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Comment by DIVx0 | Hacker News Reader

I'd pay $20/month or more for a service that:

* had high quality streams

* had gigantic library

* _biggest of all_ cracked the 'discovery' nut.

I listen to music all day, I don't like to listen to the same tracks more than a few times so I have a hard time keeping my queue full.

I'm a Spotify subscriber so I'll find an artist I think is interesting, play their whole discography and then start digging into 'related artists' to find new stuff.

This is a bit of a drag and is hit or miss. I don't necessarily want to find related music, but music that I might like. Spotify's radio feature is just about useless. Voting one way or the other will skew it to play pretty much _only_ the thumbs up'ed artist or avoid a genre entirely if you thumbs down a particular track.

I still think there is a killer music service waiting to be born. I don't think Tidal will be it.

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I like Spotify's discovery. I subscribe to a lot of playlists that are constantly updated where I can get a lot of new artists from. Never used the radio, I just go to their playlists and find Americana or Alternative or whatever I'm looking for.

I've tried many of their playlists. I've found some that are very good and was thrilled to find them, however the content was easy to exhaust and I ended up picking apart those playlists for new artists. Back to square 1 if you will.

I know it sounds like whining, but I really think the 'killer app' of music will be something that can effortlessly pick out the unknown gems from the ocean of new music. I'm continually surprised about the quality of new music but I don't like to have to dig around for it my self.

The key for me was to find interesting people to follow on Spotify. There are a lot of folks who seem to do music discovery as a full-time gig. Find/follow enough of those people and your hunger will be satiated.

Though, I wish there were better ways to discover people to follow, it's fairly manual now and much of it goes on outside of Spotify.

I can't help but feel that you're doing it wrong?

Spotify playlists are beautiful because you subscribe to it. The playlists are updated and curated continuously. This is true of the Spotify-published playlists and those of musicians, celebrities, etc.

Sure, i know what you're saying. The playlists I do subscribe to are indeed updated continuously. However updates are relatively minor. A few songs from artists already on the list, maybe one or two totally new-to-me artists every other week. I'm not saying it's nothing but I want more.

Spotify boasts a gigantic library, I cant imagine I've heard everything good (objectively) already. There has to be thousands of hours of material that I simply can't find that I'd otherwise love to hear.

Maybe I'm just subscribed to the wrong ones, but the Spotify playlists I'm subscribed to don't update that often, and they aren't that long. If I listen for hours a day, there's no way the Spotify playlists will keep up with providing new music. Pandora is better in that respect but worse in almost all others, unfortunately.

Tidal is close. They offer Flac lossless streaming.

What do you think of Pandora's radio stations?

It has been a couple years since I've given Pandora a fair try. I was a paid subscriber for a while but I ended up leaving the service because I thought their radio stations and library were too shallow. I'd request a station for an artist only to find it was not available or when available they'd only play a narrow spectrum of related songs.

Also their radio stations suffered the same problem as Spotify does. Trying to tune the station by giving feedback on dis/likes only caused the station to focus in.

I could give them a try again if they've expanded their selections.

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