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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

It's called Bandcamp

Did this for years. Finally gave up last year. It’s so much work, discovery is a huge pain, listening on all devices is a pain. None of it was worth it.

Now I just use Spotify and don’t care. I don’t need the extra work in my life.

all my friends use spotify and everytime i am with them i hear the same music. sure its the music they like, but its the same over and over and over again with no variation. They tell me spotify is great at discovery but i havnt heard it.

i listen to djs, radio stations and other internet channels that mix the music i like into new and exciting compositions.

Yeah, many people just don't care as much about discovering new music. I don't think it says much about Spotify though.

imo it tells that spotify has a conflict of interest were it sells "access to all music" and on the other hand has the means to steer customers towards economically advantageous consumption.

Yes Spotify is great at discovery. I've discovered plenty of music thanks to it during the years – lately, for example, tens of Japanese jazz recordings.

I was with Google Music for years, until the YouTube music fiasco then I jumped ship to Spotify.

I found discovery excellent in Google but Spotify is horrible, it thinks I want to listen to Pop because I put a playlist of "top" or "charts" on while I work, when really I want rock/metal albums and can't discover them for the life of me.

Doesn't it have those made for you thingies that change weekly or so? In my case it makes em for the varying genres i listen to so even tho i listen to some techno at work i can pick a metal playlist with new stuff.

I noticed some mixes it makes but it has talk shows, podcasts etc thrown in and I'm really not into that.

Also, because it has basically ruined my music preferences, despite me telling it what I want to be recommended, it makes recommendations for "Dua Lipa" and "Doja Cat". Nothing against either of them, but not really what I was looking for.

Hmmm it doesn't have any of that thrown in for me. Feels like we're having a completely different experience for some reason

I find many wrongs with Spotify, but this isn't one of them. My Spotify Discover Weekly is usually great, up to 50% great discoveries, and they're completely different in both genres and time periods to friends' lists.

I guess you just have musically eclectically challenged friends.

Yeah, I used to use Spotify for discovery when the radio function acted like...radio. Now it's just a 30 track playlist on loop generated based on things you have liked. So absolutely fucking pointless for discovery.

I am SCREAMING OUT for a service that was like the old Spotify radio.

Currently just going to gigs again and finding bands through bandcamp the organic way is what I'm doing.

Also, here is a script I wrote to download and extract a Bandcamp download link and import it with the beet CLI music library manager:

https://github.com/radiosilence/dotfiles/blob/master/.zsh.d/...

I then use Navidrome (modern Subsonic replacement) to serve it up:

https://www.navidrome.org/

Curated playlists should be your jam then, find an artist/DJ you like the taste and follow their curations.

The radio also generate different playlists over time, the tracks in a song's/artist's radio will change and not be a static 30-odd tracks forever.

Try this app I made for fun a while back: https://www.tuneful.app

It uses Spotify under the hood, similar to how the radio used to work.

Spotify's discovery sucks. I can never ever find a favorite song in Spotify's suggestions. The experience is very similar to Youtube's echo chamber.

Just wanna throw this out there: Plex now has an app for accessing music in a way better way than their movie/series-app, called Plexamp. [1]

I dont see it solving discoverability yet, but it worked completely fine on my Android devices. It also does some automatic tagging of your music to generate dynamic playlists.

it is limited to plex pass subscribers for now though. i'd say it's worth trying a free trial at least.

1: https://plexamp.com/

One method that has worked for me is following other users that actively buy music on Bandcamp that I like. I get an email digest when they buy new music. That's a strong signal to me: I already know they have similar tastes by seeing what they have purchased in the past, and I can conclude that they really like the music they are willing to spend money on.

This is true; I do reluctantly pay for Spotify. But that'll always be the case with more equitable, less profitable, ergo less well-funded alternatives. And it has been consistently (slowly) improving over the years. Worth supporting imo

Bandcamp really is a fantastic company. There are some barriers to listening to music on it directly (some intentional) but I've found so much great music through their recommendations.

I still pay for streaming due to the convenience of typing most songs and playing it instantly... but if I like something enough to click the heart button I'll often hop over to Bandcamp to see if I can pay the artist more than the $.0001 they get for the stream. Even dropping someone a dollar is literally 10,000 times more support.

This is the way. I also use Spotify because it makes most of my music available instantly on all of my devices and the discovery is good enough.

But that $150 for Spotify is only a small fraction of my yearly music spend. With most of it going to concert tickets, merch at concerts and merch/downloads on Bandcamp to support the artists I like.

Spotify and Bandcamp are not mutually exclusive

Yeah exactly, and with covid making concerts uncomfortable for me for the foreseeable future I've just been doubling down on bandcamp and merch purchases (but wow I miss live music).

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