[Spidler]

I'm still salty about the loss of OiNK and the cruft of junk that is streaming services.

Finding new artists is near impossible with the profit focus of streaming services today. Spotify insists that you listen to product placement paid top one this week, no matter if you've just had a two hour session of death metal, it insists that you want to hear whatever top-star released last week.

Apple is similar, but on their personalization page will gladly confound artists with similar /same name, and _insists_ that Sunn-O))) is clearly _chill_ this week.

Not to mention that "related artists" suggestions are tame, at best. Unable to suggest "member of band <X> has a new solo project out now!" or "This band has split and two new ones may be interesting".

And let's not get into the part that they still cannot actually tell you when a band you listen to _start_ a tour, or do a merch-release for some reason, features that used to exist, but do not anymore.

Yet, for some fucking reason, there's a full middle page on Apple Music dedicated to music I don't enjoy.

[nickspacek]

This annoys me to no end. I'm sure there are more curated playlists on Spotify out there, but having it always shoveling music at me based on whoever is paying them the most to push it is exhausting. And as others have pointed out, the app experience has seemingly deteriorated over time to the point where my Offline music is difficult and frustrating to get to play... when offline!

I'm slowly returning to curating my own music files and integrating them into my homelab via Jellyfin and Fintunes (can be found on F-Droid). I currently keep Spotify around for its podcast archive but those days are likely numbered as well. I'll end up supporting them forever though, since weaning my family members off of its convenience is unlikely to happen.

Edit to suggest "Cloudspeakers Weekly Chart" as my recommendation for a curated Spotify playlist with a wide variety of new music with updates on Saturdays. Occasionally includes pop hits, but I've otherwise found lots of new artists in there. Found it through a recommendation on here, definitely not through Spotify itself.

[easyThrowaway]

Apple Music is hilarious for this.

No matter which is your starting track, if left to their own devices the "For You" and "Music Station" features will start veering into Top-40 pop music just after a few songs. They should be renamed "Six-degrees of separation from Bad Bunny generator".

[mustacheemperor]

I haven't experienced the top-40 veer, but it seems like any jazz song from absolutely any subgenre will eventually lead to Freddie Freeloader off Kind of Blue, and then the algorithm just continues to generate from that direction. It's become a running joke between my partner and I. "Just threw on a Cal Tjader album - how many radio tracks do you think we'll get before it's a Miles Davis station instead?" I recall back when I used Spotify, that service's radio similarly insisted that any playlist incorporating even a single indie rap song MUST become a radio featuring JPEGMafia.

It really highlights the limitations of these automated discovery services. I would love a service that makes it easier to explore the vast amounts of recorded music in jazz's various subgenres, and current streaming services are not it. The human curated playlists on Apple Music are pretty good for exploring a genre, at least, but relatively surface level. You are unlikely to discover the deep cuts I'd expect to surface two hours into a generative radio off an album that was itself kind of obscure.

Gosh, I miss what.cd. The industry destroyed it and never replaced it with anything close to it. I have to imagine so many of those cassette rips, like lost Dilla tapes handed out at shows in the 90s, are just gone forever now.

[count]

I don't have this problem with Apple Music at all?

My 'for you' gives me a weird melange of stuff I love, stuff I forgot I loved, and occasionally 'wow what is this new stuff that's awesome', with the rare 'oh god I like this band but not this album' kind of thing.

It's pretty spot on, and has led to discovery of quite a few new artists I like.

I have a pretty wide taste, so it's sometimes...jarring to listen to, but it never veers into Top40.

[layer8]

You might want to try YouTube Music, which also includes whatever YouTube users upload (so you get rare mixes and other otherwise unavailable music), and will apply the usual “people who liked X also liked Y” recommendation algorithm. You won’t get any tour or merch info though.