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My favorite part of Spotify is the "Related Artists" link. I can click on it and see that Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis, Pink Floyd, and Queens of the Stone Age are somehow related to Led Zeppelin. This starts me on a very cool journey to discover music I might not have heard.

It is like Wikipedia - click on an artist, then a related artist, then an artist related to that ... Great for road trips and long coding sessions. I can get a sampling of a little bit of music history without having to go to a record store and search through bins of records. Don't get me wrong - the record store was great, but this is better.

last.fm has provided a related artist feature for longer than spotify has existed!

The last.fm spotify app also has a "recommended" tab, which has given me some pretty good recommendations.

Just don't try the option they call radio. It's awful.

If you use "Follow" on sufficient amount of artists, and Favorite some songs, the "Discover" option gives you some decent selection of more of what you might like (plus the alerts will tell you every time something new from one of your followed artists appears).

After year with Spotify, I can't imagine going back to the model of buying one album/song at a time now.

The way you matured with your favorite artists, which is the way I did too, is not the only way. My children, now 13 and 16, first experienced Pink Floyd by finding Dark Side of the Moon in my collection. They liked it and proceeded to listen to the entire catalog digesting the whole thing in about 4 weeks time.

Three years later they still love Pink Floyd and have the same appreciation for music that I have. Now they will have access to Led Zepplin and can experience it the same way they did with Pink Floyd.

Yeah, I remember those times, and I hated them, because sometimes you got a shitty album and you were stuck with it. You go to the record store and there are these long ass shelves just full of stuff that may be good or may be shitty and you're never gonna know.

Growing up in the mid/late 90's (HS class of '99) and without high-speed service, I think I had an interesting hybrid experience. Napster wasn't around yet, but you could still get music from other sources like various FTP sites that you could discover or IRC channels.

Using dial-up services for whole albums was time consuming but downloading individual songs wasn't too bad. So I could download one or two songs from an artist I wasn't that familiar with and if I liked the songs, I might go to the store, or CDNow :), to buy a CD.

So you could access a lot of music to sample but still only ended up with a few albums to actually listen to.

I recall growing up listening to certain albums countless times. I'm not sure if I'd still do that today. Some songs require a few listens before they really click with you, and services like Spotify don't have the limits that the old models did.

While it may be nice nostalgia to look back at how I listened to and acquired music growing up, if you could have given 16 year-old me today's Spotify, I would have taken it in a heartbeat.

That applies to enjoying music that is released contemporarily vs. discovering music after the fact, what ever the medium. Anyone being introduced to Led Zeppelin in 1976 on the purest vinyl had just as much (or little) opportunity to grow with the music as someone introduced to them on Spotify in 2013.

That said, I would really like for Spotify to get their discographies cleaned up. A huge number of albums are just plainly mis-tagged with the publication year, and especially for older music you have to scroll through dozens of "Best of", "The original", "The definitive" etc. as well as re-publications "Re-masted", "Legacy edition" etc. to get to the original albums. This makes it difficult to try to explore an artist work in the original arrangement. Also, the knock-off albums need to disappear. I never, ever, ever want to hear even a single song by "The Rock Masters" or anything with "Made famous by" in the title.

Eh... it was also a time when I had to listen to the radio. The radio! The same 50 crappy songs in rotation. It reached its nadir in the 90s-2000s with Clear Channel and the end of DJs and only with Internet radio and the rise of really good public radio stations did it recover.

So I'll take the trade. I can still listen to Led Zeppelin 50 times (not that I'd want to), but I can also listen to a myriad of artists, styles and mood that I would never have been exposed to on my radio.

What you describe is a music world in which your entire music vocabulary was controlled by large labels.

What kids have now isn't sitting around waiting for Atlantic or Columbia to grace their record store with the next big thing to listen to. Instead, they have a world where they can dig through an immense, mind-bendingly vast catalog of music and unearth their own hidden gems.

The death of physical media means one rarely watches the same film more than once or listens to the whole album. Something is definitely lost. Especially with music, where an album can take a couple listens to really like it. That said, I'm not sure how you fix it. And most people I know listen to iTunes radio or Pandora anyway.

By that logic someone who was born in 1970, and is 43 now, can never appreciate Led Zeppelin. There weren't born when Whole Lotta Love came out, and were 5 when Kashmir came out. They never grew with the artist. By your logic, we should throw out all "old" music.

No need to be captious, snarky, or just plain obnoxious. If you don't agree, fine - move on or comment in a polite way. Don't over-analyze with a lot of biased assumptions.

Yes but remember the time you saved up and bought an album only to realize there is only one good song on it. I like the option to listen to the songs I like.

Sounds like Stockholm syndrome for technologically lacking times :P

If you appreciate music at all, you will appreciate it whether you can get it instantly or wait weeks for it, the latter being an inconvenience, though one filled with anticipation, stress, and excitement.

Spotify is the best thing to happen to music since forever!

I'm not sure that's always true. Some of my favourite artists are ones that I really didn't get when I first heard them.

I remember being away from home for a few days in the late 80s and, having got bored with the few tapes I could carry with me I bought Husker Du's Zen Arcade, as I'd read a review of an album I liked that made reference to that one. On the first listen, I thought it was an absolute chaotic racket.

But having bought it, and not having much else to listen to, I played it through a few times and by the end of my trip I'd bought their next two albums. I'm pretty sure that had I had Spotify back then, I would have managed at most a couple of tracks before dismissing the album out of hand, trying something else and never listening to it again.

Don't get me wrong - instant access to most of the world's music is great. But unless you've got better willpower than I have, that access could easily result in you missing out on some of those harder to get into artists.

I had the exact same experience with a few albums when I was growing up. Some of my favorite albums were unappealing to me on first listen.

Now I just listen to whatever really accessible pop music bubbles up through the social ecosystem. It's kind of sad.

>If you appreciate music at all, you will appreciate it whether you can get it instantly or wait weeks for it, the latter being an inconvenience, though one filled with anticipation, stress, and excitement

Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Enjoyment of music is very dependent on context in most circumstances.

An easy example is metal drumming -- not necessarily impressive based on sound alone, but extremely impressive once you realize the physicality it requires.

The same goes for the way in which the user hears the music. Track 6 out of 10 on a physical CD or spotify CD may not get noticed as much as it would if it were track 1 on side B of a vinyl

My kids are growing up on classical music. It helps accelerate this process.