Even before the rise of AI music, they started "customizing" playlists based on the algorithm, so that you see different songs compared to someone else who subscribes to the same playlist.
This was one of the reasons why I left Spotify. There are hundreds of posts about this issue on the Spotify community site, e.g.
I really don’t like this feature—I enjoyed their genre/mood oriented running playlists explicitly as a way to listen to stuff well outside of my usual listening while out on runs, but since they made them “made for you” they’re strictly worse. Relentless algorithmic sameness is everywhere and I’m sick of it.
Spotify is also funny for maintaining the existence of their feature suggestion community boards while just utterly stonewalling for years while thousands of paying users beg for stuff like…being able to hide a section of the home screen, or not have long-standing playlists magically change.
My super basic feature request is to be able to report wrong metadata. It's just impossible right now unless you're the artist as far as I can tell. For example Dreaming Bull (https://open.spotify.com/artist/7s6vcAnBioL2PJisG8YMww) with a single actual album in 2014 is either taken over by or merged with some random crap. But Spotify doesn't care enough to even let me let them know. (Yes, I filled out the contact form multiple times - it's ignored)
At least on Tidal you can email customer support about it, but they are slow (probably under staffed) and it usually takes weeks for them to fix things and now with the constant flood of AI-made music, the crap accumulates faster than it can be cleaned up.
I ended up moving on to Apple Music where the situation in relation to attribution is not as bad. I chose Apple Music because it's among the services that has better rates for artists, although lower than Tidal https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...
> maintaining the existence of their feature suggestion community boards while just utterly stonewalling for years while thousands of paying users beg for stuff
my one I've been asking them for years for is the ability to quickly swap profiles on a family plan. (first world problem i know!)
My daughter, not being able to swap to her profile on our main media machine has utterly destroyed the utility of Discover Weekly for me, and for a time that was my favorite spotify feature.
Similarly to making so many of the playlists "made for you", they've completely ruined the "radio" feature. You used to be able to select the radio option on a song, artist, or playlist and get a playlist of songs that seemed to be a good mix of musically similar and being liked by people who liked the selected starting point.
Starting at some point around 2 years ago (it seems they A-B tested this for a while because it went back and forth), the radio option became so highly customized to your user account that most songs it plays will be ones you've heard a billion times, even songs that aren't remotely similar in any way other than that you like them.
And the playlist radio option, which was the most powerful one for discovery, has been completely removed.
I used the radio option for years to discover new music, and I really loved it. Now I feel a twinge of sadness mixed with rage when my memories of the good days get me to open Spotify and I remember what it's become.
The tests must reveal what is easily deduced: most, nearly all people do not enjoy much variety. They want to think they do, but their actions prove otherwise.
This sucks for you and me but is Spotify giving the masses what they actually enjoy.
Many years ago my most listened song (on ripped CDs in iTunes) had a few thousand plays because I turned off my headphones (analogue wireless!) while I had a track on repeat, only actually planning to listen to it a second time, and went on holiday for a week.
It's funny how the Spotify moderators are gaslighting people. Users complaining about some bad feature and moderators ignoring the issue and responding to seemingly another question. I've noticed this phenomenon cropping up 4-5 years ago on Microsoft forums, now it's across the spectrum. I don't blame the people who are paid to do it, I understand they have to do this for a paycheck but it's such a shitty thing to do.
This is why so many playlists I look at all have the same songs in them! I have had to start marking songs that I like to not be recommended. Although I just looked at Spotify to figure out how I've done this in the past, and I can see no such option. So I don't know how I did this previously!?
One thing I've seen recently: My daylist will be named the same, but have (usually very slightly) different songs between different platforms (e.g. Mac vs iPhone). Not the end of the world, but very strange.
.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.
As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
It doesn't just sound like that, it was used to mean exactly what you think well before PostHog was founded. I'm still not sure if that was an accident or the founders were in on the joke.
Grindr is a hookup app for gay men. "Hog" is slang for penis, so one might ask someone to "post hog" if they would like him to send a picture of his penis.
i know it as a "web 2.0 thing", but i guess that counts as old-school internet now.
that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
Feels like late 2000s to very early 2010s. And note that it was never -er, the -r was invariably preceded by a consonant. Thankfully, subsequent naming schemes stopped disemvoweling words.
I'm reading these comments and I'm thinking "are we using the same Spotify?" I don't see any AI music, I don't get Podcasts pushed on me, the UI is fine, playlists are fine and I get new music I like suggested to me often.
"I'm not seeing a problem so how is there a problem" is not the right critique in an era where the selection algorithm is so personalised.
Spotify is awful for me, I concur with the original article. YouTube Music is heading slowly the same way. At this rate I'll have to cast around for another phone that can take an SD card again.
The service I really miss is eMusic, they had little in the way of well known music so leaned into small label music and it was wonderful.
Get a standalone music player and you will have full control (but you also may have some upfront work to do your music downloading and create your playlists but worth it imo). I got a Miyoo Mini game emulator for my kid and ended up getting one for myself, all for ~$50. Being offline (by choice, the device does have wifi) and being able fully customize the thing, backup the SD it's really great. It's such a whiff of fresh air to be honest, you get no popups, no attention misdirects, everything is there waiting for you and no corp messes up you.
A lot of the get an iPod comments ignore music discovery. I like new music and think new music is good and would like to discover new music. Having to buy all the music I want to try would be to expensive.
College and community radio are infinitely better for new music discovery. KEXP and KTRU here in Houston have expanded my horizons significantly. Bandcamp as well.
It's the HN effect, as well as selection bias. People here are highly technical and may notice things that regular people don't, or they do things in a very idiosyncratic way. I remember seeing comments here before about how some people have no cell phone, run only a very old school terminal based computer, etc, for example. They also seem to be annoyed at very specific things as you can see in the comments here, things that the average user wouldn't even think about. Ultimately, HN and other technical fora are not representative of the average user's experience.
Agreed. I just navigated to my home page on desktop and I see the following categories:
- A section with 8 of my recently played playlists
- A section of "Made for <my name>" with 6 Daily Mixes (which I generally like), Discover weekly (which I like now that it's tailored to me: I used to hate that it only contained pop/hip hop hits), Release Radar (love it), and the AI DJ (which I find very annoying)
- A section called Recently Played which looks like all legitimate things I've played
- "New Releases for You", which are all by artists I've listened to very recently
- "Jump back in", which has several playlists and artists I've listened to recently
- A sidebar of all of my playlists I've created or followed
Of the ~50 actionable items on the page, the only one I dislike is the AI DJ, but it by no means feels forced on me since it's just a single square.
I’m more curious of the claim that you don’t get podcasts pushed on you.
The last time I used Spotify (and the reason I left) podcast were constantly featured on the start page and it was impossible to remove them (and I have zero interest in podcast in my music application).
That's what I'm thinking as well. Spotify ain't great but it's fine. Some people are recommending Apple Music but Apple Music don't even have a client for Linux and their website is awful. OTOH, I can use Spotify even through my terminal.
You may indeed have a different experience, but you also may not notice these things as it happens slowly over time, like the proverbial boiling frog. If you're younger it's likely you haven't noticed the patterns. I've been around for a while and notice these patterns from miles away.
If you're listening to new music, and recommendations, how do you know you've not heard at least some AI music? I only listen to one playlist on Apple Music (my weekly personalised New Music Mix) and I've had to report several AI tracks.
They were easy to spot as they all used the trick of releasing under the same name as successful artists who are in-between release cycles. These scammers bank on fans clicking without thinking which is money in the bank for them. I'm also pretty best about reading the bio of every new artist I'm recommended.
There's one prolific ai musician producing logo beats (boring) and psychedelic ambient (pretty much random drones) that I just can't shake from my playlists as they release lots of stuff under several different names.
I recently unsubscribed because I definitely saw a lot of AI music. I do think Spotify has the best UI and user created playlists of all platforms though
Of all the problems that I have with Spotify - its frequently changing selection of music, its hostility to power users, its shuffle algorithm, its artist hostile rates, its frequently changing-for-the-worse interface - I can't really say that AI music is one of them. If I come across some and enjoy it, great! I'm not going to let that impact my enjoyment of music as a whole.
I really don't understand the product decisions at Spotify. Some really basic functionality is missing like shuffling across all tracks in my library or treating Liked Songs as a playlist but not really (can't share with others). I keep using it for its discovery features, but even that is so much worse than ten years ago. Back then I would easily keep half of Discover Weekly. These days I'm happy if I find one or two songs I like. They feel like a company on auto-pilot.
Yeah.. what the hell do they actually work on all day?
I have a very long list of features in my head, that seem incredibly obvious and simple to implement. Some of these features were present in other music library applications ~25 years ago (Winamp et al.).
For example, "following" an artist doesn't actually seem to do anything useful as far as I can tell. I've followed a million artists, but I often find out they released new albums and I had no idea. Even something as simple as a notification badge as I scroll through my followed artist list would do wonders for discovery.
And when I consider that the features they do have in their applications don't work all that well to begin with... One egregious example is saving music for offline listening on my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've boarded an airplane to find out the app just decided to purge it all.
