If this is a topic folks are interested in, I’d highly recommend Liz Pelly’s new book Mood Machine. She did a lot of research in this area and really lays out how Spotify is destroying discovery and music community in the name of profits. Honestly it’s horrifying, way worse than most people would assume.
An excerpt was published in Harper’s too.
She also did an interview with Anthony Fantano, but I haven’t watched it.
I think algorithms overall are affecting music and how it reaches people. The rise of songs as background music for things they have nothing to do with is becoming blatant. “Messy” came out of know where and suddenly everyone knew about it and it was in tons of videos. I had never heard of that woman before (which could be for a number of reasons) but suddenly, boom, it’s everywhere. Now it’s “Anxiety.” I used to (naively) think that people were just naturally coming across music and things were just popular. But without the charade of people “calling” in to request a song, the act of discovering music feels very soulless. It’s like, “here, please choose your new favorite song from these preselected songs.”
Well, one thing I can say about YouTube Music is I’ve never heard any nameless Lo-Fi beat tracks. Every artist it’s ever played for me is real.
The only good thing about Spotify is that you can control the algorhythm with a bit of work instead of the other way around.
I’m feeding off the weekly recommendations that are filled with the 6-8 genres I like. I don’t get any mainstream garbage in my recommendations, and am finding New Songs every week.
I bet those articles come from the 3 big Labels
I used to like some of the old bittorrent clients seeing what other users were seeding. You would see someone with a lot of known killer music and something you had never heard of. It was a great way of finding new music.
that was limewire and kazaa, also cheers for bringing back a memory that I didn’t know I had lol
For me the recommendations have been circling the drain for a while. It’s just the same songs over and over again, and it seems to have decided that I only like ambient electronic music and indie pop, both of which I actually find quite boring. No matter what I do, and no matter how much I like songs in other genres, that’s what it serves me, along with the occasional '80s hit because it has figured out I’m old. It was good for a few years but then seemed to get stuck in a rut.
More or less same, or random bands with the same name, I mostly use bandcamp for discovery these days, for now it’s still great being able to follow small labels, bands and user tags.
I’ve been very cautious over all the years that ive been using it. My rule is to only like what I wouldn’t mind listening daily to, and do playlists for all the other stuff that I don’t want to get bombarded with.
It has worked out for me.
So you have
Discover Weekly
and
Release Radar
and
daylist which generates vibe based playlists every 4 hours
and
An endless search of all songs and artists and playlists matching any number of random playlists featuring random songs across all genres
limited to your imagination
and going back to the beginning of recorded music
and then at the bottom of those playlists you have recommended songs based on the playlist
then if you click on any of those songs you get more songs by that artist
then if you click smart shuffle it’ll inject songs related into the playlist
It’s kinda hard for me to sympathise but I have heard this complaint a few times now
For me the biggest complaint against spotify I have is payola
fuxk spotify
Yeah Spotify sucks, I just recently deleted my account entirely. The only thing I liked about it was making playlists. Then one day I had a Fuck This Shit moment and decided I was done.
I have a collection of digital albums that is far better than anything I could get at Spotify, lol
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Podcasts and playlists on mine. Been a spotify user for 15 years.
Playlist are usually genre specific. With a GrabBag playlist and “comedy” playlist. Spotify is good at throwing me new songs on a solid genre playlist. Pretty easy for my house/techno, rock, and my wayback (pre-2000s) playlist.
A mix of songs kind of throws it off, like too many different types of music and it doesn’t really get “taste”.
If you use spotify, make playlists separated by genres. That’s the best I’ve seen for music discovery with spotify.
Switched to deezer some years ago. I tested all music streaming services beforehand and found that Deezer an Applemusic have the most relevant music recommendations for me.
Both deezer and apple have all the spotify features my family wants plus lossless audio if youre into that kind of thing (like me). Since distribution is handled by tunecore etc the catalog is the same anyway. Decided on deezer because I use android. Also a neat little backdoor in their servers Ü.
I feel like the oldest man in the thread with about 100gigs of self-ripped music to which I still own the CD’s… Also with the signature look of superiority, of course.
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I have that same CD player. Like having my own streaming server. LOL
Music industry destroyed music way before Spotify. The second it became industry.
just stop listening to automated playlists
I use Spotify to conveniently stream an album to decide whether or not to download it into my ipod. Imo offline devices are, were and will keep being the best option (while on an airplane, on a road trip with no signal) and I get the feeling to own my music and to know the context of the artist I am listening to.
soulseek is the new napster
sail away
It’s only newer than napster by like 2 years. Napster started in 1999 and Soulseek in 2001. I wish I’d known about Soulseek back when I was fucking around with Kazaa and Limewire and shit after Napster died.
Tidal is better
Frank Zappa put it this way [paraphrased]
In the 1960s the music execs were into Frank Sinatra and Duke Ellington. They had no idea what was going on, so they just threw money at any band that came along. You had a wide variety of music.
The first set of execs hired young guys who ‘knew what the kids want.’ Those guys played it safe, so in the 1970s you had stadium rock and disco.
Now AI ‘knows’ exactly what people want.
exactly like yes Spotify is bad but are they thinking we had some natural occurring perfect system for music before?
The bigger issue is are artists being compensated, no they’re not.
The story of how Zappa and the Mothers got a contract is amazing. Basically a label guy walked into a gig as they played Trouble Every Day, their only song ever with conventional commercial potential, and signed them on the spot.
Once they got to the studio and started playing some tremendously weird stuff it was too late to stop them.
I used to really enjoy spending one afternoon a month spending my absurd grandfathered-in emusic quota on weird new folk and adjacent stuff.
Then they changed the deal and I switched to streaming. It’s just not the same.
