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Comment by mrobins | Hacker News Reader

One of the ironic things here is that it’s pitted Spotify’s brand as a music company against their brand as a podcast company. For people originally drawn to Spotify as a music service the departure of even a few icons all of a sudden makes Apple Music very attractive.

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I switched from Spotify to Apple Music fairly recently and I am still shocked on the daily how poorly built Apple Music is. In the several years I subscribed to Spotify I never had issues of content not loading or choppiness in the playback, but with Apple Music it is nearly every day.

The only thing Apple Music has going for it over Spotify (in my opinion) is that the recommendations are easily 10x better for discovering new content.

> The only thing Apple Music has going for it over Spotify (in my opinion) is that the recommendations are easily 10x better for discovering new content.

Thank you! I spent the last few years working on improving the quality of those recommendations!

Your post surprised me: I can't think of any other Apple employees publically talking about their work, other than the early years of the WebKit team.

I’m ex-Apple, so that may help, but I was once told it’s fine to talk about anything that is in a job posting.

People are working on almost everything, so I don’t feel like I’m giving away anything shocking. Apple is a big place, though. My experience may not be the same as others.

How much of the recommendation engine is built around a spatial index that performs a KNN search?

I doubt this bit of trivia would ever be included in a job posting :-)

Nice try, Apple.

Amazing - you should be proud of your team’s work! On Spotify, my experience was that it’s recommendation system would simply recommend songs from the same bands I’ve already told it that I like. But Apple will dig up some obscure band I’d never heard of and - POW! - it would be awesome and a new favourite band.

The recommendation system alone is what keeps me looking past all the errors with the software being unable to play a song on demand on a regular basis.

Congrats again!

Thank you again! There is a lot that goes into quality search and recommendations, and I was just a small piece of a great team.

Very strange. I would probably pay my Spotify subscription just for the recommendation service. Did you use Discover Weekly actively? Did you share your account with children, at parties, etc.? I'm always puzzled by how Spotify recommendations seem to be so hit and miss for people. I wonder if it could be related to the type of music one listens to.

> Did you share your account with children, at parties, etc.?

I play my son music using my phone. Spotify bury the "Private Session" toggle deep in the settings, and arbitrarily turn it off again after a while. If this damages Spotify's recommendations, then it's entirely their doing.

Can you tell me more? Last I tried (a number of years ago), the recommendations were completely mainstream and uninteresting, whereas Discover Weekly routinely dredged up almost-unknown artists that quickly turned into favorites. Can Apple Music do something similar today? Does it use a similar approach to Spotify or is it curated somehow?

Great job on the recommendations, definitely my favorite part.

What is youpinoon in way Music.app is so clunky still? For example when perusing music, if you click on something there is no way to go back to what you were just looking at!

It's such a cool thing to get to work on, and be paid for, and something I imagine everyone working on actually uses. This is not true of a lot of software we all write. So I don't understand why the app is so bad in 100 tiny little ways

Thank you.

I wasn't really involved in the client, so I probably don't have much insight to share in that regard.

It was really special to what I had been working on in a keynote or read articles/comments specifically addressing a feature, but it isn't always gravy. So many news reports/articles/comments are just so far off from what is really happening going on. And many comments are tough to hear, but true as well. Still overall it was a positive and threads like this are really something special. It means a lot to have our work appreciated and think that can be missing from the modern software development experience.

Great work!

I only tried music streaming last year and started with Apple Music and was shocked at how outright broken the platform is. Like I’d press play and a different song on the page would play. Or it would start lagging out really bad until I reload the page.

Shocked and how poor apple did here considering I haven’t had issues with any other product from them.

> Shocked and how poor apple did here considering I haven’t had issues with any other product from them.

You must not have tried Apple Home.

I'm in the same boat, but one extra thing I found that Apple Music does better is sound quality. I'm not an audiophile by any means, but even I noticed immediately that music sounded _much_ better, like, very noticeably.

But yeah, aside from that, it's kind of a miserable experience. Hard to believe it's _still_ so bad.

I actually find apple music discovery to be far worse for my tastes than Spotify. But nothing even comes close to the SoundCloud Weekly and SoundCloud Upload discovery playlists. I've found such incredible indie musicians through those playlists. I can't rave enough about them.

