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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

I was a Spotify subscriber for about a decade (I was successfully hooked by their discounted college student rates), but I switched back to my own music curation recently: I noticed that Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs, most of which I didn't even like. They would also frequently lack small artists or independent labels, so I ended up having two media libraries anyways.

I switched over to Navidrome[1] as a self-hosted solution about a year ago, and I've been extremely happy with it (especially since it exposes a Subsonic-compatible API that most clients know how to use). The only thing I really miss is the mobile client experience: Spotify handled periodic disconnects (like on public transit) very gracefully, while no Subsonic clients that I've tried do so nearly as well.

[1]: https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome

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> I noticed that Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs

I’ve noticed Apple Music doing this too. It used to not do it: discovered some wonderful music by saying “Play some music” and it would suggest new songs

Now, same small set of songs. Is there a way to force it to change? Like a different prompt

Just a theory, but I bet they (and Spotify) are sticking to songs that cost them less per play, when you get stuck on a group like this

There is no song that costs more. Labels are paid by the amount of streams they get in total. The distribution of money is made by the labels.

I wonder if the streaming services considered favoring longer songs to save on per stream fees.

Doesn't everyone just say "Play me one of the songs that someone else on the same CDN edge node recently listened to"? :)

It wouldn't save fees, because what Spotify does is allocate a percentage of their income to pay artists, and that's it. So whichever way this income is allocated, they are paying the same amount of money anyway.

clear the cache on the mobile client, Spotify may be caching songs locally to save on bandwidth.

I bought a car and started using XM now. Most of our Spotify usage was choosing a popular playlist and letting it run rather than curating our own playlists or playing a particular song that we wanted to hear. For this type of listening, a radio like experience is actually better, and XM radio does a better job at variety and rotation than Clear Channel, which is optimized for ads and always running the biggest hits. It surprised me because I had thought XM was a dead product.

I've heard this from other people, including my parents! Sirius XM seemingly does a good job of curating in a way that audiences appreciate.

I only have ever had XM when it came with the car for a year intro period. Seriously the best "I just want tunes" radio!

I feel like pointing out that radio has a lot to add to this conversation.

Not just for pop, but for discovery of new music.

The quality varies regionally of course, so YMMV. But with internet access being ubiquitous, the choice of stations has never been wider.

This looks cool and I like the idea of going back to having my own collection, but what are you doing for discovery now? I'm really tired of the same ~150 songs spotify really thinks that I like.

I have three main sources of discovery now:

1. Last.fm: I've been scrobbling for years, and Last.fm is weirdly good about giving me recommendations I enjoy. I'd say ~80% of its "personalized homepage" recommendations hit the mark for me; I like that most are linked to YouTube so I can quickly confirm whether they're a good fit.

2. Bandcamp: I try to buy most my music via Bandcamp, and I use artists that I like to discover similar music/bands that they like. Subjectively this feels a little less fruitful than Last.fm, but it's definitely more expansive.

3. Social recommendations: I run a server that multiple friends use and upload to, and they tell me when they've added something new that they think I'll like. I also listen to an Internet radio stream run by friends, and I go to a lot of local shows.

By ratio, I think I probably get 50% of my new music through Last.fm, and then 25% each through Bandcamp and my social sphere.

Don't take this in the wrong way, but how do you find last.fm usable anymore? Do you run noscript on it? Do you pay for it? I haven't been able to go there in like 5 years since they injected a billion ads and made your personal scrobble history practically unusable (you have to pay to search it????).

This thread has prompted me to export my history to csv since that's the only way I track what I listen to and I struggle a lot to remember the names of albums I like so I really want to be able to group & sort by playcount, and I miss the old last.fm so very, very, very much. But I absolutely will not pay for a site that ate my data for years and now holds it hostage (especially when I myself am the product).

No offense taken! I use uBlock and whatever else I have in my browser, plus I block a lot of things at the DNS level. So far that's left it moderately usable; the only part I really interact with is the index page, though, and occasionally checking my own profile to make sure I'm still scrobbling.

I love the idea of sharing a backend music server. I should give that a try!

