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Comment by t0mbstone | Hacker News Reader

As someone who listens to spotify all day while programming, here's my secret to success:

I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words), and I seed it with at least 10 songs.

Then, I go down to the "Recommended Songs" section and I just play whatever it recommends.

If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard. The vast majority of what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great.

Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist.

This has the effect of subtly changing the recommendation algorithm for that playlist over time.

Eventually I end up with a playlist with about 100 songs on it, and recommendations that at least roughly align with the mood.

I tend to get bored of songs pretty quickly though, so when a playlist gets too stale, I will prune the old and tired songs from it.

This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

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I'm dumbfounded people still put up with this mess on Spotify. Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior to Spotify - yet, everyone still seems to use Spotify none-the-less.

Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.

The "shuffle" alone on Spotify was enough to send me running. Have a playlist with 200 songs from 80 different artists? Well, we'll just play this one artist - the same album even! - back to back to back until you're annoyed enough to manually select the next song!

I understood people flocking to Spotify back when it was the only game in town that allowed you to play specific songs, make playlists, and "download" songs for offline (airplane) playback. But now Pandora does all this too - and has for the past several years. The two services are even priced about the same...

So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?

For one, it's US-only. And the recommendations from Spotify so far are good enough for my needs and my whole family is on it so the work required to migrate from one platform to another isn't null so unless there's a major irritant I don't plan on switching.

> Pandora is only available in the U.S. right now – but we are working on bringing our music service to other parts of the world.

I guess Spotify is still the only game in town :(

I didn't realize Pandora was region locked - what a bummer!

The rest of the comment still stands for all US based users, however.

I last used Pandora's radio in Canada around 2005. I'm questioning what it is they're "working on" for so long.

Probably license agreements with the labels... but that's pure speculation. Spotify seems to have solved that problem by throwing tons of cash at them.

You can see here[1] that Spotify has made agreements with specific labels for international rights. What a thing... only licensed to stream a song in some select set of countries... absurd in 2020/2021 and being an internet based service - but that's record labels for you.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21203324/spotify-warner-ag...

Spotify is too, just not as drastically. I opened an account in Prague and found when I got to the US that it wouldn't play anything. Curious how they knew I wasn't in CZ anymore, yet instead of just letting me play the US version, it wouldn't let me play anything.

This isn't true, may be got to do with specific set of songs? I've an US account, which I use in UK, India and Japan.

> Pandora's discovery, recommendations, and shuffle algorithms are objectively superior

IIRC, these algos were part of a project called ~Muse which later forked, and there was a schism between the algos and clickstream data or the personal data and anonymized cohort data. Will have to review / re-search.

The trove of our searches, listens, and skips Pandora has / had did a good job informing recommendations and was an effective moat for my use.

A big part of the algos was the "Music Genome Project"[1] as well. This allowed their recommendations to be about the music itself instead of just what other people also listened to, leading to some amazing music recommendations/discoveries.

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

Thank you this helps -- the "Music Genome Project" was part of this fork & schism. Pandora says little about it[0], and the open portions[1] were last updated in 2014.

At least someone's still at it, and all this helps me find my notes from that time.

https://github.com/LDugar/MusicGenome/raw/master/Decoding-th...

[0]http://www.pandora.com/about/mgp [1]https://github.com/omgDB

My guessing is a lot of it went proprietary once competition started popping up trying to also make good music recommendations. "Secret sauce" and all...

Oh how the world would have been different if Rdio hadn't been acquired and killed by Pandora. It's recommendations were perfect.

Fuck they were the ones killed it. I don’t remember how the recommendations compared but Rdio’s UX was miles ahead. Pandora really should have abandoned their frontend and went all in on Rdio.

Rdio went bankrupt, and sold assets to Pandora as part of that process. It wasn’t bought and killed.

Spotify won the same way Dropbox and Slack did. They didn't invent anything magical, they just had a client for every platform that worked when people tried it. Like web apps? Here you go. Linux nerd? Here is a deb repo. Have a smartphone? Cool, we don't care what kind.

Even now I googled "Pandora windows app", clicked a few times, and ended up on some Microsoft Store page. Interestingly enough if I add "mac" to my search terms I just get a download...

What's wrong with Pandora in the web browser?

