[patrick_haply]

What I often find is that artists will have have everything on Spotify except their latest album, at least for a few months. Fair enough, they want people to buy their albums; it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

[ProblemFactory]

> it's just one area where I find Spotify consistently incomplete.

At first (especially some years ago when the catalogue was much smaller) this used to annoy me. But Spotify has made a lot of progress in side-stepping the issue.

The Discover Weekly playlist of recommended music in particular was a great invention. It doesn't matter that much if artist X's latest album is not on Spotify, as long as they can find some other music that satisfies what people are looking for. Some techno with no vocals to code to, something chill in the evenings, like a personally curated radio, not a perfect on-demand player.

Focusing more on recommending music instead of having people search for music means that they get away with missing some artists - and they can take the cost of licensing deals into account when picking the recommended songs.

[piotrkubisa]

Personally, I fell in love in their Discover Weekly algorithm. If you in previous week listened music from artists which tracks haven't been listed in any user-made playlist nor played magical 10,000 times and there is a problem with getting a vinyl / CD you wouldn't expect any songs from such artists but in Discover Weekly you may found similar tracks - they match same genre, they are also from the same decade, they are not covers and they are unique - not only per week, but I haven't heard them in my whole life. If Spotify is going to close, please share access to it, because it is amazing.

[lobster_johnson]

Protip: You can generate a new random "Discover Weekly"-style playlist manually by putting a bunch of songs into a playlist, right-clicking the playlist (in the desktop app) and selecting "Create similar playlist".

[patrick_haply]

This is actually exactly how I do music discovery. I create seed playlists with maybe 5-10 songs and start the radio from that. Any songs that I like from the those stations get added to a separate playlist, unless I explicitly decide that I want that song to influence the future selection of songs.

Thumbs-up or thumbs-downing songs in a radio playlist will change the songs that show up, but I find just having a seed playlist is more reliable and repeatable and easier to fine-tune.

[piotrkubisa]

Indeed, I would call myself as user who uses "Create similar playlist" on daily basis. Sadly, it isn't so awesome as Discover Weekly, because for certain tracks it won't generate any new tracks, i.e. When you put single track (Price - Controversy) and click to create similar playlist you may notice exactly the same track (Prince - Controversy). Also, it usually generate the same output for the specified list of tracks.

[mercer]

Oh, thank you so much for that! I find Spotify to be an even bigger turd than iTunes (at least in the ways that matter to me), but I use it for the discovery. This tip is a good addition!

[cheriot]

Exactly. Netflix streaming has proven how well this strategy can work with a limited library.

[pimeys]

There are other big areas where it's seriously lacking content:

1) Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only.

2) Classic albums in their original form. When there's a remaster, Spotify typically only has the remaster, original was either never there or will be removed when remaster is out.

Now, when you start to invest to your sound system even a bit (not talking about 100k wires here), you notice the lack of dynamics in many remasters. The originals just sound better with good soundsystem, not so much with below-average systems.

When I listen to music, I like to have the best possible master from it. And preferably lossless, or that I have the control of the compression parameters and format. I guess Spotify will take the masses, but I'm not the only serious listener who prefers my own files and physical copies.

Streaming is handy, but you can do a lot of things already with big hard disks with your computers, some syncing NAS system (as in Synology), beets[0] and a big enough microSD in your phone.

[0] http://beets.io/

[hluska]

Honestly, if this is how you evaluate music, the current generation of streaming is not for you. Do yourself a favour, buy a good quality turntable and start collecting vinyl!!

PS - I've been collecting vinyl for over twenty years and consider it my one serious vice. This comment is the equivalent of a drug addict suggesting that you "just try it once." You've been warned...:)

[pimeys]

I own plenty of vinyl, two Technics SL1200's and a mixer and I think it's a huge waste of resources. What I need is to just get lossless music effortlessly and with the right mastering. For new stuff it's pretty easy because you only have one option (or then some mega rare double vinyl versions, I'm looking at you Björk!). But for these old rock albums... In the 2000's their record labels wanted people to buy them again and so we got these super bad remastered versions, which are the ones you find from Spotify.

Yes, now I need to get CD's to have the best mastering, rip them to flac and opus and put the CD's to a box collecting dust. Or in some cases I need to buy the vinyl, record it to flac and opus and maybe play the vinyl a couple of times more when I do a house party.

Waste of resources...

[hluska]

With all due respect, I think you're just looking for something to complain about. Generations of music fans would love to have the options that you clearly have...

[majewsky]

> Modern contemporary electronic music, which is usually available vinyl only.

Oh, the irony.

[untoreh]

I am not sure what is ironic about this, unless you mistook electronic music for edm?

[afishisafish]

Almost all underground electronic labels offer their releases digitally, they just don't publish to steaming services.

[pimeys]

And some don't. I'm looking at you SUED or Perlon. And that's totally fine! They sell enough and the dj's and producers are highly praised anyways.

[runeks]

Have you honestly done a blinded listening test, comparing 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis (Spotify Premium) to lossless, and concluded that there's a severe reduction in quality?

Audio compression is an old technology by now. Lossless CD audio is ~1200 kbps, and we're only compressing to something like 1/4th the original size. There really shouldn't be much room for error. Even completely lossless CD audio compression can still get to ~50%-ish of the original data rate.

Imagine if you had H.264 video at 50% the data rate of a completely lossless signal. That would be completely perfect.

And if you're listening on a speaker setup, your room will distort the sound orders of magnitude more than compressing an audio signal 4x will.

[pimeys]

When I get my music, I want to use that for the next 20 years at least. It's stored in my NAS lossless and I can convert it to any format I want? For example, I use 192kbps opus files on my phone, which work nice while using A2DP to pack the sound even more.

But if I own music, FLAC is the proper format. I can go into any other format from it and re-pack my whole collection in the matter of minutes. Buying and storing content in lossy format doesn't give me this freedom.

And even if Spotify Vorbis sounds ok, it doesn't change the fact that many records in there have a very bad mastering and no other versions at all. Which was my original point here.