[ahartmetz]

Just noticed this again today. Spotify vs Hype Machine (browse, then "recommendations" by checking out people who also liked $song). Spotify is somehow stuck on dark, aggressive electronic music for me. It's not the only thing that I like, not even my favorite really.

[vidarh]

Music recommendations are even worse than movies, in that they need to take into account what you've just listened to (if I'm listening to a specific genre, I'm unlikely to want something in a very different tempo and style), time of day (at bed time I'll often put on some soft classical music; that doesn't mean I want that every other time because I play it a lot), mood (if I suddenly play 1980's pop, it's probably nostalgia, and suddenly playing new music is not what I want), and at the same time I have preferences, but those are mediated by what I'm currently listening to.

Whenever I try to get a service or other to recommend music they are remarkably bad at this.

[ahartmetz]

last.fm had my favorite auto-recommendation system, but it seems like they removed the personal and artist radio features.

[vidarh]

Yeah, they're the closest I've been to being happy about recommendations by far, though they too did get into very weird "pockets" of recommendations for me at times (not bad, just very obsessively giving me music from a very small niche of my music interests).