The browsers RAM usage and the challenge of finding it among the often many tabs and windows come to mind.

Eh, does the RAM usage of a single browser window even matter on modern systems?

Anecdata, but I open Pandora in it's own window, then minimize it. This makes it pretty easy to find if you have a hundred+ tabs open at once like I often find myself with.

I currently have 44 tabs open, including Pandora in it's own window, and Chrome is only using ~2GB of RAM - perfectly acceptable to me.

That is like asking "What is wrong with driving across town to pick up your Amazon purchases?"

If you are in a highly competitive space that is effectively winner take all - you go where your customers want to be, not where your developers think they should be.

I prefer Pandora tab on my browser.

Nothing is wrong with Pandora in the web browser, other people just like to install spyware and root kits so let them.

If it's like YTM in browser then no control with keyboard keys.

Can you control pandora in the web browser with your keyboard? can you jump to pandora in the web browser with a single keyboard shortcut?

IME Spotify's recommendations, while not perfect, are way, way better than Pandora's. Spotify is comfortable letting you explore niches; Pandora, when I used it, always seemed to try to hill-climb out of whatever niche you were listening to as fast as it could into whatever music was the most broadly popular at the moment.

Imagine thinking recomendations can be objectively better than others. Personally I don't care for pandora recommendations one bit and love my spotify mixes.

Why can't they?

It can easily be proven they can, posit three systems:

1. Spotify

2. Pandora

3. No matter what, rickroll you on the next song

Cleary 3 is far superior to the other two! ;)

So if something can be objectively WORSE, there must be the possibility of something being objectively better.

Pandora has good algorithms, but as a product is objectively terrible.

It is literally impossible for you to just sort the list of stations you have created. If you have 120 stations, you have to s l o w l y scroll through them in random order until you find the one you want. And even though there are thumbnails next to them (presumably to make them easier to identify), the thumbnails change. There's a hundred different usability problems, and as far as I can tell, all of them minor features that could have been implemented years ago.

If you don't pay for the premium version, it's a nightmare of pop-ups to prompt you to pay, to the point that you develop reflexes to pass the prompts. Then there's the actual ads, which sometimes seem to disappear for a while, only to barrage you intermittently for a half hour.

The whole thing annoyed me so much, and I complained on their support channels so often, that I dropped them and just started buying music. And of course I then had to pirate the same music I purchased because there's no way to just buy some MP3s so you can move the music around.

Speaking for myself? Content. Philip Glass has 27 albums on Pandora, 105 on Spotify. Nico Mulhy? 7 vs 14. Maarja Nuut. Only 1 album on Pandora. For her, Pandora makes no recommendations for others to listen to, Spotify lists 20. Pandora has no bio, Spotify does. Third Coast Percussion? 8 vs 10. I'm just randomly clicking in my library and doing a comparison, they aren't artfully chosen examples.

I recognize this isn't mainstream listening, and for all I know the ratios are reversed for more popular music.

I found the Pandora choices of songs annoying. I love Philip Glass; I don't want to listen to a bunch of other people playing triplets against eighths. It's derivative and boring in comparison. I do want to listen to his contemporaries that compose in different ways. Or let's take Nuut again. I came across her recently while surveying contemporary Estonian composers. Pandora doesn't let me do that so far as I can tell. I'm interested in what is going on there compositionally over the last 2 decades, I am not looking for another person that writes something that is very 'similar" (according to the Pandora algorithms).

Finally, I never use shuffle. So much of what i listen to are

I understand my use case is not the only one, but neither is yours! People select different apps because they provide what the person wants.

You could check out YouTube Music (edit: changed from "music"), which has a long list of Philip Glass titles that may be up there with Spotify.

I gave up on Spotify when they removed the widget functionality on Android. I know they returned it eventually, but not without complete uproar. It burned myself as a decade old (family) premium user though; I used to love them, but that complete disregard completely changed that.

Now, only a 3 month minimum (6 would help) completely free retrial would get me back. Thus far, none has been received.

(On the flip side I absolutely love YouTube Red or Premium or whatever they call it these days.)

Youtube's organization of music is horrible. It clearly wasn't made for listening to music.

I assume they were talking about Youtube Music (https://music.youtube.com/), which is made for listening to music.

