Interesting piece about the state of music discovery in 2019. Not true for everyone I'm sure, but as a frequent buyer of records and CDs it resonated with me. This paragraph especially jumped out...
Interesting piece about the state of music discovery in 2019. Not true for everyone I'm sure, but as a frequent buyer of records and CDs it resonated with me. This paragraph especially jumped out at me:
The bulk of the music I was bugging out over was not on Spotify — something I don’t think was a coincidence. So I paid up and bought some of the releases. That’s when an old, familiar truth circled back on me: paying for music made me listen to it more. As I’d had to part with my hard-earned to get it, I was playing it over and over.
It is unfortunate that the world is shrinking the way it is, but options for those who care about music (or books, movies, news, or anything else going through these same digital growing pains) still abound and I doubt we'll ever reach a point where there are none. They're not difficult to find for anyone willing to put half as much effort into looking as they do complaining about how difficult they are to find these days.
I pay $10 a month and can listen to almost anything I could ever possibly imagine. I can't speak for everyone, but as a musician who has hosted music on most popular streaming sites over the past...
I pay $10 a month and can listen to almost anything I could ever possibly imagine. I can't speak for everyone, but as a musician who has hosted music on most popular streaming sites over the past decade I can say with confidence streaming has been a good thing.
There is a big discussion in artist communities concerning "exposure vs. compensation". A lot of venues and services will try to use your art to their own end, only to repay with "exposure." It's an age old practice that screws musicians over constantly. I don't think streaming doesn't fit this model. You can repay the initial upload cost easily, even as a very small artist. Once it's out there, your music will often get streamed in places that would NEVER hear your music otherwise. Are all artists making a living wage off streaming? No, probably not. But my music is being heard around the world for free. Likewise, most of my favorite artists I've found in the past 2 years have been almost exclusively from streaming services. Musicians have never made their bulk income off physical sales and likewise, they will never make a livable wage on streams.
Alongside this, payment models on streaming services seem superficially fair but in truth do not favour the small act, the people on the rise. Daniel Ek tells us that he wants to have millions of artists making a living from streaming services, but — and here comes that gaslighting again — behind that benevolent statement is a reality in which any artist must hit millions of streams in order to actually generate income of any meaningful amount. And, as an industry, everyone appears to be accepting that, like it is now perfectly correct wisdom. But it isn’t, and someone needs to call that out.
I don't know where the gaslighting comes from, this is literally how the music industry has ALWAYS been, the model just shifted. The author even admits this later in the article. I think people who think like this don't understand how music and genres have shifted in the past 30 years. There are no "rock stars" anymore. Genres have been splintered into thousands and thousands of sub-genres to the point where music has become almost personalized. It's almost a gaurentee you can find an artist who puts out music consistently that you identify deeply with. Do I think an "underground/upandcoming/whatever" artists like Earl Sweatshirt deserves more attention than hes getting? I do, but his music isn't for everyone and he will probably never get the sort of fame that Kanye or Drake or whoever. That "rush" the article mentions so often is a deep connection with piece of music you are listening to. The more personalized an artist is to your taste, the bigger of a "rush" you will get. The more personalized the artist is to your taste, the less likely it is that large numbers of other people will identify with that artist as well. The less likely the artist appeals on a mass scale, the less money they make. It's a very simple formula that I've found that seems to hold true with most real world examples. We have access to so much music, it's almost nauseating. So maybe in that respect, I can see the authors problem?
As a listener, I have gotten that more in the past two years using spotify than I ever would scowering bandcamp/soundcloud/a record store. I'm, in no way, saying those outlets are useless or even lesser but I hate these "streaming is ruining music for artists and listeners." I guess as someone who makes music a very large part of their life, I've been more willing to take the time to find what kind of music I really like, so maybe that's where I'm finding my disconnect with the article.
I definitely agree with this article. My music consumption and discovery habits have drastically changed from even 10 years ago to where its now hard for me to have Spotify recommend me decent...
