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Comment by rplnt | Hacker News Reader

One would think services like Spotify would help, but they only make the music more accessible, they don't help you find it. I don't have pro and only ads I hear (besides the spotify ones that are trying to annoy you into paying) are ones from Universal Music.

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I actually use Spotify to discover new music. I take some artist I know, and then I go to some related one, and then to artist related to that one, etc.

Spotify actually made discovering music way easier to me.

BTW there was one website that I used very often. It was called "We are Hunted"[1] and unfortunately it was acquired by Twitter, and as we all know Twitter Music is dead. That website had a playlist of emerging new tracks and I found a lot of good music there (and I heard some artists just 1-2 years before they became very famous)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted

> they don't help you find it

Not true in my case. (I've had Pro for a long time, not sure which if any of these are Pro-only...) I can audition as much unheard-by-me recommended-by-Spotify music as I want through its Weekly playlist, its various curated genre "browse" playlists, its "trending" playlist (where you will often hear things that only become "visibly" popular MONTHS later, the playlist content is actually determined via algorithm to spot trendings super early)

I don't agree—I use Spotify a lot and it's helped tremendously in my finding new music. The "Discover Weekly" and social playlists features always point me to sources of new music.

Spotify and other streaming services are amazing for discovering new music if you're willing to put in the effort but most people just listen to what they have pushed on them. I doubt most people even realize that top 40 music isn't written by the people that perform it.

Those people wouldn't have been willing to put forth the effort in any of the old systems either. Why does that mean Spotify made things worse?

The internet continues to make human-curated content (college/community radio, in my opinion unmatched for discovery) more accessible. But very few people listen, and with changes to fee structure, very few stations can afford to continue online broadcasting. [0]

[0] http://www.radiosurvivor.com/2016/01/05/why-american-indepen...

Really? What about the anti-Spotify's like HypeMachine? Fiercely independent, trendspotting/trendsetting, and sustainable. It's a very valuable service to lots of folks.

IMO Spotify/Rdio/Pandora could only ever hope to go the advertising route over subscription because they couldn't crack the much harder distribution problem (e.g. the HypeM's, SoundCloud's, Drip's, etc).

Spotify stopped working on Ubuntu a while back so I can't check but I'm pretty sure there is a HypeMachine app for Spotify. So you can get recommendations from them within the Spotify client.

EDIT: it stopped working after 15.04. Something with an old version libgcrypt. I didn't care enough to debug it.

Spotify works fine for me, under both Ubuntu and Arch, but they removed support for apps a while ago (on all platforms, IIRC Linux was actually the last holdout).

It is buggy for sure; But many of the Spotify apps I use work fine on Linux even without support though.

I don't know about whether the spotify app doesn't work for you anymore, but I use mopidy-spotify on arch which gives me full spotify access in the terminal.

There are alternative clients (pro-only).

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