I used Google Music until they discontinued it in favor of Youtube Music, and I ditched that crap immediately, the UI was horrible, the recommendations were BAD (Google Music was somewhat good), and I lost about half my playlist items as "not available". It is so bad, that after years of Google Music, I just ditched my playlists (what little there was) and moved to Spotify.

I just tried listening to some uploaded music last night. Except the Artists page seems to be in random order vs alphabetical and there is no apparent sort option. I'm not sure how that decision played out.

I find the YT Music recs actually pretty good, though the "recommending a song after I thumbed down" behavior blows my mind in its idiocy. Also, the fact that they don't distinguish between me liking a video on Youtube and liking a song in YT Music is also frustrating.

The UI is the worst I've seen on any music service or player, but I'd found quite a bit of music I like through their recommendations.

I reported the bug about recommending songs that I had downvoted. Apparently I had more thank 5k downvotes so it didn't consider them all in the filter. The "fix" was bumping the limit.

I used to pay for Google Music and transitioned to YouTube Music but eventually gave up because it has so many issues. I also tried Spotify but didn't like it much so now I don't know what I will use.

Yes, thanks.

And the idea of integration of music and music videos is brilliant. I love listening to music with video on my TV in the morning.

The implementation and mixing music videos with other video content in my Youtube account is horrible on the other way.

While Youtube Music is a bag of some great ideas and implementation that went horribly wrong I have started using it over Spotify recently.

Youtube Music implementation of Chromecast is spotless while Spotify every so often interupts with "Your spotify account is used on another device" (Not true just checking my phone). In general Youtube is also tolerant of using two devices with the same account for a few moments.

And no podcasts in the music app... Hurah...

I don't have anything to add but to say I'm glad someone else has discovered the beauty of coding to Glass's works.

Been listening to Glass's excellent score for Tales from the Loop for a few weeks now. It's my current goto album for coding.

If Glass is your thing, I highly recommend Idagio. It is explicitly focused on Classical, and its filtering is focused on what you'd want out of a Classical-focused search.

For instance, with Glass - there are 171 albums on Idagio. And it breaks them down with works, instrumentation, ensembles, soloists, genres (piano solo, chamber, secular vocal. etc.), conductors, and recording date.

If you want to compare the 22 piano solo albums that Jeroen van Veen has recorded of Glass's music - easy to pull all of them up quickly.

Their encoding is also vastly superior to Spotify or (yikes) YouTube Music. If you have a decent signal-chain for listening, high-quality components, and enjoy Classical... Idagio is head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Spotify is great, people on HN like to complain.

Aside from having nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free, their recommendations have helped me find a lot of great songs. I don't personally listen to the curated playlists but many of my friends love them.

Spotify objectively sucks compared to plenty of other services. Is it possible you haven't tried those other services? Having access to lots of music is certainly better than not but we've had services that do that since the early 2000s.

I subscribed to Rhapsody in 2004. It gave me access to "nearly any artist's catalogue available for almost free". As 2 examples of things it did better, instead of using a shitty recommendation system that when I pick some electro swing band it recommends death metal, instead for every artist it showed their lists of who influenced them and who they influenced. I found tons of great bands that way. Way more than i've found on Spotify's crappy system

And that's just one example. The now dead Google Play Music's recommendation system actually worked where Spotify's does not.

Haha that's funny, I guess I haven't experienced any of recommendations personally. Usually they're very good in my experience.

>Spotify objectively sucks compared to plenty of other services. Is it possible you haven't tried those other services?

It's just your personal experience that is different. Same for the other guy, same for me.

I've been on a paid accounts for Apple Music, Google Music, Yandex Music and even Youtube's adhoc solution for music. At least 1 year each (almost for entire time since the launch of Yandex music).

Spotify beats them all. Both recommendations and content (though we have to agree that content part can vary based on your location). Never had a chance to try Rhapsody.

>that when I pick some electro swing band it recommends death metal

That's how Google Music worked for me though, not Spotify.

Yandex had best UI but worst recommendation system (and lack of content).

Apple's recommendations are about as bad as Google's. Better UI but again - did not have music I wanted.

> Spotify objectively sucks compared to plenty of other services.

Is this a new thing?

"Everyone else's opinion * objectively * sucks".

