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This looks really nice, it's a good showcase of the value of having an API that lets others add value to your service.

If you're looking at expanding the feature set there's something I've been thinking of for a while, but haven't gotten around to it yet, and this looks miles better than anything I would cobble together. I really miss Apple's smart playlists[0] from when I used iTunes for my iPod. It was really easy to quickly make a playlist with songs with 4+ stars that I hadn't listen to for at least a month, and stuff like that. I think something similar should be possible to do with the Spotify API, with either manual updating on my computer, or automatic via a batch job on some server. Maybe even expand it to similar artists or something, to take advantage of having access to almost all music, not just my own collection. Imagine being able to create a playlist with 100 random trance songs from 1995-2005 with at least 50 000 plays, and having it updated daily, or the 50 most listened to pop songs right now released in 1980-2020.

The similar artist thing would probably be a good addition to this new releases feature to, to help you expand your horizon...

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/itunes/create-delete-and-use...

I stumbled across this [0] yesterday, which is basically exactly what you’re describing.

[0] http://playlistmachinery.com/index.html

That looks really cool, thanks for the tip!

If you say music discovery then I expect to discover things I don't know. Currently this is only offering new releases by artists in playlists.

I understand that via the API you can't get access to their whole graph and recommendation engine.

Currently when I like something I go to "artist radio" or "song radio" to find new things.

For a better discovery tool you need to use data from outside of Spotify

You actually have access to some pretty powerful search queries. Only a subset of them are used in the default client. You can search by energy level, by danceability, if songs are more likely to contain lyrics...

However. If the goal of this is to not miss out on artists you already know... Then it's simply a competitor to the "release radar" weekly playlist.

Hey, cool. I wonder why companies love to dumb down their recommendation engines to the point of them being barely useful when they could just let me tell them what I'm looking for.

> You actually have access to some pretty powerful search queries. Only a subset of them are used in the default client. You can search by energy level, by danceability, if songs are more likely to contain lyrics...

I've looked at the API reference [1] and couldnt find any of the stuff you mentioned, am I looking in the wrong place?

[1](https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...)

I mean why not try to find the band on the musicbrainz database, figure out what the band members are and look for other projects they did? That would be a start.

Or finding similar bands from a similar time and area

> For a better discovery tool you need to use data from outside of Spotify

I hope it’s ok to do a bit of shameless self promotion here on HN. I shared my open source Reddit Playlists project here as a Show HN post recently which aims to do exactly what you suggest by using Reddit posts.

The idea is pretty straightforward - Each week ~100 music subreddits are scraped for the most popular posts in the last week, and then a Spotify playlist is compiled with the tracks have been posted. Each playlist updates automatically every Sunday.

The main project page with a link to all the playlists is here: https://jameslawlor.github.io/reddit-playlists/

Code on Github: https://github.com/jameslawlor/reddit-playlists

How does this compare to Music Butler? It recently went to a paid model.

I did find the service very useful for the 3ish years I used it, but I didn't jump to premium, and kinda stopped using it.

Curiously, what makes this service different and how will you ensure "100% perpetually free with no strings attached"?

https://www.musicbutler.io/

Music Butler focuses on either artists you follow on Spotify (just like Spotify itself), or your Spotify Library. Brew.fm shows you new releases per playlist.

Here's a demo of how I use Brew.fm to keep my 2 most used playlists up to date: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh2Ognb4PgU.

I have no plans to monetize the tool. I'm scratching my own itch here and am very much at the mercy of Spotify. I'm hoping to keep this one a hobby project.

MusicButler dev here. Even though you didn't sign up for the paid plan, I appreciate the mention and the compliments!

And to /u/bartproost - good luck with your new adventure! Your note on monetization reminds of myself 4 years ago when I'd just started with MusicButler. Luckily I didn't make any promises about it being free forever because, well, hobby projects have associated costs too.

I was curious about the service (I'm not against paying for stuff and MusicButler supports Apple Music) but nowhere on the website does it tell me how much it costs.