I definitely agree with this article. My music consumption and discovery habits have drastically changed from even 10 years ago to where its now hard for me to have Spotify recommend me decent music. My Spotify library consists of albums where I have only saved maybe 1-2 songs. Its very rare for me to actually sit down and listen to an artists entire discography. Typically I will just shuffle all my songs into one big playlist and skip until I find a song that matches my mood. Even then, if I put on the song radio, I find the song radio algorithm not entirely great.
Another thing that seems to escape the algorithms is irony. I will sometimes listen to a funny song like something from Kid's Trap or a Weird Al song, or a country song, or whatever I think might be funny at the time. Now, I get tons of just weird recommendations for genres I don't really like at all. It is similar to the one time that I watched Shrek: The Musical on Netflix and was recommended stuff similar to that awful musical.
I think the problem is the lack of fidelity on why I am listening or watching something. Youtube, Netflix, and Spotify all seem to rely on the simple Yes/No coding for whether something is sincerely liked and the fact that this thing was selected at all. What's scary to me is that there are people who's media consumption is entirely reliant on these algorithms and they are unaware of the limitations that they pose to broadening one's own tastes. It reminds me of the equivalent of living forever in a small town and never leaving. And then that becomes your world.
This is basically you being lazy tbh. I also have a "everything I like" playlist that I listen to a lot. Also like you, Spotify recommends songs I don't like sometimes. I've found that the thumbs...
This is basically you being lazy tbh. I also have a "everything I like" playlist that I listen to a lot. Also like you, Spotify recommends songs I don't like sometimes. I've found that the thumbs down funcitonality is pretty good for that.
But the main thing is you can just use the search bar and listen to an album if you want. OF COURSE Spotify can't magically recommend you new music that you like as much as if you actively went out and put time into discovering new music. But if you put the effort into discovering some new bands, or listen to some classic albums you've been meaning to listen to, you can still use Spotify to listen to that music.
Discover Weekly, and other recommended music channels on Spotify are convenient and have given me some of my favorite discoveries. But if you don't like them, or just want to switch it up, then Spotify has many other ways to listen to music.
There is no need to make judgments based on the limited amount of information you have on my music listening habits. I do various things to make Spotify better at recommending songs: Removing...
This is basically you being lazy tbh.
There is no need to make judgments based on the limited amount of information you have on my music listening habits. I do various things to make Spotify better at recommending songs:
Removing songs from my library that I continually skip
Finding discographies on the artist's page
Looking through the similar artists that are listed on the page.
Disliking the songs recommended to me in Discover Weekly and Release Radar
Going to bandcamp to find new artists with limited views
Reviewing my old physical music library and adding songs from albums I enjoyed in the past
Requesting and downloading my Spotify data to review and analyze
Keeping a Discover Archive and Release Radar Archive playlist to revisit
And I'm telling you, after doing all that, I still get crappy LoFi recommendations for 25% of my Discover playlist (because I listened to that one LoFi playlist three weeks ago), 25% mopey indie guys who can't sing (presumably because I listen to The Shins), 40% assorted, and 10% I actually add to the library for further curation (first point above). So I stand by what I say regarding the algorithm's recommendation ability, it doesn't factor in the correct information. Its highly limited and shouldn't be relied upon to discover music.
A person recommending songs gives me so much more value than Spotify's Discover Playlists, Release Radar, and even the Daily Playlists it recommends for me. Its why I have an IFTTT applet to put all the /r/ListenToThis songs into playlist I can stream. One day I will likely have something for ~music as well so I have access to new and interesting music recommended by actual people rather than a biased algorithm.
I don't mean lazy as a value judgement. I mean if you use ONLY Spotify and complain that it isn't recommending you music that you like, you can either suck it up, or spend more time discovering...
I don't mean lazy as a value judgement. I mean if you use ONLY Spotify and complain that it isn't recommending you music that you like, you can either suck it up, or spend more time discovering new stuff. It sounds like you chose the latter. My point is if someone didn't follow music discussions in 2005 and they still don't follow music discussions in 2019, they are getting much better recommendations now than they did then. Therefore everything has only improved. Honestly anything bashing the tech involved with music streaming, I'm going to take issue with. The artists rights and general capitalism things can always be addressed, but streaming sites put the entire fucking world at our fingertips and people still find something to complain about.