Just because you write "objectively", doesn't make it so.

Opinions are, by definition, subjective

Pandora restricted access for me when I was living in the UK years a go and I could no longer access it. (I don’t know if this is the case) Spotify won for me by default, as I can actually access it.

I bit the bullet and just subscribe to both. Pandora for discovery and radio and Spotify for specific listening.

> Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing

That's exactly what I'm not looking for; I'm perfectly fine with making my own music choices. I know what I like, have an extensive "library" on Spotify, and play from just that.

The biggest thing I'm missing from Spotify (or indeed, most players, except the one I wrote myself years ago) is the ability to say "play random album from my collection". Play random track is too biased towards albums with 60 tracks vs. albums with just one track.

foobar2k wins again ;)

Does it have this ability out of the box? I don't remember it being there years ago (I looked for it), but that was 3+ years ago.

It's still the best music player I know of though, even when running with Wine on Linux.

AFAIK, I didn't have to add any plugins to achieve that feature. I believe you can set the order to be Shuffle Tracks or Shuffle Albums out of the box, but I might be misremembering if I needed to do anything for that to be there.

see: https://i.imgur.com/zL0oZsx.png

You can customize this feature in Advanced Preferences. Then, go to Playback -> Shuffle -> Album grouping pattern.

See: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=113035.0

So does cmus :-)

How great is fb2k for music discovery? Also their macOS player is kind of...bad. I'd recommend Cog for local files.

mostly the same for me, but I would love to be able to browse record labels on spotify; it does not have the concept of a record label (!) though.

It does. At least some time ago on desktop version every album had a copyright (record label) listed on the bottom. Clicking it would search you all of the stuff released under that label.

None of them are links: https://i.imgur.com/IikFCNt.png

Pandora allows you to shuffle playlists. Might allow you to sort of achieve what you're after.

> "play random album from my collection"

Quod Libet (https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) lets you do exactly that.

Can you use that on Android?

No. Quod Libet is GTK-based.

I use the "radio station" features on both because I'm not a curator. It does seems like Pandora's version is a bit better but not drastically so. Then again I'm not a music monster, I listen to what the algorithms tell me until they push me too far :)

When I try to open pandora.com from Australia I get an empty page with the sentence "Whoops! You weren't supposed to end up here."[1]

[1] https://ibb.co/YNxhbkH

> Discovery, recommendations and shuffle are at the heart of what made Pandora a thing... it's literally what Pandora was built on back when it was purely a seeded radio of sorts. Whereas Spotify more-or-less bolted on these features later in the product life... and it shows.

Pandora wants to get rid of those features. All their advertising now is "if you pay for a premium account, you can play whatever music you want, on demand".

This reminds me really strongly of how eBay decided that (1) customers prefer to buy things at a fixed price [completely correct]; so that (2) they should try to prevent people from listing ordinary auctions, because customers don't like those. [No!] Instead, the goal was to just be the place where people would go if they wanted to buy something online.

Except of course that that completely undermines the concept of eBay. They were an established auction site that intentionally drove auctions away. And then they complained that people preferred to buy things from Amazon.

In both cases, it looks like a popular company with an established brand sees a rival that's even more popular, and concludes that the only path forward must be to implement features the rival offers while discontinuing or discouraging any features where they're doing better than the rival is. How does this make sense?

Pandora is also US only unless you use a VPN.

Pandoras was better but is now much much worse. Spotifys recommendations are the fold standard.

> So, if Spotify is so bad, as would seem evidenced by all these HN threads that pop up from time-to-time, why do people continue to use it?

Aside from amount of content (which wasn't an issue earlier), I suspect the primary reason is that Pandora isn't available in Europe. I loved it so much (>5 years ago?) that I used as VPN, but this didn't quite work on my phone and ended up being too much of a bother.

Spotify's big advantage, like most monopoly-focused 'startups' is their monopoly. Not actually providing the best to their customers.

I can use Spotify without a VPN, it has a lot of stuff Pandora doesn't have, and I can share stuff with friends because everyone else also uses Spotify. It's difficult to compete with that.

I did search for 5 random bands I listen to on Pandora, found a total of 0 albums and 0 songs.

