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Comment by huron | Hacker News Reader

But how do you find new songs for you to put on your playlists?

That’s why SomaFM and online stations like KCRW are so valuable. They’re ways to introduce new music and even new styles of music to the listeners.

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I use Spotify but I loathe their recommendation algorithm. What I do when I want to discover new songs is that I search for a user playlist on r/spotify, or if there is a particular song I like, I use this website[1], which I recently discovered and which enables one to specify a song and get a list of public playlists featuring this song. It works pretty well in my case.

[1] https://www.chosic.com/spotify-playlist-search-tool-by-song-...

Here in Dublin we have Raidió Na Life, which has the best music programming of any "offline" radio. Everything spoken is in Irish, of which I understand almost nothing, but the music, is amazing.

Online, of course, SomaFM has the best streams.

Upvoted for reminding me how good Raidió na Life used to be. I haven’t listened to it in over 10 years. I used to know the Neuromantek DJs back in the 2000s. I’m amazed to see that their show is still running! These days, when I listen to the radio, it’s usually via Saorview but I must make the effort to hook up Raidió na Life and other radio stations to my home hi-fi (now that my Squeezebox has died).

Isn't that what recommender systems are for? /scnr

They can only recommend what they understand. I am not aware of any automated recommender that listens to music to make decisions on how to recommend it. For that, humans are still good.

They don't have to listen to music - they just look at what people who like similar stuff to you, like in addition to that.

And that's why a human (or a model that can represent the music) can make better recommendations.

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