In 2005 if there were a listen_to_this equivalent, you would not be able to listen to a lot of the stuff that was posted. You could check the library or the record store, but who knows how much you would find? Now you can essentially listen to all of it. Even if the occasional track is not on a streaming service, it's still a better hit rate than it used to be.
So comparing Spotify's recommendations to human is not fair. The latter takes time and energy to be spent discovering good sources and people whose tastes match your own. The only fair comparison for passive music discovery is like the itunes store top 100 songs page.
It totally is fair. And it's fair to criticize all of the other internet media companies out there for their bad recommendation algorithms like I did in my original post. No one is criticizing...
So comparing Spotify's recommendations to human is not fair.
It totally is fair. And it's fair to criticize all of the other internet media companies out there for their bad recommendation algorithms like I did in my original post. No one is criticizing them for bringing the world to our fingertips but I am complaining on the way that content is being presented, advertised, and delivered. I would bet that a significant amount of money is spent at Spotify and other internet media companies on recommendation engines because better recommendations = better engagement from users = less time spent off-site looking for the content that is provided by the provider.
Just because things are better today than they were in 2005 doesn't mean you can't criticize the things today. The world today is a very different place and in 10 more years, a significant portion of our population won't even know what its like to go to a record store and hand-pick music. Nor will the vast majority of people not spend hours curating their Spotify music library and researching music off-platform. Not because these people are lazy, but rather they are practical and normal people who just want to listen to music. I still stick to my arguments and think these recommendations are bad. They will get better. And I bet when they do, the first company to really nail it is going to take a significant slice out of the other content provider's pie.
I get the author's sentiments. Paying for a particular thing is going to lead to a greater attachment to that thing, and not in a bad way. Streaming services as a whole tend to cheapen the...
I get the author's sentiments. Paying for a particular thing is going to lead to a greater attachment to that thing, and not in a bad way. Streaming services as a whole tend to cheapen the entertainment as having so many things freely (well, after the subscription fee) available lowers the individual value of each.
The streaming services are far from perfect. The algorithms are largely dog shit imo. I remember 4 years when I first found Discover Weekly on Spotify, it was fantastic. It was recommending me interesting new things to listen to within the genres I liked. This helped me branch out a bit. But then, a few months later I realized nearly all the recommendations were terrible, obscure songs that made me immediately want to switch tracks. I had to stop relying on those auto-generated playlists for finding new music, and instead search through discographies of artists I liked and those similar. I've had much better success with that, and it's lead me to trust word of mouth (thanks ~music) and my prior experience rather than these recommendation systems.
Yet as a consumer, I love streaming services. I get more entertainment out of Spotify than $10 should buy me. I probably listen 6+ hours a day on average. I've discovered more music on there than I knew existed (though that was through effort) because it is all available to me on that platform. The main problem I have is that artists are not paid well from their streams. I have so much appreciation for people who make music because I don't have the creativity, time, energy, patience, etc. to make anything decent myself. Frankly, I wouldn't be opposed to paying more for my spotify account if it meant that extra money went solely to artists. I could buy specific artists albums myself, but I like way too many artists for a poor student to support them
FWIW I find Apple Music’s recommendations a lot more useful. They’re more limited in scope though, and not as tailored but I tend to find more consistently interesting or listenable stuff that...
FWIW I find Apple Music’s recommendations a lot more useful. They’re more limited in scope though, and not as tailored but I tend to find more consistently interesting or listenable stuff that way. I mostly just use them to keep up on the latest hits. Their approach seems to be more based on the format of traditional radio where they get people to curate collections. They also have “Inspired by ____” playlists that are way better for pinpointing the kind of vibe I’m after than genre and discover playlists do.
