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Comment by akdor1154 | Hacker News Reader

(completely off-topic, but commenters on this thread likely to know)

Anyone know a good recommendation system for classical, or even better, cross-genre recommendations? E.g. a project/product that is hosted and ready to use / subscribe to. Where I could put in "I like pieces composed by Ravel and Holst, and I also like things performed by Remy le Beouf", and it would actually give me sensible recs..

Spotify seems to rely on popularity too much, which doesn't really work here (I get a bunch of Best Piano for Chill Work compilation albums and not much else). Is Pandora's rec system any good here or does it fall into the same trap? Any other projects people have seen?

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You can go to classical music focused forums or Reddit and ask for recommendations. As far as I’ve tried, no recommendation system beats human enthusiasts when it comes to music discovery.

You might want to try out idagio. Unfortunately primephonic got acquired by apple so they are out of the game these days.

The youtube algorithm can do alright here. The key is a recommendation system that actually segments you into the right sort of place, spotify doesn't really work properly for me in this way.

Other than that I have no idea. I find stuff through some of the more obscure music subreddits (often by literally asking people what else is similar to XYZ). There are undoubtedly blogs around but nobody really uses the internet like that any more...

Side note Spotify and other streaming platforms are awful for even searching for classical music.

Gramophone has a 'What Next' feature that starts with some well known piece and gives a sort of decision tree of suggested pieces based on various criteria.

https://www.gramophone.co.uk/features/article/after-tchaikov...

The digital subscription allows you to search the archive, although I'm not sure how long they have written 'What Next'.

Make friends with a professional classical musician, and ask them! We're reasonably fun people. ;)

The trick for Spotify is to start from something obscure that you like. Anything popular will have the problem you describe Don't know how it would work for classical, but it works great for jazz.

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