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Comment by iammiles | Hacker News Reader

> And when everyone else was letting you select any music you wanted in playlist, they insisted on staying radio style only.

This is really the nail in the coffin. After a couple days on a Spotify trial, I converted to a paid Spotify account. The only reason I logged onto Pandora after converting was to get the list of my favorited songs to add to my playlist on Spotify.

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Radio was cool but they repeated songs too much. The thumbs up and down would ruin the radio algorithm.

I would thumbs down live versions or comedy skits, then it would skew the entire system.

This was years ago.

Yeah last time I used Pandora, every station would inevitably turn into "freehunter's favorite songs". Rap station? Well Run-DMC did a cover of Walk This Way, and Linkin Park is kind of rap and Beastie Boys did a lot of rock songs, and now suddenly I'm getting a lot of rock in my rap list, and rock melds into pop pretty easy, and now suddenly my rap playlist has Katy Perry and Kesha.

And thumbs down is always way too harsh in any algorithm you'll find, because there's no way of telling the algorithm why you didn't like it. If I thumbs down Thunder by Imagine Dragons, how does it know I really do like Imagine Dragons and that album was good and the genre was good, I just don't like that one song? And if I thumbs down Good Riddance by Green Day how does the algorithm know I love Green Day and I like that style of music, but I just have a really negative emotional attachment to that song and I don't want to cry right now?

Context is super hard but super important. I listen to a lot of ambient music at work and now my Apple Music and Spotify suggestions are all ambient music, even though I don't listen to that genre for pleasure.

While I haven't used Pandora (it isn't available here), you seem to be describing my experience with Spotify's various playlists. With no personal context or ranking, the algorithms have nothing to go on except how many other people liked or repeated a song. Other people have awful taste, and seem to love to put songs on high rotation that I find mediocre.

And without decent playlists and music discovery, why would you pay a monthly subscription instead of once-off fees for music you like?

I wish the algo changes the preferences based on the time etc. S, if you can set "work hours," or label it that way, it will play the sort of the music you like during those hours, while something else for other times. You can have multiple "moods" set - one for commuting, one for partying, one for night time etc.

I haven't used Pandora in years and Spotify almost never. I use SoundCloud sparsely, on occasion when someone posts an indie or to listen to podcasts like a16z. But for everyday use, I use Google Music or YouTube / Music.

Years ago I spent a week recreating my long lost high school and college CD collections on Google Play was able to find almost everything, even some of the most ecsoteric remixes.

And when entertaining, people always gravitate towards DJing through YouTube videos on the TV, and so I wired everything up with Chromecast / Chromebook pairs to make it easy. Even though they can go to any app/site they want, everyone uses YouTube.

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