As a point of fact, that was one of the best discover modes Spotify had too. Their algorithmic curation was crap, but the celebrity playlists were great if you followed people with good taste. I wish the industry would move in this direction more generally. I don’t trust data scientists to curate for me because WTH do they know?
I’d rather follow artists or critics I like and have THEM recommend me playlists. A Pitchfork or Rolling Stone recommendation playlist would be great. The writers of Wicked//Divine used to put inspiration playlists for each new collection on Spotify. When “The Last Jedi” came out they had playlists dedicated to each of the main characters. Spotify does all these, but they don’t make it their focus.
I think "gaslighting" is a pretty strong term, but the author's thoughts and examples certainly ring true to me. It's not just music - it's a problem in lots of mass-consumed media, including...
I think "gaslighting" is a pretty strong term, but the author's thoughts and examples certainly ring true to me. It's not just music - it's a problem in lots of mass-consumed media, including news, movies, television, books, etc. Everyone is pushing a "pay-for-unlimited" model and algorithmic recommendations.
For some reason the reply button isn't working for the comment by /u/somewaffles, but I wanted to quickly respond to the first sentence of that comment: This is definitely not the case for me. I...
For some reason the reply button isn't working for the comment by /u/somewaffles, but I wanted to quickly respond to the first sentence of that comment:
I pay $10 a month and can listen to almost anything I could ever possibly imagine.
This is definitely not the case for me. I tried to compile a Spotify playlist of my favorite jazz a while back and a good 30% or more wasn't available. It's not nearly as bad as Netflix is with movie availability, but still, their library has a lot of holes for the stuff I'm into.
My experience mirrors the author in finding Bandcamp a better platform for finding new music than other streaming services (Youtube is the main one I use just because there's more jazz and rare groove soul). Although I'll say that the best recommendation engine by far is a handful of music writers who I follow on Twitter who really know their shit: Ted Gioia, Will Hermes, Bird Is The Worm (who does a monthly Best Jazz On Bandcamp roundup), Brad Farberman, Jesse Jarnow and others.
Also, for everyone calling out the use of gaslighting in the title - I didn't write the headline and I agree that it's an overly strong term for this article, but I usually prefer not to alter the headline when I post these things.
Good discussion everybody, thanks much for the comments.
Yeah I guess I should also mention my listening is limited to rock, hip-hop, experimental and related genres. It sounds like it's the case that not all genre's are necessarily available on these...
Yeah I guess I should also mention my listening is limited to rock, hip-hop, experimental and related genres. It sounds like it's the case that not all genre's are necessarily available on these services which would for-sure affect my feelings if I were in your shoes.
Definitely an exaggerated title but while I disagree with the author, it's definitely a worth-while discussion that I'm glad people are having. It's cool to see people feel strongly about support artists and their work.
Of all the digital services, I find Bandcamp is the closest to digging through stacks of records looking for something intriguing or interesting. I can spend hours on there. And SoundCloud is good...
Of all the digital services, I find Bandcamp is the closest to digging through stacks of records looking for something intriguing or interesting. I can spend hours on there.
And SoundCloud is good for discovery, but only if you put some work into finding people/labels to follow and then looking at who those people follow and repost etc. It takes a good bit of time/effort to make SoundCloud effective at recommendations, but it can work, especially as the recommendations are more than just "here's 1200 hours of more stuff just like that".
I think Mixcloud gets overlooked far to often. It's excellent for "long form" listening, in my opinion, and has a big range of things, from specialist "radio" shows to comedy.
I have never liked Spotify, Deezer, Google Play Music and similar services. I've yet to use one I consider worth paying for.
The slow death of the record shop has been a small tragedy for me, because I used to spend hours in them listening, talking and discovering.
I think this has more to do with how you use the service than anything else. I don't expect it to discover music for me. I expect it to track artists for me and let me know when they have a...
