[slfnflctd]

I completely fell in love with Pandora at first. New music discovery is one of my favorite things. Eventually, though, it stopped giving it to me. Despite having over 100 stations, I started hearing mostly repeats. Also, of the artists I liked, they were only playing me a small fraction of their work. And I missed albums.

Spotify has been a breath of fresh air, I switched a couple years ago. It is missing some stuff here & there, but I haven't hit too many bugs like others have (on Windows or Android), and their catalog is much bigger than Pandora's was when I was using it heavily. Turns out, what I needed was more content. What once seemed like Pandora's best strength - that 'special sauce' recommendation algorithm - is now clearly being done to a similar or greater level of competence by damn near everyone else in the space. And like you say, the podcast stuff has been solid & gotten better, too. These things never turn out how I expect.