Another super fun issue I ran into that actually cost Spotify money since I canceled my family subscription - There are no parental controls or any other method for blocking podcasts. And the podcasts now include videos! So I go through all the trouble of locking down youtube, etc on every device in my house and suddenly find my kid watching Logan Paul videos on Spotify!
They just feel like a company that has the velocity of a snail.
I recently ditched Spotify for Qobuz. Spotify has always been a bit of a letdown, even though I've been using it since Rdio went bust (so ~10yrs). The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the amount of shit content they push at my kids.
I want to me able to give my 10yo an app on their phone to listen to music, and not have to check to see if they're actually watching videos, or listening to (possibly wildly inappropriate) podcasts - or worst of both worlds - watching video podcasts.
Qobuz isn't perfect in terms of UI, but they seem to care about, and only care about, music. I trialed Amazon Music, but it (unsurprisingly) is an ad platform, too. Apple Music was a contender - the only reason I didn't end up with it is because (also unsurprisingly) it doesn't integrate well with network streamers.
Qobuz is a bit more expensive, but so far it has been worth it.
I can't understand how people use Spotify. It was great ~10 years ago? It's terrible these days. Pushing Podcasts at you (no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs), terrible music, the UI getting harder and less intuitive to use.
It's a shame all good things have to slowly tend towards sucking, instead of getting better. Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign.
Youtube music is just as bad with pushing unwanted content. I can't believe the answer after 10 years of this is to go back to doing it myself, downloading MP3s and using something (currently Jellyfin) to curate them.
At least Youtube music lets me upload my own music to it, so that's the main reason I'm still mostly using it.
PS: Please don't reply and tell me I just haven't found the right podcast. The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
> no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs
When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.
It's at odds with millions of people but also in agreement with millions of others. I also don't listen to podcasts for the same reason. Spotify shouldn't push something that so many people detest without letting them opt out.
I don't know if you think this opinion (expressed in this way) makes you seem insightful, but just so you know, it just makes you seem uninformed. It's like saying "Listen to music? No thanks, I don't want to listen to a guy in makeup screaming about satanism into a microphone". Like, yes, that type of music does exist, but it's uninformed to make the claim that that's all music is.
Weird take. I don’t know anyone who detests podcasts. They just don’t listen to them.
Having such strong feelings about something you can just ignore is unhealthy.
FWIW, I cancelled Spotify last year and their focus on podcasts was one of the reasons. But there are plenty of other services that cater to music lovers so I just increased my bandcamp spend and moved on with my life.
I don't think there's evidence for this. While listening to podcasts is evidence of liking them, not listening to podcasts isn't evidence for detesting them.
Spotify has over 640 million active users. Of those, 100 million are active podcast listeners, despite having an app they frequently use that lets them listen to podcasts. This suggests that many of Spotify's users hate podcasts as much as they hate the wacky morning DJs who say democracy's a joke.
I didn't say that all 540 million hate podcasts. I said that many do. It doesn't take a very large fraction of 540 million to get millions that hate podcasts.
It's not many out of 100 million. 4% would not be many out of the total. That's why I said: I thought you meant "a significant fraction of", not "at least a tiny fraction of".
You meant "at least a tiny fraction of". That's all. When you say "many", we should read "at least a tiny fraction of".
You refuse to believe that millions of people hate podcasts, to the point that you apparently need a survey with millions of people saying that as evidence. You live in a bubble of people who haven't told you they hate morning DJs and podcasts. If I instead told you that millions of people detest vlogs, would you also require hard evidence?
"I don't think there's evidence for this," in response to my statement that millions of people hate podcasts. You might forgive most readers for understanding that to mean that you don't think millions of people hate podcasts.
I responded to something you wrote. Maybe I didn't respond to what you meant to write, but the solution to that is for you to write what you meant.
>no thanks, Podcasts are terrible. If I wanted to hear idiots laughing at each other I'd listen to the Radio DJs
I agree this format of podcast is terrible, but there are many podcasts that are more like one or a couple of people each giving a presentation and I enjoy them a lot.
Ukraine the Latest by The Telegraph and The History of Rome by Mike Duncan are ones I particularly enjoyed.
Hardcore History has not been as productive lately but the back catalogue is incredible. Makes a 6 hour drive feel like nothing at all. I know some people don't like Dan Carlin, but I really enjoy the long-form historical storytelling style.
I actually really like podcasts but never wanted my music app forcing theirs above links to actual music, or inserting extra ads into episodes that I could listen to from other sources. Their rollout of podcasts made me make a point to never, ever listen to a podcast on Spotify.
The Bitwarden API is well-documented. There is a popular alternate implementation of the server, and there are alternate client implementations like https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app.
> The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
Yeah same for me too. The only podcasts I can bear are monologues, when there's more than one people at least they're each talking to me not to each other. Things like Hardcore History, Anthropocene Reviewed, and most of 99% Invisible.
Public Service Announcement: there’s a healthy marketplace of refurbished and upgraded iPods from the 2004 era on eBay, the Classic 5.5 comes highly recommended with solid DAC from the factory but iPods mini with upgraded DAC, fresh battery, and large flash memory swaps for the old spinning disks are readily available.
I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.
Newer Sony Walkmans have lossless support and some can also act as a USB DAC. Unfortunately the UIs are still terrible (no search, only oversensitive alphabet scroll?), proprietary cables and the device slowly re-indexes every boot. Organizing music hasn't improved since 2000 with some albums being split into 10 artists if they have collaborations. Still, at least we don't have to use Sonic Stage any more, mine has a uSD slot, and mass storage largely works. It's a shame Zune went nowhere, the HD was a wonderful device.
But an iPod from the 2004 era is both hard to use and very heavy. You can get a tiny flash-based modern mp3 player for $30-$40, which is below the apparent price of a 2004 iPod on eBay.
Mmm agree to disagree, iPod classic is not a heavyweight device and the UX is what we had when I was a kid so easy AND nostalgic, but agreed the little sandisk clips solve the problem just as well.
Edit: I can't imagine swapping HDD for flash saves more than a few grams, can it?
Ipod classics have a spinning rust hdd. They are heavy. The 2004 4th gen 40 GB is 176 grams and is a bulky 110 cm3. That's quite a bit more than my pixel 5, which is 151 grams and just 81 cm3. In fact, could buy nearly any old phone and do better, immediately, and have a much nicer display and better bluetooth codecs and the ability to play lossless formats.
So what, you want to modify a good mp3 player to look more like a bad one?
With the classic iPod you've got a bad UI instead of a good UI and a large object instead of a small one. And while it will be lighter without the hard drive, it will still be a lot heavier than an mp3 player. It's pure downside on several different dimensions.
If you want to play your music on a device shaped like an iPod, it's even easier to use your existing phone.
I've had about 4 San Disk clips now. mostly because I lose them or put them through the wash.
some of the older models were definitely better, but at 20-40 bucks each and no real dependencies on the rest of my personal computer ecosystem it's a fair trade.
it's only that Spotify and YT music are easy to use that I haven't bought a new one. with enshitifacation being a thing I might go back
On a lark, I refunded up my phone with my mp3 library I keep on my laptop and I built up so many years ago. I enjoyed it just fine for the nostalgia but I still don't understand where I'm going to discover new music without services like Spotify. I used go to shows and see new artists that way, but with kids that's not as much a valid proposition as it once was.
Back when music blogs were exploding, it was a great way to discover new music. I'm not sure how many of those are still around, but hype machine has been out there for probably 20 years now and that was always a great way to just blow a few hours listening to all kinds of new stuff - https://hypem.com/latest/all
There's also local independent radio stations, many of which have streaming now.
- Ability to sort by the albumartist tag (listen to heaps of compilations)
- Ability to export play log
- Functions like any other external storage device for transfer purposes
Anything out there? Last I checked (10 years ago) there was nothing that hit all these marks. I had a Sansa Clip with Rockbox and just dealt with the low storage capacity.
Anything that takes SD cards should make storage a non-issue and make file transfer dead simple. Even microSD cards can hold over well over 5TB
Dedicated players are getting harder to find though. I had a Cowon mp3 player for a few years which was pretty nice. Maybe see if they've got something you like? http://www.cowonglobal.com
I just rotate music on a microSD for mobile. However, you can optionally self-host a music server and connect with a client on your device to stream. It's also possible to SSH from outside home network, if you really want to.
iPod video 5th gen w/ Rockbox custom firmware. Then do the bluetooth mod and you're in music heaven. Probably fairly easy to write a plugin for the functionality you mentioned.
I have an Android phone with a 500GB SD card and audio jack. I use an app called PowerAmp. Recently they introduced some optional subscription, but I ignored that, and so far my experience has been fantastic. I've been using that app as my audio player for years already.
I don't get it why people but Samsung S99 Pro Plus Maxi for €9999 when cheap phones for developing markets are objectively better, minus the camera, and cost like €300.
I’ve been strongly considering refurbing the 6th gen iPod Classic I have in the garage. The disk died years ago, and I imagine it would need a battery by now.
