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.
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.
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).
Thanks for the idea.
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.)
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.
I like all sorts of Americana but Spotify loves to feed me blues. I'm not all that in to "blues".
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-...
It occurs to me that finding this blog would be a good test for a search engine.