While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?
Discover weekly is the reason that I pay for Spotify. I'm an old guy that prefers vinyl to mp3s, misses the local record store terribly and hates radio, so modern music distribution sucks for me.
I first tried Spotify many years ago, back when playlists were quite new. At the time, I was living in the UK and a big user of last.fm but, out of curiosity, I spent an afternoon building one playlist out of the few tracks they had that I liked.
I was/am into house and techno but the tracks were not yet available on Spotify back then - but the originals which were heavily sampled sure were. So I ended up with a playlist of funk, disco, blues, hip-hop and jazz that was kinda familiar, lotta fun.
Fast-forward several years and I'm living in Australia, where last.fm is a paid service that had stagnated, so back to check out Spotify again...
It had millions more tracks.
It had learned from my playlist. Discover weekly is soooo good.
It had my attention and my credit card.
To the parent poster, I suggest you treat Spotify like a friendly muso willing to lend you her near infinite collection. I've you've ever wondered about $GENRE, go and play. I have no relationship with Spotify except as a very happy customer.
Funnily enough, Discover Weekly almost never works for me. I like the overall service Spotify provides, but the discovery features don't really cut it for me.
As an example, I usually don't really like most music that goes into the house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions. Most songs I find to be horribly repetitive and lacking in good buildup/melodies. However, there are exceptions I can enjoy very well (say the Soundtrack to Tron Legacy[1] or a few tracks from Overwerk).
But after listening to stuff like this, Spotify keeps recommending the other kind to me, which I just find tiresome.
I've got the same problems with other music directions (Tool and Rishloo vs. countless rather dull prog rock tracks, or black metal recommendations after listening to In Flames/Dark Tranquility).
The whole artist radio does the same for me. If I start it up, it's because I'm interested in more similarities than "well, it's ordered in in the same genre somewhere"...
[1]: Yes, I'm aware that has pretty much nothing to do with what Daft Punk usually do, but that's frankly the reason I like it.
Edit:
An interesting thing, come to think of it, is that Spotify never recommends classical music to me in their "Discover Weekly" list, although I do listen quite a bit to such recordings. I wonder if this is because they realized that "Classical Music" as a genre is mostly not good at all (I don't know how many people who like Vivaldi's music would also like Arvo Pärt's works as much, but I doubt that they're in different internal genres in the Spotify database).
Other explanations could also be that such recordings don't make enough "buzz" or that the attribuition to specific composers is more difficult (since the performing musician/orchestra is usually included as "artist").
Im a bit opposite in that I love much of the "house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions" (though much less dubstep these days) and Discover Weekly/Radio usually delivers some great stuff and is probably 95% of my new finds.
Im more inclined towards progressive trance/psy trance type stuff which I think aligns more with Classical music you mention (since I usually listen while I work). I love electronica remixes of Vivaldi and other classical pieces, for instance. I enjoy Tool as well, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer and have a much more difficult time discovering in that direction, but I listen to them less frequently as well. I also listen to a lot of rap, and intermittently some other types (almost anything but country).
Im always finding good new electronica of the types I like and rap, but their algorithms definitely could use some improving. I would particularly like an unlike/thumbs down feature like Pandora had and may still have. Id like that so that it a) never show me that song again, and b)could potentially be used to further tailor the results.
You can right-click on any playlist and select "Create Similar Playlist" to generate a new playlist with similar tracks.
I suspect this uses the same underlying algorithms as Discovery Weekly, except that DW uses the songs you've listened to as the basis.
Discover Weekly does suffer from a pollution problem — listen to one style of music for a while, and the entire tone of your DW playlist will change. Fortunately, the above trick works.
There's also the Release Radar [1] playlist, which seems to be an undocumented feature. It gives you new tracks by artists you follow, as well as related artists based on some mysterious metric.
DW explicitly excludes classical music and also jazz, for some reason. I think I've had Arvo Pärt come up, probably because he's a contemporary artist; same with folks like Max Richter and Jóhann Jóhannsson.
> I was/am into house and techno but the tracks were not yet available on Spotify back then
That's a very common problem - a lot of tracks are unavailable anywhere except Beatport and Juno, and even more are on vinyl-only releases.
I have actually subscribed to Apple Music just a few hours ago, after spending couple of hours trying to give Spotify money from a non-supported country with no avail. And, of course, the music selection is... limited, for a lack of a better word.
It used to be great for me for about 1/2 a year, now it's not I hardly find anything new I like in the mix.
I allways skipped most of the songs, but if it manages to give me 1-2 new tracks I like and never heard before this is a big big win for me.
Back when pirate music blogs where still popular I used to skip through tracks of about 70 different artists a day, download 5 albums of these, and than keep maybe 2 albums a week, buying it when I returned to them more often too. Spotify was really a huge leap forward, being able to skip thorugh albums legally and "aquiring" as many as I whish.
I've noticed they added "daily mixes", these are on the Home tab, these are playlist made up of songs within your collection, grouped by genre, then they add new songs, based on that, that they anticipate you will like.
Also I noticed if you're listening to a playlist when it ends it will automatically start a Radio based on the songs within that playlist.
> Also I noticed if you're listening to a playlist when it ends it will automatically start a Radio based on the songs within that playlist.
My phone has started doing that recently, which has left me puzzled a few times. I like listening to music at work, and while I'm concentrating on something, I don't really realize the playlist has run out until I get a track that really makes me wonder how I ended up listening to it.
I subscribe to Apple Music and have the same experience there. Their personalized recommendations are almost exclusively albums I've recently listened to.