Now I’m wondering if anybody sells a USB-C adapter to iPod dock connector.
One of these days the parts are going to end up at my doorstep. Boredom and a couple of beers away.
Ever since Google Play Music was killed off, I've been putting off setting up a home server and accessing my entire collection like that. There's some Android program that allows one to do that, forget the name of it though. Think it has "fish" in the name
You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens).
At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties.
So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.
I think you are missing the point. The criticism is that Spotify are actually using third parties to create AI generated music in order to pay lower royalties. There was an article in the last month or so on HN that explained the process.
You could use the Spotify API to autogenerate your own playlists and upload them to your library, bypassing Spotify's own recommendations. There are a couple of services out there that connect to Spotify this way. Usually I start with such a playlist then branch out into the album containing a song if I like what I hear.
I also have a personal list of hundreds of albums I want to hear. If I don't feel like anything in specific I pick one at random since Spotify usually has it. Having such a list, I don't see the appeal in listening to Spotify's curated playlists.
If you pay for RateYourMusic premium then you can use a service they offer called Sonemic. It gives you customized recommendations based on the ratings in your RYM account. You connect your Spotify account to link their track/album data to your Spotify library and then it gives you several playlists of hundreds of songs. Afterwards you can deauthorize the connection and keep your playlists. Only downside is you have to spend a bit of time adding all your ratings but you get both "recommends" and "out of comfort zone” lists.
I've found some excellent picks I wouldn't have heard of otherwise from this service. Plus RYM alone is good for manually browsing user-generated lists. Also their genre categorisation is community-driven and by far the most detailed I've come across. Unfortunately their API is not open yet but they're making headway into officially releasing it this year. Hopefully by then I'll be able to auto-add all my curated to-listen albums.
There's been so many small changes over the years that have decimated the experience further and further for me. Most recently, the "Podcasts" Library tab has now been renamed "Podcasts and Courses". The competing KPIs that must have been at play to make "Audiobooks" a separate, third tab, but bundle "Courses" into "Podcasts" could surely be written about. Certainly with merit: That horizontal scroll area now has so many tabs that putting "Audiobooks" in 3rd place basically puts it over the fold at most screen sizes, and "Courses" in 4th place would be as invisible as a Google search result on the second page.
Woe befalls the Audiobooks team, who lost that war. Sad for them.
Sorry, throughout that diatribe I forgot to even mention what Courses were, or why anyone would want them. That could only be because, I have no idea. Seeing it written in my Library tab, "Podcasts and Courses" is like hearing the echo of a feature that doesn't exist. Where do I find these courses? What do I search for? Are they included in my plan? There's none on my home page... wait, I just realized how little I care.
I think, or rather hope, we're entering an era of tech business where money gets more expensive, thus sensibility must return, you can't just be focused on growth you need to make money, keep customers happy, and not worry less about the next hundred million customers. I'm seeing it in some products. Not in Spotify, to be clear. Here's the sensible thing Spotify could do: Create a $22/mo plan, hi-fi audio, a big "Super Premium" badge around your avatar, custom app color themes, customize your home page and sidebars, this literally writes itself, people would buy it. Would it make enough money to justify the investment? Hey Dan: Did building Podcasts and Audiobooks? Yeah that's what I thought.
I don't use spotify (primarily buy CDs and use ipod classics, also records because I am a cliche) and this made me think of the articles about the guy who was one of the most listened artists on spotify (piano for study/concentration type stuff iirc?) and he got punished or something because he was publishing under several names? I couldn't quite find that or what actually happened, but I did stumble upon this Wikipedia page about controversy over fake artists on spotify[0] that suggests some of those are commissioned by spotify.
The only feature of spotify that I've ever been interested in was discovering new and new to me music. I'm not interested in AI slop though, and I can't imagine a lot of people would be (maybe the background noise use case don't mind so much which is fair, I suppose). Is this going to get to a tipping point with spotify for it to go under (or lose a LOAD of value), or is it going to be like 'smart' TVs where non-'smart' TVs essentially don't exist because almost all manufacturers have realised they can make more money from forcing ads and spyware? I see that it's been a problem for nigh on a decade according to that Wikipedia page but with the floodgates for AI feel a lot more open than they used to.
Kinda related, does anybody use soundcloud any more? Just interesting that it seemed hugely popular and was then derided (terms like 'soundcloud rapper') and I haven't heard about it in a while.
I suppose netflix still exists despite derision for their awful originals, killing the good originals, and having little content (especially internationally!).
Spotify will be fine, especially with how little they pay artists, but it's probably a shame for a lot of users.
Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it.
The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection.
Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.
Part of that feeling involves piecing together that person's tastes and whether you can be bothered digging deeper into their collection.
A more accurate recreation of that feeling might be to pick a random user with a large collection (or maybe a couple of users that are mutual friends) and select from their owned albums? Discogs would potentially be a better fit but you'd be veering into serious collectors there rather than a random person's basement.
I think it's neat though, enjoyed refreshing and seeing loads of weird album art!
What I do is use RateYourMusic.com and find people who rate albums similar to the way I do. The site even lets you build music charts and filter albums by how highly they’re rated by the users you follow.
I love discogs. Also hate it because I spend too much money there! Serious collectors and random basement are both vibes I need in my music discovery life!
I use SoundCloud from time to time, my taste is really niche and it works great for that (but you need to find a relevant artist first).
I recently jumped off Qobuz exclusively because of their drunk recommendation algorithm, or lack thereof (it seems I'd often end up with whatever is on the front page). I wound up on Pandora: their whole value proposition was finding music you like, and music you might like. I haven't been on Spotify in a hot minute, so I can't make a comparison, but Pandora has been pretty good.
The killer app of Spotify has been expanding my horizons past the 30 tracks on my MP3 player. But that seems to have stalled. I do like being notified when bands I like release new music. I am hopeless at keeping up with music so thats useful.
> I do like being notified when bands I like release new music.
One of my main complaints with Spotify is how lousy it is with that for me. Release Radar is usually a pile of songs almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what I listen to. Bands it knows I follow since it makes playlists for them will have new tracks never show up unless I go to their page or it comes up randomly.
I have no idea what the "follow" feature does because it doesn't notify me for new music from followed artists, and "What's New" doesn't include new releases from all of them. But it has given me four notifications that Journey is coming to Nashville in case I didn't get it the first time.
I get targeted ads via the spotify app (and email sometimes) for Beast in Black, The Sword and Hammerfall. I dont really have the wide musical taste to comment in broad strokes but I havent missed an album for these so I am rather content.
My personal solution is to use ReleaseFeed(https://releasefeed.elomatreb.eu/) to get RSS updates for artists I want to listen to, which is great if you already use RSS.
I don’t get it. If you want to avoid algorithmic garbage maybe don’t subscribe to a playlist made by an algorithm. There are tons and tons of human curated playlists on Spotify. There are also hundreds of radio stations across the US streaming online for free.
People have these ultra narrow niche picky preferences and then ragequit when they don’t get their way.
“I want a machine learning customized playlist but it should have perfect intuition about what is made by humans and what is not and if you can’t make that I’ll call you ‘garbage.’”
We can’t even sort email properly with algos and we’ve been trying for over 30 years. We can’t block phishing.
If you hate Spotify so much go back to your cd collection or try pirating mp3s again. That service is a miracle — dozens and dozens of startups burned hundreds of millions trying to build something like that years before - and all people can do is whine. “Mehhh, it’s electron, waaaaa”. Ok go make your own service in c++ or whatever and then get all the major labels on board and then make it popular and then make it profitable. I’ll wait. Or actually I won’t I think I’ll go listen to Money for Nothing on Spotify on any of five or six operating systems.
Tech is wasted on people like this. Show some appreciation for the miracles around us. Spotify is one of them.
I'm so confused by these complaints. I use Spotify every day, and just type in the music I want to listen to. You click on a song and it plays. How are people getting all wrapped up in whether some podcast shows up on some screen, or whether there's AI generated music on there, or if the Electron app is properly optimized?
I want to focus on non-AI complaints for my question. Each time Spotify comes up on HN, the sentiment is dominated by nitpicking negative comments. To be clear, I am a musical normie that looks forward to daily Spotify to listen to popular music. I also don't mind the phone app, web app, and even Linux desktop app (what a blessing).
My question to the haters: If Spotify is so bad, as you claim, why haven't we seen a flurry of competitors emerge? My guess: Licensing a large enough set of music to make a compelling alternative is the primary moat.
Last point: While I believe people and their stories about AI gen'd slop appearing in their playlists, I have not experienced the same. Are my musical tastes so bland that they just don't bother? (No trolling to others on that one... Just poking a bit of fun at myself.)
outright monopoly. i think it decided around 2008ish. pandora and all the others lost deals with labels, labels bougth into spotify, and apple promoted them left and rigth so its a dopoly.
its not a space i follow so i have all the details wrong.
