1. a music recommendation engine
2. social sharing of playlists
3. a music subscription service
To me, those are more important than the player itself -- in fact, I'd say #2 and #3 on that list are the defining aspects of Spotify for the general user, where #1 is more of a personal killer-feature for me.
Music subscription was on my list. But, if you already have all the songs you'd listen to, and don't care for finding new music, what do you use it for?
I feel like most music systems, Spotify too, does a kind of violence to the album structure, with all their playlists and shuffling and whatnot. The very idea of "streaming" is vaguely antithetical to the album structure and to the idea of possessing discrete artifacts... If I designed the perfect music player for me, it would almost be a kind of simulator of a record collection with a record player.
Anyway, I am also completely uninterested in Spotify's "social" features. I think their metadata interface is pretty poor and their "Related Artists" is totally haphazard compared to the actual musical knowledge embedded in databases like AllMusicGuide (which I adore).
I also get irrationally upset about Spotify's prominent display of what I call lifestyle propaganda, like their playlists of the day like "Saturday Beach Party Bonanza" or "Yoga Morning Zen Relaxathon" or whatever. (For some reason I never see "Technical Death Metal Tuesday" or "Zappaesque Hell Jazz Extravaganza" or "Lonely Bong Haze Headphone Friday".)
So I dream of a music player with another type of appeal, more album orientation, more facts and knowledge based relational metadata, and better catalogue curation (Spotify's artist pages are overloaded and unorganized and the metadata for classical and jazz especially are messy).
A digital music manager should be at least as good as a physical shelf of albums that you sort, browse, and select; otherwise what's the point? No digital music player has accomplished even that.
Some enhancements a digital album-centric manager would provide over physical items on shelves are: searching and sorting via metadata, putting albums in multiple "Shelves", and tracking listening statistics (not as an aggregate of track statistics, but at the album-level).
My would-be media manager also supports "Mixtapes" (like playlists, except in set order and ideally with a length limit) which can be placed on Shelves alongside released Albums. Similarly, long "Live Recordings" have first-class status like Albums and Mixtapes and can be put on Shelves (even though they may be a single "track"/file). Finally, dynamic playlists of tracks are replaced by "Dynamic Shelves" of Albums/Mixtapes/Recordings, so you can quickly get to your recent-most-played or highly-played-you-haven't-played-recently, but always as sets of songs that should be listened to together, in order.
The main way I do music discovery on Spotify is looking at the "Appears on" section under artists I like. A lot of these are compilations and mixtapes. They've been curated by a person and actually released, so you can get quality, real variety, and real similarity (of taste).
p.s. Do you really find that Spotify's music discovery is better than last.fm + curated reviews? New Releases could be a differentiator if they would at least offer a filter for full albums (not to mention filters by genre or "recommended for you").
Discover Weekly has been great. Shared playlists are great too. As for radios, they were OK when I first threw my music at them, but now I just hear the same old stuff.
Disclaimer -- I have only recently started to use Spotify on a daily basis. And typically I am playing an already known-good-to-me Artist channel, and I am admittedly a newbie to using spotify in general.
With that said though, there was some feature, I believe it was called "discover music while you listen" or some such thing that would play some other artists amongst that which I chose to shuffle/play.
The genres werent even in the same galaxy!
I listen to EDM and industrial almost exclusively. It was interjecting Taylor swift, some country-sounding stuff and some other stuff that I couldnt identify but was the complete opposite of the spectrum from what I was into...
Further, finding a particular song that has the same word in the title as some song that is being heavily pushed seems impossible.
There is some band called TOVE LO -- and any time I search for a song actually titled "habits" not by them - the only thing it shows me is this TOVE LO page...
so, yeah - my experience with their recommendations has been worse than sub par.
I would recommend giving Spotify another shot, maybe spend some time favoriting and saving songs you do like, as it's recommendations have been on point for me.
Maybe she isnt on Spotify... But ill give it a try...
I agree. I think most users find it very difficult to differentiate between features, so Spotify is 1, 2 and 3 all together. This is a sad state of affairs, because it means users are far less able to choose a product or service that solves the problems they actually have.
I /do/, however, have a large music library for which a web player/library would be awesome.