Thanks for the idea.

Just wanted to chime in and recommend Rate Your Music [1] as well. Really great way to dive into different genres and artists.

[1]: https://rateyourmusic.com/

RateYourMusic is a great site. It's also an infinite rabbithole to waste endless amounts of time. By the way, did you know it has a film section too?

It depends what music you like, but at the end of the year every year, a lot of people with very different tastes post their favorite of the previous years $yourVerySpecificFavoriteGenre.

For me, this is video game music. My absolute favorite blog for this is "Press A," [0] which is hosted on a broader music blog called "A Closer Listen," but in addition to their post, I also simply do a search of "best video game music of $previousYear" every January and typically find about 20-30 different recommendations, which I sample on youtube and then get what I want of that. This past year seems to have been particularly stunning, so far I've listened to Kena: Bridge of Spirits, TUNIC, Elden Ring, and Sable, all of them utterly fantastic (Elden Ring actually being the weakest of the list). Pretty sure Kena will prove to be my favorite of the year, but I think it'll take me months to get through everything, simply because I haven't wanted to move on from anything yet.

Some previous lesser-known favorites include Sayonara Wild Hearts, Stellaris, and Spiritfarer.

[0] https://acloserlisten.com/2022/12/12/press-a-2022-the-years-...

Fun fact: SEO spam and AI-driven search seems to have made "Press A" a completely un-googleable term at this point. Seems to correct me to Wordpress no matter what I do, even using quotes, and then ignores A as a glue word.

It occurs to me that finding this blog would be a good test for a search engine.

I searched *Press A* in Kagi and it shows that website at the top for me

https://wtf.roflcopter.fr/pics/o4jKTW7y/C6N4W6W5.png

Wow thank you sir for introducing me to these Jems. See no algorithm will come close to understanding such intricate cultural details.

No problem, I was hoping someone would share my love of semi-obscure or very obscure video game music! As a bonus, check out the Songs of Supergiant Games 10th Anniversary Orchestral Collection (NOT the original soundtracks, this is much higher quality) :)

Were you using Discover Weekly or similar? I've found Spotify helped me create a massive list of songs I really liked. My liked list is up over 2,000 and Discover Weekly will usually unearth another 10+ great options without fail each week, and similar with song or artist radio.

Wonder if it's preferred genres or something that happens with a certain playlist size?

(One of my gripes is that the shuffle on long lists isn't very good, but I solved that by splitting my main list into a few sub-playlists and then using shuffle on those.)

My discover weekly used to be great, but at some point it broke and started suggesting me finnish, dutch and german music. Despite me always skipping them in the discover weekly.

same here. i had much better results years ago but recently i think ive been getting someone elses discover weekly by mistake because there is hardly anything on it that i like

I often favour music without lyrics because it's less distracting in an office environment, so music by international artists doesn't bother me at all - might even be preferable. More interesting for my kids to hear international influences if we're listening in the car too.

I just checked my Discover Weekly for this week to see if maybe it had gone downhill, and fav'ed about 20+ out of 30. I think it must just work very well for the styles I like.

Weird. I usually call it "Discover Weakly" or "Discover Meekly" because it's usually about every 3rd week that I find a new artist.

I like all sorts of Americana but Spotify loves to feed me blues. I'm not all that in to "blues".

Funny thing, I did the same thing (used Jellyfin for several years, then Navidrome for probably a year) and now moved back to Spotify. I think the discovery of music in self-hosted apps is worse. I like to listen albums mostly but I always happened to listen to the same handful of albums, only because those were the first on my mind. I think Navidrome's smart playlists have potential though. Did you come up with a good way to rotate the music?

I am fond of setting my "album" tab in Sonixd/Finamp to "random" sort. I just refresh or scroll until I see something interesting.

I also use last.fm (still) for recommendations. I've been scrobbling there for over a decade and I still get decent recommendations. Add in recommendations from friends and I far prefer the experience to algorithmic discovery.

If Spotify invested a bit in client UI improvements like making album listening easier (they push playlists far too much for my liking) and fixing the buried "offline" and "private listening" switches, I could be tempted back. Maybe.

