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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

Well, that sucks! I've discovered so many awesome bands and great songs over the years from Last.fm's streaming service, including a lot of underground stuff I wouldn't expect a site like that to have. I always wondered how they managed to keep the doors open without a paid service. Guess they cant =/.

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Try grooveshark, they also "similar artists". It's less precise - it shows artists which are quite different (but I can imagine people listening to them both) but that may be an advantage you get a wider set of bands

This is an interesting problem. I want to discover new music, but not at random. However, being offered a whole lot of "sounds just like" music tends to reinforce a local maxima (so to speak).

What I want are people with taste kinda-sorta like mine to tell me, Hey check this is out, and pass me something not like everything else I listen to, yet somehow in the realm of stuff I might probably like.

I had a similar problem and Grooveshark helped me (But they now removed that feature, I've complained but they don't care.)

My hack was to search for playlists containing a song I liked. So I would find a "rock" playlist with lots of songs I knew but a couple very good ones I didn't.

As a startup idea, I was thinking of a "Github for playlist". Basically, abstracting the different "streaming" services and really focus on the quality of the playlist.

Anyone could fork your playlist, add a few songs, and do a "pull request". The cool thing is how I could be subscribed to your playlist and since I trust your taste, I would get notifications when you add or accept new songs.

I see some kind of hierarchy where there could be "stable" playlist that are updated conservatively but also other "unstable" playlists where it changes often so you can discover more song.

That would definitely be a service I would use by following other good playlists but also curating mine and welcoming suggestions from friends.

Basically, abstracting the different "streaming" services and really focus on the quality of the playlist.

bop.fm of YC S13 is doing exactly that. Their UI is way too clunky for me to think about using it yet, but the idea is solid

Hey, I've just tried it, that's great. As you said, UI is very clunky but I managed to explore and listen to new songs based on songs I already liked thanks to the playlist of other users.

Hey, Grooveshark dev here...neither I or a couple other devs I just asked can think of a feature that we removed related to radio. Can you give some clarification?

Hey, I'm not sure what you mean by the radio.

But all I want is to view playlists containing a song I like.

So, let's say I search for "One Metallica". I'd like a button "Playlists containing this song" that would let me browse playlists of everyone who has "One of Metallica" in it.

And, if I may suggest a new functionality, what would be even better is to find playlists containing multiple songs.. So, "Please show me some playlists containing the song One Metallica and Pull Me Under of Dream Theater". I'm confident that these playlists will contain songs I like.

Personally I preferred that way to explore new songs instead of the radio thing.

Oh I see what you're saying now...to my knowledge we never had a feature like that, unfortunately I think it would be fairly expensive to implement the way our data is structured right now (it's optimized for looking up playlist -> songs not the other way around), but I can definitely see the appeal of a feature like that. I could see us precomputing a list of playlists to check out per song and applying some quality metrics to them...precomputing would preclude us from being able to do looking up playlists by multiple songs. Anyway I will mention it to my boss, can't make any promises of course.

Talking about the way Grooveshark structure their data could be an interesting topic.

I would be surprised to test how much time it would take to find some playlists containing a song even with a trivial algorithm. The reason I'm saying that is that it would be very fast for popular songs to find a few playlists (We don't need 1000 results, just a few is great for our case). And for the less known songs, I'm happy to wait for quality playlists! ;)

I have a similar problem with Spotify: it often happens that I like a certain song by a certain artist, but that song is usually unlike the rest of the album. Therefore, recommendations always fall in "you like this album/artist, this one is similar", which is clearly not what I want.

In theory Pandora can solve that problem, but for reasons I don't know even their list-similar-songs-service is blocked outside the US (it used to be that you could use that one alone in a separate page, but then they blocked it).

Have you tried Slacker? You can adjust artist/album/song stations[1], there are staff-curated stations, and you can filter stations by mood. Three user tiers ranging from free to $10 monthly.

They won my affection when they made a station devoted to the music of Breaking Bad to celebrate the start of the final season.

[1] http://imgur.com/hFap7MM

That's why I really liked direct connect, I would spend days going through people's share lists even after I downloaded the album I originally wanted, because they had so much more cool stuff

Hmm, Grooveshark seems blocked here (Denmark). Is it blocked everywhere outside the U.S., or specifically here?

When I go, I get a message saying: Som følge af høje driftsomkostninger, har amerikansk baserede Grooveshark stoppet [blokeret for] adgang fra Danmark. Vi vil savne dig! Du er velkommen til at skrive til os. Vi kommer tilbage!

Roughly: Due to high operating expenses, the American-based Grooveshark has stopped [blocked] access from Denmark. We will miss you! You are welcome to write to us. We'll be back!

Grooveshark is available in every country other than Germany and Denmark.

I know rdio works in denmark, though they are currently in the process of switching their music recommendation engine from echo nest. The UI is also beautiful

Forgot about them, thanks for the tip.

They did have a paid service, I was a paying subscriber for a few years. But they never managed to figuring out licensing for play-on-demand, and they were late to market with mobile apps. Once Rdio came to Australia I started paying 4x as much as I paid Last.FM, and dropped my Last.FM subscription.

They've had a paid service for quite a while, but apparently $3/month + ads just isn't enough.

You can still get a playlist of recommended music on the web at www.last.fm/listen/user/USERNAME/recommended

It uses embedded YouTube videos, but it's nice to use it on some occasions.

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