When does this actually happen? I can imagine it on their background music playlists (and wouldn’t really mind it) but I’ve never encountered it on any playlist at least as far as I’m aware. Is it only electronic music or will they AI you an entire 5 piece rock band?
without any hate to the well intentioned engineers working on the thing, spotify has just exceedingly poor product taste in any number of dimensions
- the godawful ai dj they tried to force on pple
- buying gimlet media and running it into the toilet. some of the world's best and favorite podcasts, gone because some swedish billionaire decided to throw all his money into foie grasing a perfectly fine niche media company.
- buying anchor and going absolutely nowhere with it. it was never good so whatever. nice try i guess.
- locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting (to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive)
> locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting
Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.
Spending that money was part of their strategy to go for a "bundled" rate for royalties, which 99% (their number) of the US customer base now does. In a nutshell, they can downrate the royalties for music as long as they bundle other things with it- that's why there's books on there now as well. UMG is now fighting it [0] but all the indies are basically fucked as there's no global leverage.
The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.
Spotify pays on a pro rata model. Something like 70% of their operating revenue is divided amongst license holders based on the number of plays. The only way the majority of artists make more money is if Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake and The Weeknd suddenly fall off the face of the earth and their record labels burst into flames.
All streaming platforms realistically pay out close to the federally-set royalty rate.
They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened… the best we ever got was a set of watered down APIs that’s curiously missing what one would need to build a third party client.
They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.
Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.
> They also deprecated their library (libspotify) which had previously been used to build alternative third-party clients and playback-capable integrations for paying Spotify users. They promised a replacement, but that never happened…
really which part? that ui where it switches songs if your finger grazes it even slightly? and starts over completely when you try to flip it back, forgetting where you were? the loud non audio adjusted ads?
Presumably they mean the part where it gives you easy access to a huge amount of music all in one place (unlimited and ad free, if you pay for a subscription). Most of the time I'm listening to music in the background so the UI isn't really much of an issue.
> to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive
It seems like most podcasts do everything they can to make downloading an MP3 impossible. This isn't just a spotify problem. Just about every website for every podcast I've seen does the same thing.
Not to mention axing third party API access instead of coming to a licensing agreement, forcing DJs, dance class teachers and others to jump ship to Tidal/Beatport/whatever at high cost, losing all their carefully curated playlists unless they go through the time consuming process of converting them.
That would explain why mine were definitely wrong too. Although I wouldn't attribute it to malice since it makes little sense to tell me I used their paid service much less than I thought, at least compared to the opposite.
I don't care too much if music is played by a living virtuoso live, created in a DAW with a ton of synths, samples, and sequencers, or completely synthesized by an AI model. What I care about is that music be good not plagiarized.
If Spotify offered AI-generated tracks of stunning beauty and sterling production quality, I might even consider subscribing to it. But apparently the "slop" which the post refers to is far from this heavenly ideal.
So I stay with YouTube premium and keep buying music on Bandcamp from the authors.
I switched to Tidal about 8 years ago after discovering how bad the Spotify encoding was. With some songs the high end is just complete garbage that physically makes my ears hurt, for example Enigma's Cross Of Changes. The encoding on that is so bad on Spotify, or at least used to be. What a waste of money, effort and computing resources.
Of course, the best way is to buy either digital or physical releases, which I do for the ones that stick with me.
For people moving off Spotify, have a look at https://listenbrainz.org. You can sync your listens to there and it will give you weekly recommendations. From my experience so far they are decent.
Note they don't host songs themselves, but will auto-search youtube/bandcamp/etc. and play the closest match. So YMMV.
They also commission half-baked slop from session musicians for a fixed rate and then feed it into playlists to reduce the payouts due to artists.
Between churning licenses, AI and session slop, it’s not a usable platform nor one worth supporting. It didn’t even start as a music platform — it was advertising first and music was determined to be an affordable draw.
Pretty much - either they pay gig musicians an hourly wage to record "human" slop that spotify has the rights to and can stream effectively for free, or just out right ai generated slop
Are they greyed out because you blocked them? I'm confused?
I'm 99% my discover weekly hasn't had one yet... and I have a full archive of all my discover weekly's from the last 4 years... Can anybody show me a simple way to check for AI Gnerated content in this list?
Since people are reminiscing on the loss of their favorite music services from the past, I'd like to add We Are Hunted [1] to the list.
> proprietary search technology which continuously scanned the Internet to identify the hottest new music in the world.
For a short period is was the best way to discover new unknown music. It was bought by Twitter, folded into Twitter music (even though they never created a comparable feature) and killed along with it.
If anyone knows anything like this that exists today, please let me know.
Is the belief that these tracks are being generated and placed by Spotify themselves, or is it possible that third parties are uploading generated music? Are other streaming services liable to encounter the same issue?
Spotify have been shown to deliberately promote songs which they call Perfect Fit Content that cost them less in terms of royalties. This includes AI generated songs and you can find the same song under 50 different names according to this article: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify...
I feel like there should definitely be some good parts about AI music. Probably a lot of slop today, but I’m open to AI entertainment possibly surpassing human entertainment in some cases. Or hybrid.
We're actually entering the timeline where you have to migrate to some Neal Stephenson Anathem-esque (digital) monastery where people cultivate knowledge. He really was onto this trend, in the newer Dodge books as well.
Maybe this is one of the few pro-social use cases for crypto, some sort of alternative net where people are verifiably real and content is authentic. I genuinely cannot understand how platforms are not taking more aggressive measures against this stuff.
It just so happens that OpenAI’s sama is founder of World(coin), which in exchange for your biometric data can authenticate you online as a biological human.
I have a slight
y different issue on Spotify and YouTube music. during the day I listen to lo-fi and at night sometimes as background music. this has lead to my entire suggestion list being 4 hour long tracks and nothing related to my actual music I like! I guess most of that lo-fi stuff is now AI generated as well.
I stoped using Spotify when they committed the unforgivable UI sin of "loading a page and then moving elements on that page when web calls complete" that resulted in me clicking on something other than what I had intended to because it changed with my thumb a nanometer from the screen. It was a good 20% of the time and it made me insane.
I think this explains why apps shuffle the UI around every now and then. I build muscle memory to access particular functionality fast, then update comes, I click the wrong thing, and that technically speaking is measured as more engagement.
I dig my YT music quite a bit. Love the plethora of mixes they give me with various smatterings of artists I listen to that go together nicely, plus some new artists in the same vein layered in.. And their holy grail My Supermix rarely misses for me..
Haven't noticed anything AI-created yet. That would really suck if it did happen..
dunno about the AI generated, but their discover weekly algorithm definitely changed a couple of months ago. I went from getting a nice mix of post-2012 music, new, fresh, to a ton of songs I listened to in when I was first getting into music. Very frustrating
I have several songs that I actually like which are AI songs.. maybe they just need to label them explicitly as AI? Or maybe they need a way to filter it out.
There are some honestly funny and interesting AI generated songs out there.
I just quit Spotify because they kicked my family off the family plan without hardly any warning. Apple Music has a family plan and they don’t require that you live at the same address
Years ago, I saw a sign at a junkyard mechanic's shopyard: "We screw the other guy and pass the savings on to you." I laughed, as one does. A little dark humor goes a surprisingly long way, though the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial as you realize that maybe the laugh is meant to take the sting out of the truth that you may never know if you're the other guy or not.
This is what Spotify was from the beginning. It was always going to be exploitative, it was always going to turn to the dark side and embrace the every form of enshittification possible because it was born that way.
It was born out of sleight of hand between broadcast and retail.
It was born out of papering over the economics of piracy with a thin veener of false legitimacy, where the word decimated doesn't begin to cover what actually happened to artist payouts because it's off by more than an order of magnitude. The shameless scale of it would make Walmart blush.
It was born out of collecting consumers with convenience and a dash of zeitgeist.
It was born screwing the people who create the work the platform depends on and passing the savings on to you.
Screwing with you was inevitable, it was just put off until later.
> you may never know if you're the other guy or not
The older I’ve got, the more I think on kindness.
With kindness, there is no ‘other guy’. Sure, this was funny. It is funny. It really is! But it’s _not that funny_. And I feel I couldn’t have said it wasn’t that funny until I’d seen enough (got old enough?) to understand.
Like you I think I’ve thought about being the other guy or not. As for Spotify — I don’t subscribe. I don’t want to be part of it.
> the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial
we need generalized transparency & control for AI content. a standard for metadata annotations, watermarking & UI indicators to inform consumers of AI content and allow them to screen it out.
The problem with the AI content is that it cheapens real content . I'm not talking about the money, i mean the intrinsic and emotional value experienced when connecting with the content. AI pictures make you feel less engaged when you see a real picture from a friend.
Their "disover weekly" has never been great for me. But their DJ is perfect.. its what I listen to 99% of the time tbh. No AI slop as far as I can tell :)
Spotify is terrible but mostly because the interface is bad. It has so many frustrating changes that no one asked for that have accumulated over time and little annoyances / bugs that’ll never be fixed. I feel like basic things such as managing playlists or navigating my library are harder than they need to be. They deserve to lose.
I’m curious about some of the newer services such as Qobuz or Deezer or Tidal. Are they any better?
