[nickburns]

I actually do find this observation to be quite accurate for many of my own 'suggestions.' I'm regularly recommended 'new' and 'old' music that was clearly matched to my 'tastes' only by melody or, more noticeably, sample. It very much seems like if a song fits into a genre I listen to frequently or have been listening to lately, and it samples another song I've listened to before—cheap recommendation. And the greater the frequency of individual plays (i.e. the more times I've replayed any one song), the more likely that derivatives will be recommended to me.

It's easy to see how this would've been baked into a human-made algorithm when you consider waveforms. Speaking only to Spotify's algorithm here. And it doesn't really bother me for obvious reasons. But it is creating something of a musical echo chamber for me.