I agree with this. I don't mind paying a fair price, but I need to know what the price is before I invest any time bothering.

You’re both right of course. Things have been quite hectic for me. I’ll be sure to update this very soon.

This is cool! How/where does it get the new releases data from? Would be nice to have a service like this for books

Pretty cool, but after I visited the settings page and changed nothing, I hit Save… and now the profile page says I have listened to 0 genres and keeps crashing the tab on iPhone/safari :(

Not sure if the settings page is related, but that was when it started.

I have an idea why this could have happened. Will look into this tomorrow and fix. Sorry!

One thing I can't stand is Spotify not allowing me to turn off / disable singles in the new music feed. I only want to hear an artist's new album.

Nice tool, I will definitely give this a try. A couple notes on the first user experience: I clicked on the example and it took quite some time to load (maybe you're getting a lot of traffic currently?) and before it did I saw zero values for the genres and such. A player appeared at the bottom and wasn't sure what to expect, but I tapped the play button and nothing happened (I'm on Chrome on Android).

Thanks this is great feedback! I'll add a loading state to avoid 0 values, and will look into the load time.

hey I just spent some time using this and found quite a few songs from artists I would've other missed which is great. I have some feedback on a couple visual items. Let me know if there's some way I can send to you directly.

Sure thing! Want to dm me on Twitter? https://twitter.com/BartProost DMs are open

I like to use Spotify Release List [1] which is also a good replacement for the Spotify Release Radar. It just watches for artists you follow and doesn't include those that buy their way into the Release Radar (I'm looking at you, Ed).

[1] https://spotifyreleaselist.netlify.app

As with all music recommendation engines, I want the ability to remove things from the mix. I have zero interest in music similar to Kidz Bop, it's just something I happen to play for my kids.

There’s a way to do that: click the See stats for a playlist button and select a playlist to only get recommendations for that playlist

The novelty of these api apps are great... things like "You can’t get enough of Matteo Faustini lately" and "Your love for Negramaro has faded." makes me laugh... but besides the main section of the dashboard everything else just looks like a long list of albums...there's no long term engagement. I'm not sure why I would return here. Either way, of all of the spotify related web apps I've seen, this one does it the best.

Congratulations on the launch!

I have a suggestion for your next iteration, 'Lyric based music playlist' i.e. Songs for niche categories like Philosophy; There are people looking for it[1] as current music scene seems to be flooded with Romance/break up songs.

So a tool which classifies using the lyrics and are able to find obscure songs irrespective of the artists could be able to address that need-gap.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/31-lyric-based-music-playlists-... (Disclosure: This is problem validation forum).

This is neat! I clicked the hamburger menu before logging in and was able to select “settings”, which triggers a client-side error. You may want to hide that menu option unless authenticated.

Great find! Will do, thank you!

Tried it. Didn't find anything interesting there except for a graph telling me what genres I am listening and many songs that are in my playlist.

Here's a video of me demoing how to use Brew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh2Ognb4PgU

It sounds like you're not interested in stats on your listening behavior. There's a section called Missed New Music that points out releases you might have missed, and there a button saying 'See stats for playlist' which lets you check missed music per playlist. If that isn't interesting either, Brew probably isn't for you

Very cool! Will spend some time with this!

I've been disenfranchised with algorithmic recommendations. It's lead me down the RNG path of music discovery.

I built Audile to simulate the old feeling of walking into someone's basement, thumbing through their vinyl collection, and finding all sorts of weird and interesting music: http://audile.app/

I miss those times too! I probably spend an hour a day on the hunt for new music, which used to be a much more social activity for me than it is now.

Is audile basically randomizing Deezer's entire library?

Yeah, Deezer uses integers for addressing their albums. This is literally Math.random() on top of their library implemented with a cloudflare function.

Wow - first Show HN I've seen in ages which I've been earnestly excited to try! Love the name as well, .fm is such a great TLD.

"Your listening habits have gotten less diverse over time. You've been listening to 95 genres over the last month, which is 9 less than your average of 104.

