never drop a surprise change that makes the crowd scream.
I've found a lot of great music through Pandora.
It's very miss-or-miss; you need to be willing to thumb down 95% of what Pandora thinks you'll like. But with enough care, it's a good discovery channel.
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Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage.
Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it would still feed me junk.
This guy is a classical music guy, though, and all the pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly, forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed mixing it in with my regular music.
One thing about classical music, is that every performance is a “cover.” Who performs the piece is just as important as who wrote it. None of the selection services seem to understand that.
MP3 tags are pretty much worthless. They are incredibly limited, and I don’t know why they have never been improved.