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Comment by vlaaad | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated, but I just can't stop myself from saying that I absolutely hate Spotify even though I'm a paying customer. Fuck you Spotify. You were supposed to be a convenient way to discover and listen to music. Now you are only convenient for listening to music, and absolutely terrible for any recommendations. This is sad really. Spotify had good recommendations. It's absolutely in a position where it can provide good recommendations — it has both a vast music library and a vast amount of data on user preferences. And it chooses to push procedural/ai-generated slop instead to earn more money. I thought that maybe buying $SPOT stock will make me more at peace with its greed, but it didn't work. Spotify fucking deserves to crash and burn because it sees paying customers as idiots who might not notice they are fed garbage. Fuck you Spotify, fuck you.

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I always find these takes curious because they could not be further from my experience. I'm still discovering tons of good music. Perhaps it's specific to genres, but I haven't encountered any generated junk tracks.

Really? How about asking google to "play bloomberg news on spotify" next time. Then see if you can remove the resulting chaos from your history so it won't start feeding you slop.

Since relatively recently I'm getting AI music in my automatic radio. They look/sound like soulless facsimiles of the real thing.

It depends on the algorithm which often preferences "similarity" (for whatever definition of similarity is).

This year I got into some pretty generic blues/rock when driving and really liked one of the songs in some playlist/radio [1]. Little did I know that the song was AI. So when I started a radio based on that song, the resulting radio was 99% AI though I didn't even realise that until after a second/third listen through.

So you can really fall through the rabbit hole.

[1] He Talked A Big Game, Played A Small Tune by Dumpster Grooves. A better song than most human slop that sells stadiums. https://youtu.be/L3Uyfnp-jag?si=mPBgJ_qO2AF80FGP

Wow, that channel is misrepresenting its songs as lost records. Pure cancer.

Yup.

There's also obvious care and human creation there as well.

They have several "artists". Bertha Mae Lightning gets the better lyrics and artangements. Virgil Dillard gets simpler tunes and the occasional weird grammar/lyrics. And so on.

I even saved that radio as a playlist to show people: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/072Wp3cFsziKBQlnglF5XM?si=... It has both obvious AI ("artist" by the name of promptgenix) and not-so-obvious (Enlly Blue, Dumpster Grooves).

The weird/sad/funny/ironic part? Many of those songs are still better than whatever Taylor Swift and a lot of other artists produce.

When they launched Discover Weekly thing, I used to add at least 1 track from it to my library - it was insanely good. Now it's all junk - not even close to what I listen to.

They also removed a lot of discovery features - Playlist Radio - for example. And they still do have some version of it on the backend, but you have to go through some weird mechanisms to trigger it - like play the last song in playlist, wait till it ends (or rewind) and you get the playlist radio. But it's also a crippled version of it - prefers playing the exact same popular songs for some reason.

Then they released this DJ thing, which is laughably bad. No Spotify, I don't want someone talking to me with useless information in between songs. Who though that was a good idea? Who actually uses that?

There hasn't been a change in Spotify in last 7 years or so that wasn't negative.

YouTube Music works pretty well for me. One great feature is that it includes not just a commercial music streaming catalog, but all user uploads of music on YouTube.

and you can upload 100,000 of your own tracks to the service for your private use as well. It is a great service considering I am getting it as a side effect of youtube premium. Single handedly the last subscription I would cancel.

I had to chuck Youtube Music away when it was polluting my youtube playlists with stuff I was liking on youtube music. Me as a video viewer and me as a music listener are two completely different people.

This is more frequent than you would assume. I’ve neither subscribed to Apple Music nor Spotify for this exact reason: I’m a millenial who would like to discover music.

Another extremely annoying effect is, being 40+, they only suggest music for my age. In “New” and “Trending”, I see Muse and Coldplay! I should make myself a fake ID just to discover new music, but that gets creepy very fast.

Why do you want a megacorp to tell you what to listen to!?? There are a million ways to do discovery where some enshitified corp isn’t incentivized to push something at you.

I think perhaps the assumption of the OP (I know mine was in the early days) was that "discovery" on Spotify would involve human tastemakers and some kind of dynamic aggregation of peer tastes that could lead to organic discovery of new music, no matter how niche or obscure.

As opposed to what it has now devolved into: the most basic of similarity matching always showing you the same few hundred songs, combined with increasingly numerous paid placements.

Why haven't you unsubscribed then?

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