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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if it'll meet the same fate as Netflix at some point, with publishing houses going for their own streaming services instead.

I don't think so because the way that people consume music and the way they consume films and television are very different. With a film you might block out a few hours to watch that specific provider. With music you're more likely to want to interleave content from several providers at the same time (eg a playlist). Unless all the providers are available on the same platform it wouldn't work well.

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A considerable amount of music is distributed by a small subset of providers. So in that regard it's not that different to the TV / film situation and you could theoretically still interleave different artists.

There's also a common use case where people will just play a specific artist for an hour. Or even an album.

Frankly, I hope services like Spotify don't disappear. It's a great loss to consumers just how fragmented video streaming services have become. I'd hate to see the same happen to music as well.

I don't think that behavior is all to common. I see people listening to a very wide range of artists and almost never reach for stuff outside of it around here.

I use music streaming services to play specific albums (as I tend to play older artists who created albums designed to be played as a whole entity rather than singles)

My wife uses them to shuffle singles by specific artists (she’s more into pop music).

I’d wager if my wife and I both coincidentally follow the same pattern despite doing so for different reasons, that it’s then likely a more common pattern than first assumed. Please also bare in mind that I’m not suggesting our use cases are how the majority of people consume music, but I’d be surprised if it was small enough to be a rounding error.

Speaking of interleaving, I wish Spotify understood how to interact with Concept Albums. Changing to the middle of The Wall for one song is jarring and I usually skip it.

And then I worry skipping it is going to train the algorithm that I don't like Pink Floyd.

What does this mean? I don't use spotify. Are you saying when you go to listen to an album it will put a random song into the queue?

Only if you listen on shuffle(like every music app I guess) or in their AI lists. Would be nice if the AI ones would respect that for sure, was wondering why that's not a thing since like 2016.

I'll be listening to a theme or genre of music and it adds songs that don't really work outside the context of their album.

Spotify allows both: listening to random songs (either based on a particular genre, seeded from an existing playlist, or generated from the user’s listening habits), or choosing specific songs or albums to listen to.

They probably meant listening in random mode, and Spotify randomly choosing a track that doesn’t make much sense outside the context of its album.

I never understood why for albums like this they even bother splitting up the tracks.

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