I've never used streaming services and likely never will for the reasons often raised in these threads.

I've gone completely digital in my collection and store this as named and tagged files in a folder, backed up in the usual way.

I don't listen to the collection directly, I use the Mixx dj software to create "mixtape" files which are what I play on a phone or at home. I name the mix files by date and genre and just copy a bunch around as needed. Sometimes it's just a whole album played through, sometimes I actually giving mixing tracks a go where appropriate. It's fun, they work offline, but it takes a bunch of time. I consider it a hobby, but it's generally time spent listening rather than noodling with software so there's that.

When I was a kid I used to make the mixtapes recording onto actual tape from the radio. It's basically th same.

"Spotify would consistently "rabbithole" me into the same ~150 songs, most of which I didn't even like."

They do that because their fake top/featured/popular now playlists are crafted by major record labels and other influential people/companies in the music industry. Those 150 songs are what they wanna push right now and what are at least remotely close to your taste. The trick is to find custom and good quality playlists made by others.

I listen to a lot of thrash metal and I just found "New thrash 2022+ only" playlist (or something like that) and it's full of awesome small never-heard bands that have only 50-5000 listeners per month. I would have never discovered any of them if I just followed the algorithm.

What I've found is that the trick with Spotify is to listen to the user-curated playlists, not the Spotify-created playlists. I've discovered a lot more music, and a wider variety of music, that way.

are you me?

I've been using my navidrome instance for the past 6 months (on those free oracle machines), and I can't be more happy about it, specially with android app thing. Seedbox provides fresh stream heh of new music I'm actually interestd on

what do people mean when they say spotify rabbitholes them? My new music from spotify is either from manually clicking links of related artists to artists I like, or clicking stuff from the release radar of new content released every week. Where are you getting these stale recs?

This is just speculation on my part, but I've wondered if it's because of listening patterns: I tend to listen to entire albums at once and did most of my discovery on Spotify by starting "radios" from songs or albums. Spotify would then rabbithole me on those even when refreshed; they'd slowly converge on the same set of songs, unless I moved to a completely different genre (and even then I'd sometimes end up with playlists with all kinds of discordant stuff mashed together).

I got fed up when I looked up while working and realized that I had listened to Circles by Dag Nasty[1] like 8 times in a single day. I used to like that song, but now I can't listen to it anymore!

I've switched to Last.fm, Bandcamp, and my friends (bless them) for discovery.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyx4JeyMJE0

Discover, artist radio, auto-playlists after playing a single song, etc. Pretty much everything in the app is a terrible recommendation.

I find it works brilliantly for me and always find new stuff. What styles do you favour? FWIW, I started my Spotify era with things like Chemical Brothers, RJD2, etc but then have a lot of very different genre mixed in besides that (anything from black metal to pop). I'm always surprised when others have a bad experience with Spotify as a discovery tool.

I like to find a new genera of music and if I like the song I will choose the radio option. Spotify says "Get a collection of songs based on any artist, album, playlist, or song, with Spotify Radio." but in my experience the radio playlist is not (only) based on the song I'm playing because it also mixes in a bunch of recently played songs that are normally unrelated to the song genera I'm listening to.

That's the thing about Spotify's (and other music streaming services) recommendation engines: they're terrible DJs.

It puts completely unrelated songs together in the same mix, be it because of different genre, mood, energy. Only human-curated playlists and albums are good to play-and-forget; but at that point why do I need Spotify at all?

I pay Youtube begrudgingly to avoid ads, I might as well use their music service which has the exact same problem, rather than paying Spotify on top.

Where's the music coming from? Do you own the music files or are you simply replacing legal music with just not paying for it?

This was asked and answered in multiple other subthreads.

Hype Machine is also still great for discovery.

Where do you get the music?

I buy a lot of music on Bandcamp and at shows. Other stuff (older stuff) I buy at thrift and music stores (there are many where I live). I also started out with a large library due to CDs that were handed down to me.

Soulseek is good if you wish to sail the seas, Bandcamp for indie musicians getting paid fairly.

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