[al_borland]

This is one of the reasons I’ve gone with Apple Music. The way the app is setup, I can treat the catalog like an online store and my library like my personal CD collection. I made a self-imposed rule to respect this paradigm. When I hear about a new band or album, I go the “store”, add it to my library, and the next time I’m looking to listen to some music, I can see some the recently added list has a couple albums I added that were recommended to me organically as if it was 1994 again. The only real difference is that I’m not out $19 if I don’t like it. I can simply remove it from my library (akin to retuning it to the store), so my library contains the albums I actually like, or am currently exploring.

This has helped me a lot to avoid the infinite choice and overwhelm of having a 100 million song library, which is the case when engaging with a streaming service library directly.

[redwall_hp]

That's how I use Spotify. I make playlists of music I listen to frequently, separated by genre. If I want to play a whole album, I click through for one of those favorites or search for it. Mostly I find music via YouTube and then search for what I specifically want to add, or I look for user-curated playlists.

I've been doing that since Spotify launched in the US, and I'm mystified by people somehow using it differently and letting algorithmic picks determine what they listen to.