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Comment by BjoernKW | Hacker News Reader

Spotify.

Their “Discover more artists.” / “Fans also like.” feature has provided me with quite a few interesting bands I didn’t know before.

Their curated genre playlists are fantastic as well.

I mostly listen to progressive metal / progressive rock and occasionally some electronic music, too.

Their algorithms and curated content work well even for those not-exactly-mainstream genres.

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That hardly ever works for me. It's either "here's another artist that's like these ones, only more mediocre" or completely crazy ones, like a playlist of the album Ilana (The Creator) by Mdou Moctar, a Berber electric guitarist, where Spotify recommendations are all for Tyler The Creator.

You should check out Tinariwen https://youtu.be/WcqlOq1cjjc

I really recommend Aza (Tamazight influence from the Atlas Mountains of Morocco). I've seen them live a bunch of times. (I attended this particular performance!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C1u_MFahhw&list=RDuvS_fSfW2...

http://azamusic.com

Yeah, I love Tinariwen. Interesting piece of trivia - I saw the guitarist Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Zwan, Bonnie Prince Billy, touring with Iggy Pop etc. etc. etc.) mention Mdou Moctar on Twitter a few times, and was about to recommend Tinariwen, only to discover that he'd played on one of their albums!

If you need to get in the right frame of mind for Coding here is an albums-only playlist I made that seems to do the trick for me and a few friends - https://open.spotify.com/user/j3elam/playlist/61RNVG9yeQpFBR...

Thanks - I'll check that out.

Thank you for bringing Mdou Moctar to my attention. Holy crap, that is one hell of an album, it's been on constant repeat since yesterday and I just can't stop listening!

>Mdou Moctar, a Berber electric guitarist

Holy crap, I heard this guy years ago and loved his work, but then forgot his name and couldn't find him again. Thank you for bringing this music back to me!

His latest album is incredible - there are days I have Tarhatazed on a loop for an hour or two when coding (you need to be in the right frame of mind for that to work though!)

I use Spotify but something I do not enjoy about their playlists is they redefine genres. I noticed that all of their house genres are filled with auto-tuned singers and cheap sounding music (chainsmokers, swedish house mafia). This isn't the kind of house that is played in clubs or is remotely reflective of the genre. You have to look for things like "housewerk" to find actual music that reflects the state of the art in this space that djs themselves enjoy listening to.

The same thing has happened with some rock genres, I've seen Spotify build playlists of pop bands who've taken the image/art of a hardcore/heavy rock band to create this really confusing situation where you are expecting a raw rock sound but you get a heavily produced pop sound.

I cant find these. Where can they be found? What are the search terms to be used?

The “Discover more artists.” / “Fans also like.” / "Related artists" (the exact name varies depending on the version and client used) feature currently is accessible via individual artist pages.

The curated playlists were mostly recommended to me on the home page in the Spotify desktop client but I suppose you could find them by simply searching for "progressive metal" in that case as well.

Anyway, here are the playlist links if you're interested in those genre playlists specifically:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX5wgKYQVRARv?si=...

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX0uqkwkR49kK?si=...

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6dkBTR6Wovn86LEDAmIKdV?si=...

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