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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

I used to use soundcloud all the time but switched to 'Discover weekely' on Spotify, like the author of the article. Spotify hit it out of park with Discover weekly.

One downside of spotify is still discoverability, discover weekly doesn't introduce you to completely new kinds of music, it sticks to what you already like. You are on you own to introduce randomness into spotify's discovery algorithms.

I think Rdio had that right idea here. I was discovering much more new music when I was with Rdio than with Spotify. Spotify leans heavily towards what is popular.

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Agree completely. Rdio did a much better job with music discovery, but they were limited by selection. Soundcloud doesn't have typical discovery features, but the ones they do have are quite good. Here's how I find good (relatively unknown/esoteric) music there:

- Follow good aggregator accounts. These repost new music regularly, which appears in one's timeline.

- Follow good regular accounts and play their "likes."

- Go to a song's "related tracks" screen and play those

I find excellent music on a regular basis this way.

Thanks for the tip. I used rdio, currently spotify, and pandora. My method in finding songs was going to Pandora and adding songs I loved from their to spotify. Pandora seems to be great at finding similar sounding songs to what I request.

The whole finding people to follow is what is the problem for me. It takes time finding accounts to follow. Friends dont have similar taste in music. Apple has the right idea in picking songs/artist you like before you get to start the service so you get something you like in your feed.

someone make an app to connect users to awesome playlists based on songs/genre/and more

The initial bootstrap period is definitely a missing piece that Soundcloud could and should build.

"DiscoverTracks" is a service to help with part of the process (it looks at your likes and plays you related tracks based on the likes of friends and friends of friends I believe.) Doesn't solve the entire issue, but it's handy: https://www.discovertracks.com/

You can try 8tracks.com. They have curated playlists based on genre/mood/etc. I generally just search by an artist I like then browse through all the different playlists to find something else I like.

So sad that Rdio is gone. Their discovery and design were both fantastic. I can't bring myself to use Spotify, but I've been using Deezer in the meantime. Its immaturity (as a product) shows, but it gets the basics right and the UI isn't nearly as confusing as Spotify's.

This is where I disagree with Justin Kan who said "turns out most people don't really care that much about discovering new music." Maybe he's right in the nuance of monetizing that specific feature, but Discover Weekly by Spotify is one of the most killer features I've seen in a music app in a long time. These days I don't have much time to browse blogs/twitter for new music and it's great that I have a temporary inbox of new songs that I should be listening to that often results in at min. one new favorite song.

Isn't it weird that so much of what makes Discover Weekly great seems to be in its presentation as a weekly changing playlist (of all things!) and not in the discovery algorithm itself, which is fine, but nothing we haven't seen before.

I'm a huge Spotify fan and if you've found Discover weekly useful you might like the following other resources for discovering new music:

http://furia.com/newparticles/current.html

http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html

https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/3rgsDhGHZxZ9s...

There's more, of course but I agree that many of the curated playlists lean towards popular music. I also follow /r/spotify on reddit and every now and then there's a good playlist on there.

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