Pandora decided a few years back to block international users. I don’t know if they’ve changed this - I haven’t bothered to go back.

Did they ever allow for international users?

Yeah, way back when (early 2000s?) it was a streaming personalised radio and it worked fine, at least in the UK.

I'm going to check out Pandora, but out of the large ones (Apple Music, Deezer) Spotify has by far the best algorithmic recommendations.

Pandora isn't available outside the US, so it doesn't really matter how good it is compared to Spotify I can't use it anyway.

It doesn't matter how good the tech is if business/legal can't keep up with the competition.

Pandora's suggestion algorithm is much better than Spotify's. What you describe is what I used to do with Pandora. I migrated to Spotify several years ago.

Spotify generates some decent genre based playlists based on my listening history. Not as good as Pandora was.

Lately with the pandemic, I've created a super-chill, ambient play list (I started with Moby's Long Ambients and expanded from there) to relax before bedtime. This has been really helpful for unwinding in these stressful times.

However, an unintended consequence is that Spotify now thinks I listen to soothing ambient more than 50% of the time. My year in music is all ambient and my suggested play lists are all wishy-washy now. Apparently there is no "ignore this playlist when tracking usage." You can only manually disable tracking under "Settings > Social" and it times out after every session.

I haven't used Pandora in a decade, but when I did, it strongly preferred to play mainstream artists, and within artists, only a handful of specific tracks. They weren't bad choices, but I got pretty bored of them.

Spotify takes a lot more risks and I think its highly preferable.

A decade is a long, long time. The catalog is definitely on-par with any service out there today.

I would believe they've improved over time. But my comment wasn't that pandora had a poor catalog. It was that they wanted to play mainstream songs instead. Perhaps not even mainstream, but just very specific songs. They had a lot of artist's whole discographies but only a subset would ever come on. I can still remember a few of them for me:

royksopp - this must be it

trapt - headstrong

ladytron - destroy everything you touch

Some sort of remix of the hand that feeds by Nine Inch Nails (I think it was the photek remix or something)

I got these songs a lot on many stations, and nothing else by those artists ever, haha.

I don't hold a grudge from 10 years ago though

I loved Pandora back when they were experimenting, but then they stopped providing service where I live and Spotify is the only game in town :(

Yeah, I hate this too. I use citypop and synthwave when exercising, and they then “pollute” everything else.

My "philosophy" with listening to music while programming has been that if I can tell I like the song, then i'm probably focusing too much on it rather than the task at hand.

+1 I do something similar. As a general rule, I prefer to listen to songs I don't already know while working. If I'm humming or singing along, I'm doing it wrong.

I've actually discovered some of my favorite bands/songs this way.

Programming along, with background music playing - when suddenly I become "aware" of the song playing and how good it is. That's when I give it the "Thumbs Up" in Pandora, then go back to work. Might happen once a session if I'm lucky.

I do this too. It works well.

In addition I have several playlists, as a song might suit the current playlist, and another song might fit playlist B instead. So any playlist might be seeding several other playlists at a time.

Sometimes I go through many, many recommendations, listen to a song in short pieces quickly by skipping most of it. It sounds weird but that way I can pretty accurately tell if the song is shit or not (read: if I end up liking it). If the song passes my filter, I put it to some playlist. I just do this quickly and finally go back and listen to the new ones.

As for "dislike", there isn't one per song but there is a "Don't play this" per artist. I sometimes play children's songs or pop as requested, and after some time the recommendations include music I truly never want to hear again in any recommendations (Marcus & Martinus I'm looking at you).

Also, it feels like only the first songs in a playlist actually matter for the recommendations. I don't know if this is really the case. I'd hope the recommendation engine took a random sampling of the entire playlist and recommended based on those.

Edit: there's a "hide" for a track.

> I create a playlist to fit a mood (for example, ambient electronic music with a good beat and no words) ... what it recommends and plays is tolerable but not great. ... (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me.

SoundCloud Weekly[0] recommendations have been solid for months specifically with ambient: ~85% Good tracks with ~30% Resonating enough to Favorite. My other contexts / use cases include listening by Album and Artist, Genre, Mood- and Mind-Setting, and Discovery.

