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Comment by mmahemoff | Hacker News Reader

Spotify's discovery is better than a 4. Since a playlist can be represented by a URL, sites have emerged to share playlists, which is actually awesome, one of those living in the future moments. Even better, these can be dynamic, like a top 40 list, and also curated by everyone.

That said, Spotify could certainly do much more in this area (a lot of their energies have been focused on getting the US launch, it seems).

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This.

See spotylist.com, discovery through non-friends playlists beats algorithms as you can understand why songs are grouped together and get a feel for a persons music tastes.

I'm not sure if any "social" type of discovery can beat algorithmic in quality. The added benefit of "social" is the socializing bit, not the discovery bit. Algorithms can always match you up with similar people faster and better.

But thanks for the link I'll re-consider the rating.

The radio feature, incidentally, was disabled (temporarily ?) for the US launch. It's not been removed from the client internationally.

I imagine the difference is in how you listen to music. Having been a staunch evangelist for Rdio, I've found that the people that really fall in love with it are usually album listeners. If you prefer to listen in more of a radio type setting, Spotify would probably be better due to the improved playlist functionality.

So I guess it comes down to whether you're trying to discover in the sense of finding new artists, or just finding new music to listen to in the moment.

After testing out Turntable.fm for the past few weeks, I have to almost disagree. And this is coming from someone who worked on Grooveshark Radio for a year, which is almost all algorithmic.

Turntable is fun with friends. But being a listener in a DJd room is no different than listening to a curated playlist, a curated radio station, and probably worse than personalized algorithmic radio in terms of efficacy of discovery.

You'll discover music on Turntable, but for the same amount of time spent on an algorithmic radio station you'll probably discover more.

You might "discover" more in the sense that you'll get far more recommendations of songs you've never heard of, but those recommendations might not be relevant to you. Why? Because your mood changes from song to song and algorithms will never capture human emotion quite like, well, humans.

When I'm in a well-DJ'ed Turntable room, the "radio" feels so much more natural. Songs flow. People are constantly editing their queues to best the song before it and I find myself rarely having to vote on a song. Its already better than Pandora, IMO. It also beats BMAT which has amazing algorithmic recommendations (based on waveform analysis and musical feature decomposition).

The only issue I see right now is that if your tastes are outside of Electronica and Indie, theres not much else for you at the moment.

These discovery services are not integrated into Spotify so I don't really consider them Spotify discovery features. Is a site that lists Spotify playlists really different from a site that just lists playlists? Most of these sites you can play the music. If I were to go to a website to do discovery, there are plenty of other options too like the Hype Machine and it does not require Spotify.

Without arguing definitions, I'd say the net effect is that discovery is good for advanced users (who will use those third parties) and not for basic users. Integrating this kind of thing into the actual service would be a good move.

I use and like Grooveshark but it's radio recommendations are pretty bad and people who have used both say Spotify's is better. I would take these scores with a grain of salt. As much as I like Grooveshark I wouldn't give it a 9 overall.

Grooveshark's radio is not the best, but it's probably better than Spotify's Radio, especially in terms of customizability.

Interesting. Are you saying that Spotify's radio is more like actual radio? Where you just listen and what's on is on?

If so then Grooveshark definitely deserves a higher rating than Spotify for radio. Recommendations can be improved but not being able to skip a track is a big design flaw (for me, I can see how some want a set-it-and-forget-it radio).

You can skip tracks in Spotify's radio, but you only get fixed stations by genre.

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