[arcturus17]

Yea, more depressing than anything, in the sense that it confirms that Spotify relies very heavily on preferences of other users and creates filter bubbles like Youtube.

It's a vastly inferior method to Pandora's song analysis method IMO. I'd definitely use Spotify more if it had that, maybe significantly more - I can use it for 6 hours on a given day but then I often give it breaks because I'm on a discovery rut.

Maybe that's just me, and they know on very certain statistical terms that for most users that's not the case and music filter bubbles work much better.

Or maybe they're completely wrong in their approach and they're making a massive mistake at scale. We've come to develop this bias that tech giants "must know what they're doing" but I think it's often not the case. In ten years we could be reading how a competing service took over by offering the same catalogue with much better recommendation tech or other bells and whistles layered on top.

[awild]

To me Spotify has this vibe of musical ignorance all over it. A friend and I joked about their ceo wearing a t-shirt that had something to the effect of "I love music" on it. Which IMHO no-one that deeply likes music would wear. He also made snide remarks about how musicians should adapt to their platform wrt to publishing more music more often (instead of adapting Spotify to the needs of the musicians)

The story I linked also has a similar feel, the music is basically avant pop and neo soul, and instead of forwarding this cluster to someone with a musical/cultural background, a techbro comes up with their own label that comes off as basically "it reminds me of my favourite thing".

From the outside it seems they are really only approaching it from a purely technical point with a subconscious arrogance, ie they are adding the value not the musicians.

Their programmers probably make more money than most musicians on their platform and that's frustrating as fuck.

[ubercow13]

I think this is an interesting take.

People who might in the past have gotten their new music from such deeply passionate music lovers and experts as John Peel, or any number of other DJs, are now often using algorithms in their place. And there is a sense that those algorithms are created by people with no real love for music or personal investment in it as part of our culture, which is kind of sad.

I think this is a big part of why music discovery through Spotify feels so soulless, especially compared to something like Bandcamp Weekly.

I guess their next step would be to start creating the music itself with algorithms. You would simply turn on Spotify and it would start playing a continuous stream of algorithmically created music to match your profiled tastes.