Unfortunately many of thr same poor UI decisions are baked into Backstage, so soon you’ll have a similar experience deploying code onto your companies development platform.
I'm also planning to leave. It's offensive that they decided to do podcasts and audiobooks and not allow you to turn that off in the UI. I want an app to listen to music! But someone there apparently thinks they can engage me more if they throw in a bunch of other irrelevant functionality. Ugh.
I've been using Tidal for 2-3 years now. Happy with it. I'd recommend it without a question.
I'd say that they, however, are very similar to Spotify from a UI/UX perspective as that seems what the consumer base wants. Unsure if the specific issues you have with Spotify also exist though.
It's astonishing just how awful Spotify's software is. Everything it does, it does poorly, even down to things like playback and playlists that were figured out by other media players decades ago. Just this week, it started randomly playing music on its own when I open it. The fact that this thread has over a hundred comments within an hour speaks to just how despised it is.
Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.
I quit Spotify in the mid 2010s solely because the software was so bad, which robbed me of the satisfaction I might get today from quitting due to its even worse offenses.
Kudos to all the people who shared their opinions and mentioned many alternative services and tools. When I wrote the original post, I didn't know it would end up on HN and spark a discussion here, which means the topic is relevant. It's not just about the slop music itself, but the way Spotify is evolving (or devolving).
I enjoyed the Weekly Discovery and Made For You playlists for years and its suggestion mechanisms were just what I needed. I could tolerate the terrible UI and other minor flaws of the app as long as the excitement of discovering new music continued. I also didn't like the special promotions, podcast recommendations, and other novelties, but the real value was there and it kept me paying for the service.
The changes started around 2020, when the playlists started to contain fewer songs and artists that I could call discoveries. I found myself in what could be called a music bubble, and it didn't feel like it was growing much.
Also, when I first started using Spotify, I spent a lot of time in the app and was more involved in the listening process. Now I was mostly just hitting the button, minimizing the window, and listening to music in the background. It became less interesting. I'd come back to the app occasionally to skip (or block) a track I didn't like. And then came the AI-generated tracks, which was the last straw for me.
Not that I hate Spotify, it's just sad to see it go the way of enshitification. It probably still meets the needs of millions of other users, but I'm no longer one of them. In fact, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be more conscious about my hobby again. I still have my mp3 library that I've been building since the late 1990s, and I still buy and donate to artists from time to time, so I just have to relearn how to do the things that AI algorithms have tried (and failed) to do for me.
I don't see why Spotify's suggestions are all that important. I use it when I want full control over what I'm going to listen to. I search for artists and songs I learned about somewhere else and make my own playlists.
Happy to find Ben Jordan's video here. He's done a few videos about just how bad Spotify (and others) are, and they're all very refreshing data-driven reviews of the industry, free from as much bullshit and bias as is possible.
Long time paid Spotify user. Soon to be ex-paid user. This resonates with me. For a while now, I have been pretty unhappy with the way I consume music. Yes, because Spotify has become shit. The UI is hostile. Their business practices makes me feel bad for using it. And everything else already mentioned in other comments. But there's something else.
My spotify Liked has about 2400 songs. And I can't name most of them. If you played one for me, chances are I wouldn't even know the artist. It all feels so... disposable. How did I get here? I hit like a few times on Discover Weekly, each week. And now...I have this mess! Spotify recommends me songs that sound exactly like other songs...that I can't remember the name of. I can't go back to check. Weeks later I hear it! Or is this the new one that sounds like the old one? I don't know. It's all so surreal and so different than the before times.
In my yutes would buy albums and absolutely devour them whole. Every track. I would listen to just that album for days or weeks. I couldn't afford to buy all the music, so I squeezed every drop of enjoyment I could out the music I had. I think I enjoyed the music much more, back when I had much less.
So, with that nostalgic feeling in mind. I'm starting a new system of music consumption. I'm going back to the old ways! Instead of paying Spotify $12/mo to shovel all the shit in my face, I'm going to spend $12/mo on Bandcamp (or equivalent) to buy an album and pour over it for the whole month, until I buy the next album.
I don't know if this will work. I don't know how I'm going to handle discovery. But I have to do something; And this is something. A few weeks ago I bought some music. Threw it into a Beets.io library. Setup a Navidrome server inside my vpn. I listen with Symfonium on my phone (good offline features there).
Now I'm trying to really listen to the music again; not just mindlessly consume it like disposable content. It feels like this muscle has completely atrophied. Lyrics don't stick like they used to. I don't instantly remember the track order. Listening to an entire album takes some effort. Maybe though, that's the way it should be.
I stopped paying for Spotify years ago and instead make playlists on there that I can feed into any of the various websites that will rip mp3s for you. Yes they are 128kbps, but for casual listening, it's fine. Some tools will try to match against YouTube and download audio from there, since apparently in some cases YouTube will have higher audio quality.
Unfortunately the free version of the Spotify iOS app is absolute unusable garbage.
Where do you get the highest quality audio if you want to put in some work? I'd like to jump ship back to a personal library but don't know how I'm gonna extract these 2000 songs I only have 1/4 of locally
You can pay per track/album to actually own the music as lossless flac files or sign up for their streaming service that uses the same lossless format, but doesn't let you save them.
I do a bit of both and load the flac files onto my fancy DAP for real listening.
I’ll give a counterpoint: with a subscription, Apple Music for iPad is quite literally the best personal music exploration/listening app on the market. A quiet room and good pair of headphones is all the rest you need.
My Spotify experience was poisoned as soon as I signed up some 8 years ago to try it; I realized there was no way to remove the popular but garbage music from the dashboard. It was essentially advertising space for slop. So I cancelled my subscription within 1-2 days. I instead ended up going with Youtube Music which doesn't try to push propaganda on me and instead either shows me what I have in my library already that I have saved and/or uploaded myself, and music that they think I'd enjoy based off of my library.
Prior to this like many other people I was a hardcore Grooveshark fan/user. There were other services, but their names escape me at the moment. I was looking for a replacement and platforms kept coming and going, but Youtube Music (for all of Google's faults) seem to have stayed all this time. I'm still using it, it's still not pushing slop on me. I'm happy.
As an aside, accepting that I'm in the minority here speaking on behalf of them, I am not someone who would write a blog post announcing that I'm leaving some shitty platform. I'll just cancel my sub and move on. I don't need nor want to grandstand regardless of AI or just people's shit taste.
> As an aside, accepting that I'm in the minority here speaking on behalf of them, I am not someone who would write a blog post announcing that I'm leaving some shitty platform. I'll just cancel my sub and move on. I don't need nor want to grandstand regardless of AI or just people's shit taste.
Without someone writing the post you wouldn't be here discussing it. I applaud the author for writing his short post on his own personal website. He's hardly "grandstanding". You're the only one who claims to be "speaking on behalf" of others.
Personally I've had loads of issues with YouTube music, largely in that it regularly makes a point of inserting various popular songs into playlists and radios of otherwise very niche genres (which they have nothing to do with) I strongly prefer to listen to. The more niche the genre, the higher the percentage of what follows is typically in line with it... for a while. Sooner or later everything gets infested with the same tripe I don't want to have to deal with listening to on my own time. It's not even good for discovery, as when I try to let a mix go off of a genre or artist that's new to me it isn't long at all before I spend more time skipping past the same nonsense than I do actually listening to music, new or old.
I work in a public-facing environment. I already hear every single one of these songs, none of which I liked to begin with, to a sickening extent over the radio. Leave me to my esoteric tastes and take the chart-toppers elsewhere.
This is an issue I've had across the board, though, be it Spotify, YT Music, heavily curated Pandora stations, or any other streaming service I've tried; nowadays I strongly prefer simply listening to my local library (which I've played to death, but at least it's to my own preferences) instead.
Show me a platform that stays in its damn lane where I can listen to what I want to, and I'll gladly hand over my cash; I'm not gonna do that to be made to listen to the same junk that scored me making that cash to begin with.
What was your experience with Tidal? I felt like it was better at recommending new albums and artists I want familiar with and there was much less of a focus on playlists.
I haven't used Tidal yet, myself. I've got a mind to, though, especially as it seems much friendlier to artists than most--I'd even consider publishing my own music there, whereas other streaming services (with maybe the sole exception of YouTube music for sheer discoverability) are hard "no"s that I personally explicitly refuse to touch.
This drove me insane a little while ago. Every single "personalised" Spotify playlist that got shovelled my way had a bunch of songs on it from Olivia Rodrigo's latest album, regardless of whether they fit the playlist theme or not. I don't listen to Olivia Rodrigo, and consistently skip her songs when they come up because they just aren't my cup of tea, but Spotify continued to shoehorn them into every playlist I listened to.
Same thing with the AI DJ. There are some days where it just never misses, and I can listen for hours without skipping a single song. Other days, it feels like every other theme is "here's an artist we've been paid to advertise", and I end up getting tired of it pretty quickly.
But the future is obvious right? If an AI citizen pays taxes, contributes to society, and has the same rights as humans, why would their creative expression be considered less "real" than a human's? They would be a legitimate member of society expressing themselves through music, just like any other citizen.