I think this has more to do with how you use the service than anything else. I don't expect it to discover music for me. I expect it to track artists for me and let me know when they have a release. I'm tracking several thousand artists this way right now. I watch the release radar, and if I'm bored I'll play the discover weekly, maybe hunt up some playlists made by other music lovers that share my tastes and see what they are listening to. I think Spotify is missing out on a massive opportunity there - the platform has all the tools necessary to let users recommend music to other users through tastemaker playlists. They do a little of this now but they can go so much deeper with that idea.
AKA: I am a closet luddite and do not know how to engage with different ways of discovering music. Music journalism was and is almost exclusively garbage paid for by the music industry. The author...
AKA: I am a closet luddite and do not know how to engage with different ways of discovering music.
Music journalism was and is almost exclusively garbage paid for by the music industry. The author of the OP being one of those people, who the cynic in me says wants them AdBuckz, doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that. Same with most video game and movie reviewing. That is why more grassroots 'digital word of mouth' stuff is so important, and why music discovery is better and easier now than it was pre-net - so long as you put in the minimum required effort to find ways to discover it.
Interesting piece about the state of music discovery in 2019. Not true for everyone I'm sure, but as a frequent buyer of records and CDs it resonated with me. This paragraph especially jumped out at me:
Fucking A!
I pay $10 a month and can listen to almost anything I could ever possibly imagine. I can't speak for everyone, but as a musician who has hosted music on most popular streaming sites over the past decade I can say with confidence streaming has been a good thing.
There is a big discussion in artist communities concerning "exposure vs. compensation". A lot of venues and services will try to use your art to their own end, only to repay with "exposure." It's an age old practice that screws musicians over constantly. I don't think streaming doesn't fit this model. You can repay the initial upload cost easily, even as a very small artist. Once it's out there, your music will often get streamed in places that would NEVER hear your music otherwise. Are all artists making a living wage off streaming? No, probably not. But my music is being heard around the world for free. Likewise, most of my favorite artists I've found in the past 2 years have been almost exclusively from streaming services. Musicians have never made their bulk income off physical sales and likewise, they will never make a livable wage on streams.
I don't know where the gaslighting comes from, this is literally how the music industry has ALWAYS been, the model just shifted. The author even admits this later in the article. I think people who think like this don't understand how music and genres have shifted in the past 30 years. There are no "rock stars" anymore. Genres have been splintered into thousands and thousands of sub-genres to the point where music has become almost personalized. It's almost a gaurentee you can find an artist who puts out music consistently that you identify deeply with. Do I think an "underground/upandcoming/whatever" artists like Earl Sweatshirt deserves more attention than hes getting? I do, but his music isn't for everyone and he will probably never get the sort of fame that Kanye or Drake or whoever. That "rush" the article mentions so often is a deep connection with piece of music you are listening to. The more personalized an artist is to your taste, the bigger of a "rush" you will get. The more personalized the artist is to your taste, the less likely it is that large numbers of other people will identify with that artist as well. The less likely the artist appeals on a mass scale, the less money they make. It's a very simple formula that I've found that seems to hold true with most real world examples. We have access to so much music, it's almost nauseating. So maybe in that respect, I can see the authors problem?
As a listener, I have gotten that more in the past two years using spotify than I ever would scowering bandcamp/soundcloud/a record store. I'm, in no way, saying those outlets are useless or even lesser but I hate these "streaming is ruining music for artists and listeners." I guess as someone who makes music a very large part of their life, I've been more willing to take the time to find what kind of music I really like, so maybe that's where I'm finding my disconnect with the article.
I definitely agree with this article. My music consumption and discovery habits have drastically changed from even 10 years ago to where its now hard for me to have Spotify recommend me decent music. My Spotify library consists of albums where I have only saved maybe 1-2 songs. Its very rare for me to actually sit down and listen to an artists entire discography. Typically I will just shuffle all my songs into one big playlist and skip until I find a song that matches my mood. Even then, if I put on the song radio, I find the song radio algorithm not entirely great.
