Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

Here's my 2 cents: don't rely so much on spotify for recommendations. It's first and foremost a streaming service, any recommendation features are secondary. My strategy is to use a variety of recommendation systems. I've found things through spotify, pandora, gnoosic, reviews, forums, even wikipedia pages. Hunting for music is really fun! Music tastes are subjective, I just don't think the algorithms are ever going to be perfect.

View on HN

I don't know how much Spotify uses human curation, but Apple Music has a lot of human editors behind the scenes to assemble -- and update/maintain -- what I'm pretty sure are tens of thousands of playlists at this point, based on artist and genre and subject and mood and more. And while this is absolutely one of those Totally Subjective YMMV Works For Me May Suck For You deals, for me it's been far more hit than miss.

(I have some experience with Tidal, which also has apparently human-curated lists but they haven't at all at Apple's level. My experience with Spotify wasn't good, but it was also really limited, because it just didn't offer anything obvious over Apple Music to me -- the reverse is almost certainly true for someone who's already deeply invested in Spotify, though!)

It is subjective, but I agree with you and enjoy the human touch on the Apple playlists. I tried Spotify long ago, had some issues and then moved to GPM. I used GPM for years until they started pushing me to YTM, so I moved to AM. AM has been the best experience so far, but like you said, YMMV.

TYSM!

I don’t consider it as much as “relying on Spotify” as I just consider the recommendations a great addition to music discovery. A long time ago I relied heavily on last.fm’s radio for music discovery, and Spotify does a decent job filling that gap.

To each their own, I guess, but I’m naturally a “passive” music discoverer, using a combination of recommendations and similar artist radios and whatnot. It works fairly well.

> recommendation features are secondary

The recommendation features, albeit imperfect, are a big reason I'm still on Spotify. I don't think they're secondary at all, as I would have gotten bored by now and canceled my subscription. True, I could go through all the effort you mentioned, but realistically I wouldn't.

> Hunting for music is really fun!

I mean, maybe. I only listen to music when I'm a) driving; b) working. Neither are times I'm particularly interested in searching for new bands to listen to, so I'm going to end up relying on my streaming service's recommendation engine.

I highly recommend carving out some time to put on a good pair of headphones, and just listen to music. It can be very much like reading a good book.

Sometimes I do this with music videos. Unfortunately a song has to be popular enough to have a video made, but I'm routinely surprised which songs do have videos. I'm sure this is a bit of nostalgia, since I grew up in the era when MTV still showed music videos.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com