Recommendations have always been at the heart of the Spotify experience. Friends and family share their favorite music, podcasts, audiobooks, and more from Spotify millions of times each month. That’s because word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways for people to discover their next favorite track. Spotify users have told us they...
I’ve been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.
But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.
So you mean it’s convenient. That’s a valid reason. Evil shit aside, that’s literally why music streaming exploded the way it did.
Unfortunately, the evil shit is pushing me away. Why can’t we just have a regular music streaming service that doesn’t inevitably suffer from feature creep and enshittification? Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?
I don’t trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I’ll never hear again.
I do like bandcamp’s “people who bought this also bought this” recommendations, though.
Spotify’s payment model also adds a ton of bias to their suggestions. Artists need to hit a threshold number of listens a month to get paid at all, so Spotify ends up just suggesting music from artists they are already paying, rather than letting other folks hit that threshold. It’s also why the “shuffle” feature never actually shuffles a whole playlist before starting to repeat songs. If you really pay attention the songs that get repeated by the shuffle algorithm are the ones from bigger artists to try and keep smaller groups from getting paid at all.
I’ve been telling people for years to buy 1-2 albums a month, and then after a couple years you have a sizable library. Spotify is renting.
But spotify is easy and fast, and some people think they listen to way more music than they do. I wonder how many people are paying spotify $10/month to listen to the same 4 albums for years.
So you mean it’s convenient. That’s a valid reason. Evil shit aside, that’s literally why music streaming exploded the way it did.
Unfortunately, the evil shit is pushing me away. Why can’t we just have a regular music streaming service that doesn’t inevitably suffer from feature creep and enshittification? Why does everything have to constantly increase profits?
My wife is one of those people and I beg her over and over to just let me host her music.
There’s something to be said for curated “auto” playlists, both for background and discovering stuff.
That being said, Pandora is waaaay better at this. So are free broadcasts/channels like Radio Paradise.
I don’t trust spotify not to fill those playlists with AI slop, now. I also personally prefer to go deeper on a band, rather than thoughtlessly drift through a bunch of stuff I’ll never hear again.
I do like bandcamp’s “people who bought this also bought this” recommendations, though.
Spotify’s payment model also adds a ton of bias to their suggestions. Artists need to hit a threshold number of listens a month to get paid at all, so Spotify ends up just suggesting music from artists they are already paying, rather than letting other folks hit that threshold. It’s also why the “shuffle” feature never actually shuffles a whole playlist before starting to repeat songs. If you really pay attention the songs that get repeated by the shuffle algorithm are the ones from bigger artists to try and keep smaller groups from getting paid at all.