Spotify works well for Albums and Artists. HypeMachine is my go-to for Discovery and Genre. SoundCloud and BandCamp work well for diving into artists and labels discovered. Playlists and Favorites across these are best for Mood- and Mind-Setting, as are "special purpose" options like Brain.fm and Ragya.

[0]https://soundcloud.com/discover/sets/weekly::[username] [1]https://www.ragya.com/

> Every now and then (maybe one out of every 20-30 songs) I will discover a shiny new gem of a song that really resonates with me. So I drag that song up and add it to my slowly growing playlist.

I take a similar approach, but I've found that the recommendation algorithm is pretty bad, so as an extra step I click on the artist and spend a bit of time listening to their other songs (and add those too, in the hopes it'll affect the algorithm).

> This approach has worked pretty well for me so far, but I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

That's one of my main issues with the 'recommended' algorithm. 90% of it is stuff I already have in other playlists, or stuff I keep skipping. I really wish the algorithm did a bit more with all the data it has, but I imagine they optimize for sales (to us or promoting artists/labels) over our actual desires.

This is what I do, except using a general playlist. At ~ 300 songs almost all recommendations I didn't like. At current ~ 400 songs all recommendations I don't like and Spotify gave up with a passive-aggressive message sort of "I give up, add more songs if you want better recommendations". (Note that I have a wide variety of styles in the playlist; too lazy to break up in genres and also I kind of like the "surprise" factor)

The secret to my success to spotify is be a free user with adblock. On desktop browsers, there's no forced shuffle / variance. It just plays the album from start to finish, and, of course, no ads. Pick something manually you like. When you're done, pick a an artist from their list of similar artists. Play entire albums at a time. If you're not immediately dissatisfied, you'll probably feel good about the next half hour of music.

I do the same thing now, but the recommended section leaves a lot to be desired on mobile.

There's no way to prevent songs from getting suggested (other than maybe blocking a song entirely?). My recommendeds don't seem to get updated until the playlist has changed dramatically. And repeat songs get added to the section even if I haven't added it the umpteen times it was suggested prior.

Is the experience different on desktop or am I doing something wrong?

Anyone here remember turntable.fm? I do. Sad. JQBX.fm isn't the same either. That was a great way to get a higher "hit" ratio though.

I miss it so much. Nothing else has come close. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't added a feature like it.

>I really wish that there was a way to explicitly tell Spotify that I "dislike" a song and to never recommend it to me again.

You can at least for radio playlists. You can specifically say to never play this song or artist again. They used to let you thumb up or down on tracks which I think was a much easier UI.

Skipping songs doesn't seem to do enough for songs in your playlists so you have to go through the whole right click -> never play again workflow. I really wish I could just downvote individual songs as they play and tailor it that way since sometimes I'm just tired of a particular song, but maybe I like the song or the artist and don't want to click on 'never hear this again'. It just seems to repeat certain songs way too much based on your listening history.

My solution to me getting tired of tracks in my work playlist was to keep adding more. It's currently at 2885 songs, or 5.2 days of music. It's mostly video game music, since a lot of video game music is written to not be too distracting.

Though maybe I should say the majority of the playlist consists of songs I've imported into iTunes. Apple does a decent job at letting you seamlessly integrate your personal library with stuff from their streaming catalog.

I mostly use this approach as well but my experience with multiple services is that I eventually (and sooner, rather than later) end up hearing same 100 or so recommended songs. Maybe I'm too picky, but I just don't have great luck with recommendation engines anywhere I go.

> here's my secret to success:

> effectively, I manually make my own playlist.

yes, but my method at least introduces me to music that I would have otherwise been exposed to.

I recommend the app Mick Tagger for the drag process. Makes it easier and keeps you in the zone with programming instead of having to fiddle with a song and playlist.

Thank you for saying this. I've been trying to use Spotify for a year now and it leaves so much to be desired on process. You're doing gods work

I've had trouble with this. It seems no matter what I play, Spotify just wants to recommend three songs by Pavement on repeat.

> If I don't like a song, I hit the skip button on my keyboard.

Which button is that?

Share an electronica playlist and prove it ;).

Do share your playlist , if its public

Music preferences are subjective, because familiarity is a huge part of appreciation. Sharing my particular fingerprint of music appreciation with other people doesn't do me any good, because they will only criticize my preferences as they are not their own.

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