Damn, you went from pinocchio to real boy is 2 seconds. Your anthropomorphic assumptions will lead to the classification within various species. If you are gonna pay an AI for it's output, but not bees....you may want to re-evaluate your premise.
This was one of the reasons why I left Spotify. There are hundreds of posts about this issue on the Spotify community site, e.g.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Option-to...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/Spotify-P...
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Your-Library/I-Sent-a-Playl...
Spotify is also funny for maintaining the existence of their feature suggestion community boards while just utterly stonewalling for years while thousands of paying users beg for stuff like…being able to hide a section of the home screen, or not have long-standing playlists magically change.
At least on Tidal you can email customer support about it, but they are slow (probably under staffed) and it usually takes weeks for them to fix things and now with the constant flood of AI-made music, the crap accumulates faster than it can be cleaned up.
I ended up moving on to Apple Music where the situation in relation to attribution is not as bad. I chose Apple Music because it's among the services that has better rates for artists, although lower than Tidal https://virpp.com/hello/music-streaming-payouts-comparison-a...
my one I've been asking them for years for is the ability to quickly swap profiles on a family plan. (first world problem i know!)
My daughter, not being able to swap to her profile on our main media machine has utterly destroyed the utility of Discover Weekly for me, and for a time that was my favorite spotify feature.
Starting at some point around 2 years ago (it seems they A-B tested this for a while because it went back and forth), the radio option became so highly customized to your user account that most songs it plays will be ones you've heard a billion times, even songs that aren't remotely similar in any way other than that you like them.
And the playlist radio option, which was the most powerful one for discovery, has been completely removed.
I used the radio option for years to discover new music, and I really loved it. Now I feel a twinge of sadness mixed with rage when my memories of the good days get me to open Spotify and I remember what it's become.
This sucks for you and me but is Spotify giving the masses what they actually enjoy.
https://craphound.com/category/internetcon/
I wonder which suffix is more popular, -ify, -ly, or -r.
I guess the hope is they won't end up in the toilet and they might, in the future, be able to buy a domain not prefixed by "get"
.com is the best TLD by a long shot but it's really saturated, so as a startup you have no chance.
As you say, the hope is to make it and be able to buy the X in getX.com where hopefully you've checked that X belongs to a squatter and not an existing company (they're both bad the latter is worse).
Would you mind explaining please?
that was all set off by flickr - they might not have been the first to do it, but they were the first to get popular enough to set off a wave of imitators.
Spotify is awful for me, I concur with the original article. YouTube Music is heading slowly the same way. At this rate I'll have to cast around for another phone that can take an SD card again.
The service I really miss is eMusic, they had little in the way of well known music so leaned into small label music and it was wonderful.
- A section with 8 of my recently played playlists
- A section of "Made for <my name>" with 6 Daily Mixes (which I generally like), Discover weekly (which I like now that it's tailored to me: I used to hate that it only contained pop/hip hop hits), Release Radar (love it), and the AI DJ (which I find very annoying)
- A section called Recently Played which looks like all legitimate things I've played
- "New Releases for You", which are all by artists I've listened to very recently
- "Jump back in", which has several playlists and artists I've listened to recently
- A sidebar of all of my playlists I've created or followed
Of the ~50 actionable items on the page, the only one I dislike is the AI DJ, but it by no means feels forced on me since it's just a single square.
https://i.imgur.com/RKsIgLR.jpeg
The last time I used Spotify (and the reason I left) podcast were constantly featured on the start page and it was impossible to remove them (and I have zero interest in podcast in my music application).
There's one prolific ai musician producing logo beats (boring) and psychedelic ambient (pretty much random drones) that I just can't shake from my playlists as they release lots of stuff under several different names.
https://suno.com/song/da6d4a83-1001-4694-8c28-648a6e8bad0a
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/mit-l...
It's just so good, IMHO.
I have a very long list of features in my head, that seem incredibly obvious and simple to implement. Some of these features were present in other music library applications ~25 years ago (Winamp et al.).
For example, "following" an artist doesn't actually seem to do anything useful as far as I can tell. I've followed a million artists, but I often find out they released new albums and I had no idea. Even something as simple as a notification badge as I scroll through my followed artist list would do wonders for discovery.
And when I consider that the features they do have in their applications don't work all that well to begin with... One egregious example is saving music for offline listening on my phone. I can't tell you how many times I've boarded an airplane to find out the app just decided to purge it all.
Another super fun issue I ran into that actually cost Spotify money since I canceled my family subscription - There are no parental controls or any other method for blocking podcasts. And the podcasts now include videos! So I go through all the trouble of locking down youtube, etc on every device in my house and suddenly find my kid watching Logan Paul videos on Spotify!
They just feel like a company that has the velocity of a snail.
I want to me able to give my 10yo an app on their phone to listen to music, and not have to check to see if they're actually watching videos, or listening to (possibly wildly inappropriate) podcasts - or worst of both worlds - watching video podcasts.
Qobuz isn't perfect in terms of UI, but they seem to care about, and only care about, music. I trialed Amazon Music, but it (unsurprisingly) is an ad platform, too. Apple Music was a contender - the only reason I didn't end up with it is because (also unsurprisingly) it doesn't integrate well with network streamers.
Qobuz is a bit more expensive, but so far it has been worth it.
I've not heard of Qobuz before, thanks for the recommendation.
It's a shame all good things have to slowly tend towards sucking, instead of getting better. Bitwarden, one of my beloved apps, has done the same with a god-awful UI redesign.
Youtube music is just as bad with pushing unwanted content. I can't believe the answer after 10 years of this is to go back to doing it myself, downloading MP3s and using something (currently Jellyfin) to curate them.
At least Youtube music lets me upload my own music to it, so that's the main reason I'm still mostly using it.
PS: Please don't reply and tell me I just haven't found the right podcast. The "X person/people talking taking 2 hours to discuss something that could be discussed succinctly in 5 minutes" isn't a format I'm interested in.
When you inject personal opinions like this which are obviously at odds with millions of other people, it's difficult to take the rest of the comment seriously.
Having such strong feelings about something you can just ignore is unhealthy.
FWIW, I cancelled Spotify last year and their focus on podcasts was one of the reasons. But there are plenty of other services that cater to music lovers so I just increased my bandcamp spend and moved on with my life.
You meant "at least a tiny fraction of". That's all. When you say "many", we should read "at least a tiny fraction of".
> You're living in a bubble.
This is a bit of a strange comment.
You refuse to believe that millions of people hate podcasts, to the point that you apparently need a survey with millions of people saying that as evidence. You live in a bubble of people who haven't told you they hate morning DJs and podcasts. If I instead told you that millions of people detest vlogs, would you also require hard evidence?
If you read what I wrote, you'll see I never said that. I don't know why you think it's worth replying to something other than what I wrote.
I responded to something you wrote. Maybe I didn't respond to what you meant to write, but the solution to that is for you to write what you meant.
Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/2tLoFkQ
I agree this format of podcast is terrible, but there are many podcasts that are more like one or a couple of people each giving a presentation and I enjoy them a lot.
Ukraine the Latest by The Telegraph and The History of Rome by Mike Duncan are ones I particularly enjoyed.
+1. Given it's open source I'm tempted to revert to the older one, though it will probably stop working over time as other things change :(
Yeah same for me too. The only podcasts I can bear are monologues, when there's more than one people at least they're each talking to me not to each other. Things like Hardcore History, Anthropocene Reviewed, and most of 99% Invisible.
I subscribe to Qobuz and buy a lot of lossless DRM free music and can recommend them as well, tho there was recently a big swath of the available music dropped due to licensing issues (hence the utility of downloading DRM free music). I also price shop against the digital albums and often a CD on eBay will be cheaper, I don’t mind missing out on the “24bit 192khz hifi” to save a few bucks.
Edit: I can't imagine swapping HDD for flash saves more than a few grams, can it?
I ultimately replaced it with a Zen Stone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Zen#ZEN_Stone/Stone_P...
With the classic iPod you've got a bad UI instead of a good UI and a large object instead of a small one. And while it will be lighter without the hard drive, it will still be a lot heavier than an mp3 player. It's pure downside on several different dimensions.
If you want to play your music on a device shaped like an iPod, it's even easier to use your existing phone.
some of the older models were definitely better, but at 20-40 bucks each and no real dependencies on the rest of my personal computer ecosystem it's a fair trade.
it's only that Spotify and YT music are easy to use that I haven't bought a new one. with enshitifacation being a thing I might go back
There's also local independent radio stations, many of which have streaming now.
WYCE is my personal favorite - https://grcmc.org/wyce
You can use services like listenbrainz or last.fm.
- 500GB+
- Ability to sort by the albumartist tag (listen to heaps of compilations)
- Ability to export play log
- Functions like any other external storage device for transfer purposes
Anything out there? Last I checked (10 years ago) there was nothing that hit all these marks. I had a Sansa Clip with Rockbox and just dealt with the low storage capacity.
