I wish other music apps could license their recommendation system. Still nothing seems to come close.
Contrast Chosic (which is free) - its recommendations are configurable and usually hit the mark much better: https://www.chosic.com/playlist-generator/
(two songs in widly distant genres/production styles can still be very similar on rythm, tonality, chords, tension, progression, structure, etc.)
It felt less like a music genome project and more like this typical nonsense streaming platforms do, "people who listen to song A, also tend to listen to song B".
The trouble was, despite our diligent training and curation of many Pandora stations, any station remotely related to rock would eventually converge on Morrissey. It got so bad that whenever a Morrissey song would play you could hear shouts of protest from across the warehouse and it would be immediately downvoted with extreme prejudice.
Nevertheless it would keep feeding us Morrissey so the joke among us became “All stations lead to Morrissey”.
To be very fair, there's nothing plain whatsoever about Spotify's recommendations. Not only do they have the largest corpus of training data, their models are hard to beat.
What's worse is that they're not even obscure albums. Like, if I was ever going to get into the Eagles I would have already done so, I don't need to "discover" them.
Another trick I heard was taught in schools was "don't tickle me with a feather and then hit me with a brick."