Your taste is set in stone. It was and still is indie rock"

I got a laugh, because this is absolutely and 100% true. Awesome job!

Thanks!!

Worth mentioning is The Echo Nests old genremap; which is also very interesting to roam around in: https://everynoise.com/

Love this!

I have to be honest, Spotify is not a source of music for me.

If it were for Soundcloud, but ultimately I'd like to discover new tracks and songs on my own. Where's the fun in machine doing it for you?

How do you discover new tracks on soundcloud?

I get the craziest recommendations from the YT algo. Some vinyl-only release a dude ripped with 687 views, 2 comments, and impossible to buy anywhere.

I would never be able to find that stuff on my own.

Xarabass is my favourite YouTuber rn, been on a French touch kick lately and a lot of The eternals /Vinyl Fever stuff has been super underground but he’s always got some new stuff.

I'm in the same boat. In my experience, fellow human beings are the best source of recommendations. I constantly get great recommendations from a few friends and family members (I have to admit, maybe I'm lucky).

This is actually what prompted me to create https://digs.fm - I wanted an easy way to see what music my friends digged lately (something like Goodreads, but for music).

The tiled layout looks nice. For the genre report, I remember spotify api only provides artist genres instead of individual tracks.

This is great! I'd love to see a deeper breakdown of genres or a listing of all the ones I've listened to.

I can look into that!

I want a music streaming service where I can only listen to a track once, then it's unavailable forever.

Snapify? Pretty bad deal for the artist making $0.004 per play . Love the idea though

It's guaranteed to be a niche app, an art project even. Thanks

Is there any option to delete my account?

There is now! Added a Delete my account button to settings.

Can I view anyone's profile without logging in?

You can! There’s 3 examples on the home page. Now that so many people joined I might see if there’s a way to highlight users with similar taste.

Sounds good, pun not indended

ah dad joke

It is too similar to last.fm.

Any similar software for Apple Music? Would love to try something like this though I don't use Spotify.

(Whoever downvoted please at least explain why you are downvoting a legitimate comment asking for a similar tool)

Cool design, good UI, stats look good. The album art is big and cluttered for my taste, I'd prefer a list view.

Don't want to get too negative, but I don't think this can seriously compete with spotify's built-in song discovery. They have tons of advantages in that respect, some moats (can only play 30s with API, integrated playlists), and some by virtue of scale (can compare with other people's listens to find new tracks).

The only way I can see this working is with features that spotify doesn't provide, like social recommendations or shared listening. Still a good showcase of your programming + design skills though!

I made a jukebox prototype for spotify a while back (http://spotifight.herokuapp.com/, click spotify authorization at the bottom), and got around the 30s limit by playing the songs over users' spotify instead.

Thanks! Your jukebox prototype looks cool as well. I like the idea of playing songs over users's Spotify instead, will explore that idea, thanks!

I think you're right re: Spotify's built-in song discovery. Brew.fm's concept as is now would be easy to copy for Spotify, they'd be crazy not to if enough people seem to find value, and I'd love it if they do.

A way to properly differentiate would probably be by serving a (slightly) different audience. I can imagine Brew.fm is a little overkill for the average Spotify user, who'd rather hit play and lean back. It'd be cool if there's room for Brew.fm long term by serving the more hardcore music fan, who's more than happy to put extra work in, in exchange to feel on top of new music, and closer to the artists.

It has some rough edges, but I'm still pretty proud of it. The first time it just worked, and people were all adding songs to the playlist at once was magical.

I could totally see Brew.fm working for hardcore discovery. People who are in the music industry or are really serious about finding new stuff. Choose who to follow, see who's released what every day. The really amazing thing would be being able to see what's new + popular, hot releases by unknown artists. Unfortunately I don't think that info is available through their API.

Are you hiring at Welcome?

Yes we are. Feel free to DM me if you'd like to chat

Show HN: Brew.fm – Let bots discover new music on Spotify for you