Dedicated players are getting harder to find though. I had a Cowon mp3 player for a few years which was pretty nice. Maybe see if they've got something you like? http://www.cowonglobal.com
I don't get it why people but Samsung S99 Pro Plus Maxi for €9999 when cheap phones for developing markets are objectively better, minus the camera, and cost like €300.
Now I’m wondering if anybody sells a USB-C adapter to iPod dock connector.
One of these days the parts are going to end up at my doorstep. Boredom and a couple of beers away.
https://moonlit.market/
Have you got the old iTunes installed? I was pleasantly surprised Apple still offers the old binaries for download
https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs/software
"New music is shit. Kids these days have no taste."
You're not going to be forced to upload an Ableton project and video of you recording the instruments. AI music usually is heavily processed and arranged by a human anyway, it's not yet like pushing a button (if you want to get listens).
At most it's the 'artists' self-admission of copyright via stuff like Distrokid + some automated analysis for sample royalties.
So likewise AI at most will just be a checkbox they'll choose to ignore during that process just like people who repost other artists music.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
ctrl+f "summer afternoon in Brooklyn"
I also have a personal list of hundreds of albums I want to hear. If I don't feel like anything in specific I pick one at random since Spotify usually has it. Having such a list, I don't see the appeal in listening to Spotify's curated playlists.
I've found some excellent picks I wouldn't have heard of otherwise from this service. Plus RYM alone is good for manually browsing user-generated lists. Also their genre categorisation is community-driven and by far the most detailed I've come across. Unfortunately their API is not open yet but they're making headway into officially releasing it this year. Hopefully by then I'll be able to auto-add all my curated to-listen albums.
Woe befalls the Audiobooks team, who lost that war. Sad for them.
Sorry, throughout that diatribe I forgot to even mention what Courses were, or why anyone would want them. That could only be because, I have no idea. Seeing it written in my Library tab, "Podcasts and Courses" is like hearing the echo of a feature that doesn't exist. Where do I find these courses? What do I search for? Are they included in my plan? There's none on my home page... wait, I just realized how little I care.
I think, or rather hope, we're entering an era of tech business where money gets more expensive, thus sensibility must return, you can't just be focused on growth you need to make money, keep customers happy, and not worry less about the next hundred million customers. I'm seeing it in some products. Not in Spotify, to be clear. Here's the sensible thing Spotify could do: Create a $22/mo plan, hi-fi audio, a big "Super Premium" badge around your avatar, custom app color themes, customize your home page and sidebars, this literally writes itself, people would buy it. Would it make enough money to justify the investment? Hey Dan: Did building Podcasts and Audiobooks? Yeah that's what I thought.
The only feature of spotify that I've ever been interested in was discovering new and new to me music. I'm not interested in AI slop though, and I can't imagine a lot of people would be (maybe the background noise use case don't mind so much which is fair, I suppose). Is this going to get to a tipping point with spotify for it to go under (or lose a LOAD of value), or is it going to be like 'smart' TVs where non-'smart' TVs essentially don't exist because almost all manufacturers have realised they can make more money from forcing ads and spyware? I see that it's been a problem for nigh on a decade according to that Wikipedia page but with the floodgates for AI feel a lot more open than they used to.
Kinda related, does anybody use soundcloud any more? Just interesting that it seemed hugely popular and was then derided (terms like 'soundcloud rapper') and I haven't heard about it in a while.
I suppose netflix still exists despite derision for their awful originals, killing the good originals, and having little content (especially internationally!).
Spotify will be fine, especially with how little they pay artists, but it's probably a shame for a lot of users.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_fake_artists_...
Every time you load the page it recommends a random album from Deezer’s catalog. The algorithm is pretty silly: loop Math.random() * MAX_ID until you find an album id that actually exists and return it.
The goal was to recreate that feeling you’d get going down to someone’s basement and thumbing through an old record collection.
Also 1001 Albums to Listen To Before You Die is a pretty decent collection of canonical albums from the record industry that’ll keep you busy for quite a while.
I think it's neat though, enjoyed refreshing and seeing loads of weird album art!
Yeah, I'm all over the lists. So many are so narrow in scope, which can be frustrating.
I recently jumped off Qobuz exclusively because of their drunk recommendation algorithm, or lack thereof (it seems I'd often end up with whatever is on the front page). I wound up on Pandora: their whole value proposition was finding music you like, and music you might like. I haven't been on Spotify in a hot minute, so I can't make a comparison, but Pandora has been pretty good.
The killer app of Spotify has been expanding my horizons past the 30 tracks on my MP3 player. But that seems to have stalled. I do like being notified when bands I like release new music. I am hopeless at keeping up with music so thats useful.
One of my main complaints with Spotify is how lousy it is with that for me. Release Radar is usually a pile of songs almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what I listen to. Bands it knows I follow since it makes playlists for them will have new tracks never show up unless I go to their page or it comes up randomly.
I have no idea what the "follow" feature does because it doesn't notify me for new music from followed artists, and "What's New" doesn't include new releases from all of them. But it has given me four notifications that Journey is coming to Nashville in case I didn't get it the first time.
Release radar does seem useless.
People have these ultra narrow niche picky preferences and then ragequit when they don’t get their way.
“I want a machine learning customized playlist but it should have perfect intuition about what is made by humans and what is not and if you can’t make that I’ll call you ‘garbage.’”
We can’t even sort email properly with algos and we’ve been trying for over 30 years. We can’t block phishing.
If you hate Spotify so much go back to your cd collection or try pirating mp3s again. That service is a miracle — dozens and dozens of startups burned hundreds of millions trying to build something like that years before - and all people can do is whine. “Mehhh, it’s electron, waaaaa”. Ok go make your own service in c++ or whatever and then get all the major labels on board and then make it popular and then make it profitable. I’ll wait. Or actually I won’t I think I’ll go listen to Money for Nothing on Spotify on any of five or six operating systems.
Tech is wasted on people like this. Show some appreciation for the miracles around us. Spotify is one of them.
My question to the haters: If Spotify is so bad, as you claim, why haven't we seen a flurry of competitors emerge? My guess: Licensing a large enough set of music to make a compelling alternative is the primary moat.
Last point: While I believe people and their stories about AI gen'd slop appearing in their playlists, I have not experienced the same. Are my musical tastes so bland that they just don't bother? (No trolling to others on that one... Just poking a bit of fun at myself.)
its not a space i follow so i have all the details wrong.
- the godawful ai dj they tried to force on pple
- buying gimlet media and running it into the toilet. some of the world's best and favorite podcasts, gone because some swedish billionaire decided to throw all his money into foie grasing a perfectly fine niche media company.
- buying anchor and going absolutely nowhere with it. it was never good so whatever. nice try i guess.
- locking up joe rogan and whoever to try to put walled gardens around podcasting (to this day when you go to a spotify page for a podcast it acts like it has never heard of "RSS" or "mp3". fucking offensive)
- they habitually screw over musicians https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
- reggie watts: https://www.instagram.com/p/DEhAr7lx7CI/?igsh=bXBpZ25kczMyZ3...
- bjork: https://variety.com/2025/music/news/bjork-spotify-streaming-...
- they faked spotify wrapped numbers https://x.com/hello__caitlin/status/1864367028758565216?s=46
- this is petty but they are a big step back from winamp and that is just slop https://x.com/riomadeit/status/1878556039676666024
i will say ONE nice thing. Gustav Soderstrom himself does make a pretty damn good podcast about spotify https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-11/introducing-the-new-... . its a real shame his product is mostly riding the highs of early good decisions.
Not to mention blowing >$250M of their subscription revenue to lock down one podcaster when most of their subscribers joined for not podcasts. That money could have gone towards paying music artists better rates like Apple Music and Tidal do.
The second part was demonetizing any songs with under 1000 streams per year- they're just taking most of the long tail for themselves now.
[0] https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/26/universal-music-...
All streaming platforms realistically pay out close to the federally-set royalty rate.
They couldn’t allow for users to opt out of the constant A/B testing and user herding in the ever-changing official client by using a sane third-party client that just acts like a normal music player and obeys the user’s preferences. The ability to shove the music that’s most profitable and whatever other non-relevant audio content in users’ faces by mandating official client use is too valuable to give up.
Somehow even Apple is better on this front, with there being multiple alternative Apple Music clients out there that are build with official Apple SDKs and aren’t reverse engineered, which is crazy. They’ve out-Apple’d Apple.
It exists... but only for employees: https://xcancel.com/rogueops/status/1656349863968112680
It seems like most podcasts do everything they can to make downloading an MP3 impossible. This isn't just a spotify problem. Just about every website for every podcast I've seen does the same thing.
- get youtube premium, has youtube music with it. youtube music is basically straight superset of spotify.
- https://github.com/jam3scampbell/music
That would explain why mine were definitely wrong too. Although I wouldn't attribute it to malice since it makes little sense to tell me I used their paid service much less than I thought, at least compared to the opposite.
If Spotify offered AI-generated tracks of stunning beauty and sterling production quality, I might even consider subscribing to it. But apparently the "slop" which the post refers to is far from this heavenly ideal.