Another thing that seems to escape the algorithms is irony. I will sometimes listen to a funny song like something from Kid's Trap or a Weird Al song, or a country song, or whatever I think might be funny at the time. Now, I get tons of just weird recommendations for genres I don't really like at all. It is similar to the one time that I watched Shrek: The Musical on Netflix and was recommended stuff similar to that awful musical.
I think the problem is the lack of fidelity on why I am listening or watching something. Youtube, Netflix, and Spotify all seem to rely on the simple Yes/No coding for whether something is sincerely liked and the fact that this thing was selected at all. What's scary to me is that there are people who's media consumption is entirely reliant on these algorithms and they are unaware of the limitations that they pose to broadening one's own tastes. It reminds me of the equivalent of living forever in a small town and never leaving. And then that becomes your world.
This is basically you being lazy tbh. I also have a "everything I like" playlist that I listen to a lot. Also like you, Spotify recommends songs I don't like sometimes. I've found that the thumbs down funcitonality is pretty good for that.
But the main thing is you can just use the search bar and listen to an album if you want. OF COURSE Spotify can't magically recommend you new music that you like as much as if you actively went out and put time into discovering new music. But if you put the effort into discovering some new bands, or listen to some classic albums you've been meaning to listen to, you can still use Spotify to listen to that music.
Discover Weekly, and other recommended music channels on Spotify are convenient and have given me some of my favorite discoveries. But if you don't like them, or just want to switch it up, then Spotify has many other ways to listen to music.
There is no need to make judgments based on the limited amount of information you have on my music listening habits. I do various things to make Spotify better at recommending songs:
And I'm telling you, after doing all that, I still get crappy LoFi recommendations for 25% of my Discover playlist (because I listened to that one LoFi playlist three weeks ago), 25% mopey indie guys who can't sing (presumably because I listen to The Shins), 40% assorted, and 10% I actually add to the library for further curation (first point above). So I stand by what I say regarding the algorithm's recommendation ability, it doesn't factor in the correct information. Its highly limited and shouldn't be relied upon to discover music.
A person recommending songs gives me so much more value than Spotify's Discover Playlists, Release Radar, and even the Daily Playlists it recommends for me. Its why I have an IFTTT applet to put all the /r/ListenToThis songs into playlist I can stream. One day I will likely have something for ~music as well so I have access to new and interesting music recommended by actual people rather than a biased algorithm.
I don't mean lazy as a value judgement. I mean if you use ONLY Spotify and complain that it isn't recommending you music that you like, you can either suck it up, or spend more time discovering new stuff. It sounds like you chose the latter. My point is if someone didn't follow music discussions in 2005 and they still don't follow music discussions in 2019, they are getting much better recommendations now than they did then. Therefore everything has only improved. Honestly anything bashing the tech involved with music streaming, I'm going to take issue with. The artists rights and general capitalism things can always be addressed, but streaming sites put the entire fucking world at our fingertips and people still find something to complain about.
In 2005 if there were a listen_to_this equivalent, you would not be able to listen to a lot of the stuff that was posted. You could check the library or the record store, but who knows how much you would find? Now you can essentially listen to all of it. Even if the occasional track is not on a streaming service, it's still a better hit rate than it used to be.
So comparing Spotify's recommendations to human is not fair. The latter takes time and energy to be spent discovering good sources and people whose tastes match your own. The only fair comparison for passive music discovery is like the itunes store top 100 songs page.
It totally is fair. And it's fair to criticize all of the other internet media companies out there for their bad recommendation algorithms like I did in my original post. No one is criticizing them for bringing the world to our fingertips but I am complaining on the way that content is being presented, advertised, and delivered. I would bet that a significant amount of money is spent at Spotify and other internet media companies on recommendation engines because better recommendations = better engagement from users = less time spent off-site looking for the content that is provided by the provider.
Just because things are better today than they were in 2005 doesn't mean you can't criticize the things today. The world today is a very different place and in 10 more years, a significant portion of our population won't even know what its like to go to a record store and hand-pick music. Nor will the vast majority of people not spend hours curating their Spotify music library and researching music off-platform. Not because these people are lazy, but rather they are practical and normal people who just want to listen to music. I still stick to my arguments and think these recommendations are bad. They will get better. And I bet when they do, the first company to really nail it is going to take a significant slice out of the other content provider's pie.
