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by eat_veggies 3111 days ago
I haven't used apple music before, but spotify's ml recommenders are really impressive, and most of my favorite songs and artists were recommended to me via its "discover weekly" playlist. Its apps are super slick (cross device play/control is really handy!), especially compared to itunes.

Just buy a month of premium ($10/month or $5 if you're a student) and try it.

2 comments

Apple Music has recommendation playlists as well: New Music Mix, Favourites Mix and Chill Mix which all get updated weekly based on your likes/dislikes and existing music collection.

I actually find Spotify apps to be far worse than iTunes at least on iOS. And the Apple Watch app for Apple Music is really impressive.

Apple's recommendations can be ridiculous though. When I go to the "For You" tab in their iOS app here is what is shown as I scroll down

1. Favourites mix - i.e. the music I've played the most

2. Recently played - i.e. the music I've played recently

3. Tuesday's Playlists - the first of any real recommendations so far, but 4 of the 9 album covers it shows in the thumbnails are music I've played recently

4. Heavy Rotation - i.e. music I've played a lot, but not just recently

5. Tuesday's Albums - recommendations based on an artist (Waxahatchee) I've listened to

6. Artist Spotlight Playlists - a selection of playlists, including "Influences" and "Inspired By" playlists by artists that I don't listen to and are really unrelated to most of my collection.

7. New Releases

finally there's the wordy stuff I don't care about, social media posts.

Most of this stuff is not even bad ML (like the "Amazon recommends me vaccuum cleaners because I searched for and bought a vaccuum cleaner" problem) it is just literally showing me what I listened to. I've tried the recommended playlists a handful of times and they don't really show me much new things, they remain pretty unchanged in the weeks or so that I check them.

When you throw in the fact that they periodically delete all of the music I've downloaded, and nuked a chunk of my music collection after I signed up ... I have to say, my experience of Apple Music overall is pretty terrible.

Just as a single counterpoint: Spotify has Mixtape of the Week and two similar auto-generated playlists, and the songs in there are at best vaguely related to what I listen to on Spotify - I haven't found anything interesting in there.

The albums I haven't listened to in a while and might want to listen to again according to the app are those I listen to daily.

New releases are not sorted or filtered by genre, so I guess it is great that some pop or reggae artist has a new album out when I only listen to metal on Spotify?

Etc., etc... in other words - I use Spotify for totally unrelated reasons and switched from Google Play Music, but it has all the same faults, it just works better for some part of the target group, but it is in now way perfect, or even good, with regards to their recommendation engine either.

Yeah I agree with this. Spotify is a good experience. Save one. Their security is shit. After having my account hacked for the unpteenth time I finally threw in the towel since they clearly are not interested in securing their damn service and jumped to Apple Music. The UI is not as good as Spotify but I don’t worry about my account being hacked every week and their catalog is bigger at Apple Music. My wife found some obscure ass Pakistani tune she loved since she was a kid in Delhi. That was hardcore. Spotify never had much desi stuff.

I hope Spotify fixes their security woes. Either way I have no reason to leave Apple Music now.