So I stay with YouTube premium and keep buying music on Bandcamp from the authors.
Of course, the best way is to buy either digital or physical releases, which I do for the ones that stick with me.
Note they don't host songs themselves, but will auto-search youtube/bandcamp/etc. and play the closest match. So YMMV.
Between churning licenses, AI and session slop, it’s not a usable platform nor one worth supporting. It didn’t even start as a music platform — it was advertising first and music was determined to be an affordable draw.
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
https://www.fastcompany.com/91170296/spotify-ai-music
I'm 99% my discover weekly hasn't had one yet... and I have a full archive of all my discover weekly's from the last 4 years... Can anybody show me a simple way to check for AI Gnerated content in this list?
> proprietary search technology which continuously scanned the Internet to identify the hottest new music in the world.
For a short period is was the best way to discover new unknown music. It was bought by Twitter, folded into Twitter music (even though they never created a comparable feature) and killed along with it.
If anyone knows anything like this that exists today, please let me know.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Hunted
It’s a Chromium Embedded Framework app, and they publish nightlies of CEF.
Maybe they’ve moved over, but I doubt it.
Maybe this is one of the few pro-social use cases for crypto, some sort of alternative net where people are verifiably real and content is authentic. I genuinely cannot understand how platforms are not taking more aggressive measures against this stuff.
Haven't noticed anything AI-created yet. That would really suck if it did happen..
There are some honestly funny and interesting AI generated songs out there.
Never looking back!
This is what Spotify was from the beginning. It was always going to be exploitative, it was always going to turn to the dark side and embrace the every form of enshittification possible because it was born that way.
It was born out of sleight of hand between broadcast and retail.
It was born out of papering over the economics of piracy with a thin veener of false legitimacy, where the word decimated doesn't begin to cover what actually happened to artist payouts because it's off by more than an order of magnitude. The shameless scale of it would make Walmart blush.
It was born out of collecting consumers with convenience and a dash of zeitgeist.
It was born screwing the people who create the work the platform depends on and passing the savings on to you.
Screwing with you was inevitable, it was just put off until later.
The older I’ve got, the more I think on kindness.
With kindness, there is no ‘other guy’. Sure, this was funny. It is funny. It really is! But it’s _not that funny_. And I feel I couldn’t have said it wasn’t that funny until I’d seen enough (got old enough?) to understand.
Like you I think I’ve thought about being the other guy or not. As for Spotify — I don’t subscribe. I don’t want to be part of it.
> the darkness feels stickier and the levity more trivial
I edited to add: what extraordinary wording.
Thanks for the kind words!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The problem with the AI content is that it cheapens real content . I'm not talking about the money, i mean the intrinsic and emotional value experienced when connecting with the content. AI pictures make you feel less engaged when you see a real picture from a friend.
This one is also really good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hX8iQvs2mw
I’m curious about some of the newer services such as Qobuz or Deezer or Tidal. Are they any better?
I'd say that they, however, are very similar to Spotify from a UI/UX perspective as that seems what the consumer base wants. Unsure if the specific issues you have with Spotify also exist though.
Spotify truly isn't a software company the same way your health insurance company has a web portal but isn't a software company either.
I enjoyed the Weekly Discovery and Made For You playlists for years and its suggestion mechanisms were just what I needed. I could tolerate the terrible UI and other minor flaws of the app as long as the excitement of discovering new music continued. I also didn't like the special promotions, podcast recommendations, and other novelties, but the real value was there and it kept me paying for the service.
The changes started around 2020, when the playlists started to contain fewer songs and artists that I could call discoveries. I found myself in what could be called a music bubble, and it didn't feel like it was growing much.
Also, when I first started using Spotify, I spent a lot of time in the app and was more involved in the listening process. Now I was mostly just hitting the button, minimizing the window, and listening to music in the background. It became less interesting. I'd come back to the app occasionally to skip (or block) a track I didn't like. And then came the AI-generated tracks, which was the last straw for me.
Not that I hate Spotify, it's just sad to see it go the way of enshitification. It probably still meets the needs of millions of other users, but I'm no longer one of them. In fact, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be more conscious about my hobby again. I still have my mp3 library that I've been building since the late 1990s, and I still buy and donate to artists from time to time, so I just have to relearn how to do the things that AI algorithms have tried (and failed) to do for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVXfcIb3OKo
edit: personally if I just use my playlist spotify is fine for me, except the 4GB ram issue on 64bit but that's rare/may be old news now
Long time paid Spotify user. Soon to be ex-paid user. This resonates with me. For a while now, I have been pretty unhappy with the way I consume music. Yes, because Spotify has become shit. The UI is hostile. Their business practices makes me feel bad for using it. And everything else already mentioned in other comments. But there's something else.
My spotify Liked has about 2400 songs. And I can't name most of them. If you played one for me, chances are I wouldn't even know the artist. It all feels so... disposable. How did I get here? I hit like a few times on Discover Weekly, each week. And now...I have this mess! Spotify recommends me songs that sound exactly like other songs...that I can't remember the name of. I can't go back to check. Weeks later I hear it! Or is this the new one that sounds like the old one? I don't know. It's all so surreal and so different than the before times.
In my yutes would buy albums and absolutely devour them whole. Every track. I would listen to just that album for days or weeks. I couldn't afford to buy all the music, so I squeezed every drop of enjoyment I could out the music I had. I think I enjoyed the music much more, back when I had much less.
So, with that nostalgic feeling in mind. I'm starting a new system of music consumption. I'm going back to the old ways! Instead of paying Spotify $12/mo to shovel all the shit in my face, I'm going to spend $12/mo on Bandcamp (or equivalent) to buy an album and pour over it for the whole month, until I buy the next album.
I don't know if this will work. I don't know how I'm going to handle discovery. But I have to do something; And this is something. A few weeks ago I bought some music. Threw it into a Beets.io library. Setup a Navidrome server inside my vpn. I listen with Symfonium on my phone (good offline features there).
Now I'm trying to really listen to the music again; not just mindlessly consume it like disposable content. It feels like this muscle has completely atrophied. Lyrics don't stick like they used to. I don't instantly remember the track order. Listening to an entire album takes some effort. Maybe though, that's the way it should be.
Unfortunately the free version of the Spotify iOS app is absolute unusable garbage.
You can pay per track/album to actually own the music as lossless flac files or sign up for their streaming service that uses the same lossless format, but doesn't let you save them.
I do a bit of both and load the flac files onto my fancy DAP for real listening.
And where to go?
I’d like Apple but their apps are horrendous and they completely bastardized the classic Music app pre streaming.
https://www.deezer.com
Options for acquiring media:
- Buy vinyl/CDs
- Ripping from streaming services (Deezer was well-known for that a few years ago)
- yt-dlp for niche picks you can’t find in better quality elsewhere
- Rip CDs from local library
- Bandcamp, Soundcloud
- Various what.cd successors, if that’s your thing
I’ll give a counterpoint: with a subscription, Apple Music for iPad is quite literally the best personal music exploration/listening app on the market. A quiet room and good pair of headphones is all the rest you need.
- youtube music
Prior to this like many other people I was a hardcore Grooveshark fan/user. There were other services, but their names escape me at the moment. I was looking for a replacement and platforms kept coming and going, but Youtube Music (for all of Google's faults) seem to have stayed all this time. I'm still using it, it's still not pushing slop on me. I'm happy.
As an aside, accepting that I'm in the minority here speaking on behalf of them, I am not someone who would write a blog post announcing that I'm leaving some shitty platform. I'll just cancel my sub and move on. I don't need nor want to grandstand regardless of AI or just people's shit taste.
My jam was Audiogalaxy.
One thing that has always pissed me off is the heavy-handed way the Big 3 labels have dealt with this.
https://www.tips4design.com/2010/08/ai-draw-grooveshark-logo...
Without someone writing the post you wouldn't be here discussing it. I applaud the author for writing his short post on his own personal website. He's hardly "grandstanding". You're the only one who claims to be "speaking on behalf" of others.
I work in a public-facing environment. I already hear every single one of these songs, none of which I liked to begin with, to a sickening extent over the radio. Leave me to my esoteric tastes and take the chart-toppers elsewhere.
This is an issue I've had across the board, though, be it Spotify, YT Music, heavily curated Pandora stations, or any other streaming service I've tried; nowadays I strongly prefer simply listening to my local library (which I've played to death, but at least it's to my own preferences) instead.
Show me a platform that stays in its damn lane where I can listen to what I want to, and I'll gladly hand over my cash; I'm not gonna do that to be made to listen to the same junk that scored me making that cash to begin with.
Same thing with the AI DJ. There are some days where it just never misses, and I can listen for hours without skipping a single song. Other days, it feels like every other theme is "here's an artist we've been paid to advertise", and I end up getting tired of it pretty quickly.
Make a new word! Slop has so many meanings already.
/half-s
Damn, you went from pinocchio to real boy is 2 seconds. Your anthropomorphic assumptions will lead to the classification within various species. If you are gonna pay an AI for it's output, but not bees....you may want to re-evaluate your premise.