Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

For all the complexity... this is something Spotify has got right.

I'm in my 40s, and I still listen to an incredible amount of new music. That is across everything from mainstream rock and pop, through to jazz, jungle, soul, techno, house, hip hop, classical... everything (though I tend to draw the line at screamcore).

And in there last year a tiny unsigned band with 2 tracks and fewer than 900 listens (at the time) got suggested. That band is now one of my favourite bands, a Scottish punk band... Dead Pony https://open.spotify.com/artist/3lGO6uBIzoFyU6OoGMER1B?si=OT... . Since hearing them I've told my old contacts in the music business about them (typically DJs at 6 Music, a few people that own labels, and a few musicians too). Earlier this year they've been signed (nothing to do with me, though I hope whispers meandered and it helped), been featured on BBC 6 Music, and are now working on an album and one of their tracks has hit over 1M listens. I've seen them live and holy crap, they rock... destined for far larger venues than the 50 person under-arches theatre in London that I saw them...

Spotify is doing something very right when I'm not solely rediscovering things I've been listening to for 30 years, but am finding the things I'm going to listen to for the next 30 years.

I've tried Tidal, Deezer, Apple, and my own heavily loaded Plex with all of the music labelled and richly tagged... but the discovery capability of Spotify along with the playlists are their killer feature.

My experience is completely different. The weekly dynamic playlists are very poor (either completely the wrong genre or songs I regularly listen to in the case of the monday playlist). The daily playlists regularly play the same songs by an artist. It seems to me that spotify only uses the top 2 or 3 songs and nothing else. I'd say that of a specific genre it will play 40 to 50 songs and then repeat them.

Even randomizing your existing playlist plays the same music over and misses most of them. Not to mention the UI and flows are pretty terrible for a software that dominates the space.

Same, the only way I can reliably find new music I like on Spotify is to find compilation albums that artists I know feature on and listen to the other tracks.

Then a couple of years later half the new music I found is no longer on Spotify. I've largely given up on it.

This might possibly be true for the types of music you named. Try it with world music in general (e.g,. south asian or middle eastern music) and you'll come across severe limitations and suggestions that simply do not work. Spotify doesn't even still carry even half the catalog of music from some of these regions. It's suggestions in (western) classical also have left a lot to be desired.

which platform does this right though? YouTube is alright for Bollywood at least

The premise (i.e., a singular 'music streaming' platform is what one should 'judge' Spotify against) is itself what I would reject in this case. e.g, for Indian classical, you're much better off with a whole constellation of blogs out there (and separately, certain music festival sites that host their recordings). Even national radio works a lot, lot better.

The reason I run my Plex is all the world music, classical, and frankly obscure music.

If Spotify could increase and sustain the catalogue then I'm pretty sure this would work. But it feels like the catalogue is smaller, churns more, and isn't as enriched in meta-data or listener behaviour to make it work yet. A network problem more than a technical one.

Yes, agreed, it's definitely a much bigger network & economic problem than a technical one.

Blogs, discogs and national radio actually work a lot better for me for discovery, simply because, as you say, Spotify may not even have the input data in order to then help me discover better music. Thing is, I'm not sure there is a desire (perhaps economically driven) to improve that catalogue as they would need to.

When I was at Spotify 3-4 years ago, one of the problems was poor metadata for most music. There's a semi-internal project to be better at classification (https://everynoise.com/) but it has its own problems.

And you can't rely on automatic classifications either. But then music providers don't give you proper info for the music they provide. It's a circular problem.

And then it's a social problem, too. You may want to listen to music that other people that listen to your music do... But then you might not want to do that.

It's a mess.

Also, the ability to listen to whole albums or discographies at a time when no one else was really offering that.

Part of what drove me away from Pandora at a certain point (maybe they've changed since then, don't know) was that they would only play a small subsection of any particular artist's work-- that is no bueno for me, if I really love them I want to hear it all at least once.

My experience with Spotify is similar to yours, but sometimes I want to go on a discovery binge... For that I use Every Noise at Once, built by a Spotify engineer (glenn mcdonald) and one of the coolest sites I've ever used:

https://everynoise.com/

Gosh, I had basically the same story. Heard Dead Pony for the first time on some random Spotify playlist about a year ago, and they're awesome. I'm hopeful they do some shows in the US soon.

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