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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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