And weirdly (as tech tends to be), Spotify was terribad for me in terms of stability and playback continuity. :-D

But yea, Apple Music is not great here either. Haven't had enough time with their suggestion engine, but Spotify's is indeed pretty awful.

YouTube music is by far the best about recommendations IME. Shame about the app and smart device integration, though - often telling a speaker to play music on the TV will just have audio and not video, for example.

Wow I moved from Spotify to Apple about… 6 months ago? My experience has been better than Spotify. Searching in the olddddd Spotify apple (pre electron days) worked so well. But then they broke it when moving to electron and never fixed it.

Try Tidal or Qobuz, they should work.

There's also:

Tidal https://tidal.com/

Deezer https://www.deezer.com/

Bandcamp https://bandcamp.com/

Jango https://www.jango.com/

Radio Paradise https://radioparadise.com/

There's also FOSS software for collaborative music with friends, musicians etc:

Jamulus https://github.com/jamulussoftware/jamulus

I switched to Deezer recently and my favorite thing is that it actually has a usable, full-featured web version that's not full of bloat -- and, more importantly, allows lossless music playback in browser. The web UI works so well that I never even bothered to install the desktop app, unlike other services I've used in the past. They definitely deserve a shout-out.

Best feature of Deezer by FAR:

That unlimited lenght "Flow" playlist. It's like personalized radio, but you can skip songs.

I'm so sad that Spotify didn't implement such a feature yet.

And Youtube Music https://music.youtube.com/

As a long time Google Music user I don't understand why people never mention them. It's Youtube Music now. For 118SEK I get pretty much the same music as any other streaming service, PLUS all of youtube's content without ads, useful on chromecast. I realize you can get rid of the ads if you have a computer hooked up to your monitor but I really like the chromecast.

They killed (these are just my beefs, others have more):

- the variant of music that I used

- Google+

- search (well they silently replaced it with a non working version)

They are becoming more and more irrelevant for me.

That's why I forget Google Play Music.

I think Spotify is getting onto thin ice. I subscribed to Spotify because I want to stream music, and I like that the bands I listen to get a bit of money.

But when I hear that they are paying $100M to some controversial US podcaster (before Neil Young left Spotify I have never heard of Joe Rogan), I'm thinking, this isn't what I signed up for. I want my money to go towards German indie bands, not rich American celebrities.

I don't know what the majority of Spotify listeners care about, but for my part I know I couldn't care less about podcasts, I just want to listen to music.

I don't think they're on thin ice. Remember when people were boycotting Netflix over Cuties? Their stock prices recovered and everyone forgot. People have also boycotted YouTube or pulled their ads. These things just blow over.

This feels different to me. Netflix has a unique library of shows. They have content you can't get elsewhere. Spotify doesn't, when it comes to music (other then their Spotify Sessions, but it's not much). I can easily switch to a different service (already did) and get the same content. My new platform pays artists more, and works well enough. I'm not sure Spotify has anything special enough to draw music fans who left back.

The budget of the film Cuties was under $1M, maybe a small bit more with Netflix's marketing involvement after the initial release (Netflix bought the rights to a worldwide release outside of France). Spotify just directly wiped tens of millions of dollars off their service and likely suffered more long-term lost subscriptions since people have already switched to YT Music or Apple Music; anyone that dropped Netflix had probably resubscribed by the time Squid Game was released.

Unless I missed something, they lost a couple of artists that weren't exactly chart toppers, and a few episodes of a podcast. I don't see the fuss.

or dave chappelle. i mean, both dave and netflix are doing quite fine.

I signed up for the music, or more specifically, the algorithmic recommendations.

With Spotify allowing commercial interests to influence recommendations (artists can choose to take a drop in royalty income to prioritize their music in recommendations) and pushing podcasts in my face all the time when I open the app, to the detriment of recommendations... I've decided to run my own Jellyfin server instead.

Like you, this isn't what I signed up for. It's sad that I can't just pay a monthly fee for a good music app -- even Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, etc. are all crappy music apps.

I signed up for the music. Cancelled over the censorship. Gross.

I was already primed to leave Spotify because of that very tension. I never had any desire to play music and podcasts in the same app: I swap between them pretty fluidly and the separate apps keep everything in context.

So the second that the podcast side started to interfere with the music side in the slightest, I dipped.

I don't think so I think this has just blown up in the twitterverse and will be over in a couple of weeks because the twitterverse is only important in the short term and spotify knows that.

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