When I tried spotify a few years ago, it was exactly this aspect that totally failed my expectations.
I wanted a service like Spotify as a replacement for genre radio. I wanted something that somehow figures out my tastes, and generates a mix for me.
In my experience, this totally fails unless you happen to like the most commercial pop music available.
Whenever I tried to coax it to play some alternative and undergroundy music, it ended up playing
the most commercial nonsense after 2 or 3 tracks.
I haven't tried a single streaming service since, because I dont feel I want to be poisoned by the most empty and stupid music in existance.
I suspect you didn’t use it for long enough for it to develop a good profile of your tastes. I’ve been using it for 5 years and the recommendations are my favourite feature, and on the whole very impressive.
I’d consider myself into quite underground music (electronic/techno, nothing mainstream or commercial at all, I’d wager even most people who consider themselves into electronic music wouldn’t have heard of a lot of the artists I listen to) and it usually gets it pretty right, sometimes amazingly so.
I’ve been introduced to some of my favourite music by Spotify, and the interface makes exploring related artists etc. really easy. Ideally I’d like better cataloguing (e.g. tagging) and metadata (e.g. more emphasis on labels) but I know I’m a niche user and I can work around these limitations.
My tips if you try it again would be:
- if it recommends something you don’t like, press thumbs down (if available) and skip - they use skipping as a signal you don’t like something
- build up a collection of music you do like, using the save button and/or playlists
- check out the feature which plays related music after you’ve finished listening to a track or album - this often finds the most interesting music for me
- check out the “related songs” area under any playlists you’ve created. If you have focussed playlists (e.g. I have ones for different subgenres), this can help you discover some great stuff.
I’d actually say the stuff Spotify plays after an album/song is the best part of their recommendations for me. The daily mixes it generates aren’t bad. Release Radar and Discover Weekly can be a bit hit or miss, sometimes for example it will recommend overly commercial stuff for my tastes, but it’s always worth scanning through (and I do thumbs down the really off recommendations).
It’s not perfect of course, for example sometimes I find it gets “stuck” in a small subset of artists after a while, but combined with other sources and some input to guide, Spotify is the best service I’ve found for discovering music, and is way above for example YouTube suggestions
I had this problem with Apple Music and Pandora, but Spotify worked for me. I had to skip a lot of stuff in the beginning, but it got way better than any other service I've used. I assume skipping is just training the AI on what you don't like (and like) so it takes some time.