I get the author's sentiments. Paying for a particular thing is going to lead to a greater attachment to that thing, and not in a bad way. Streaming services as a whole tend to cheapen the entertainment as having so many things freely (well, after the subscription fee) available lowers the individual value of each.
The streaming services are far from perfect. The algorithms are largely dog shit imo. I remember 4 years when I first found Discover Weekly on Spotify, it was fantastic. It was recommending me interesting new things to listen to within the genres I liked. This helped me branch out a bit. But then, a few months later I realized nearly all the recommendations were terrible, obscure songs that made me immediately want to switch tracks. I had to stop relying on those auto-generated playlists for finding new music, and instead search through discographies of artists I liked and those similar. I've had much better success with that, and it's lead me to trust word of mouth (thanks ~music) and my prior experience rather than these recommendation systems.
Yet as a consumer, I love streaming services. I get more entertainment out of Spotify than $10 should buy me. I probably listen 6+ hours a day on average. I've discovered more music on there than I knew existed (though that was through effort) because it is all available to me on that platform. The main problem I have is that artists are not paid well from their streams. I have so much appreciation for people who make music because I don't have the creativity, time, energy, patience, etc. to make anything decent myself. Frankly, I wouldn't be opposed to paying more for my spotify account if it meant that extra money went solely to artists. I could buy specific artists albums myself, but I like way too many artists for a poor student to support them
FWIW I find Apple Music’s recommendations a lot more useful. They’re more limited in scope though, and not as tailored but I tend to find more consistently interesting or listenable stuff that way. I mostly just use them to keep up on the latest hits. Their approach seems to be more based on the format of traditional radio where they get people to curate collections. They also have “Inspired by ____” playlists that are way better for pinpointing the kind of vibe I’m after than genre and discover playlists do.
As a point of fact, that was one of the best discover modes Spotify had too. Their algorithmic curation was crap, but the celebrity playlists were great if you followed people with good taste. I wish the industry would move in this direction more generally. I don’t trust data scientists to curate for me because WTH do they know?
I’d rather follow artists or critics I like and have THEM recommend me playlists. A Pitchfork or Rolling Stone recommendation playlist would be great. The writers of Wicked//Divine used to put inspiration playlists for each new collection on Spotify. When “The Last Jedi” came out they had playlists dedicated to each of the main characters. Spotify does all these, but they don’t make it their focus.
I think "gaslighting" is a pretty strong term, but the author's thoughts and examples certainly ring true to me. It's not just music - it's a problem in lots of mass-consumed media, including news, movies, television, books, etc. Everyone is pushing a "pay-for-unlimited" model and algorithmic recommendations.
For some reason the reply button isn't working for the comment by /u/somewaffles, but I wanted to quickly respond to the first sentence of that comment:
This is definitely not the case for me. I tried to compile a Spotify playlist of my favorite jazz a while back and a good 30% or more wasn't available. It's not nearly as bad as Netflix is with movie availability, but still, their library has a lot of holes for the stuff I'm into.
My experience mirrors the author in finding Bandcamp a better platform for finding new music than other streaming services (Youtube is the main one I use just because there's more jazz and rare groove soul). Although I'll say that the best recommendation engine by far is a handful of music writers who I follow on Twitter who really know their shit: Ted Gioia, Will Hermes, Bird Is The Worm (who does a monthly Best Jazz On Bandcamp roundup), Brad Farberman, Jesse Jarnow and others.
Also, for everyone calling out the use of gaslighting in the title - I didn't write the headline and I agree that it's an overly strong term for this article, but I usually prefer not to alter the headline when I post these things.
Good discussion everybody, thanks much for the comments.
Yeah I guess I should also mention my listening is limited to rock, hip-hop, experimental and related genres. It sounds like it's the case that not all genre's are necessarily available on these services which would for-sure affect my feelings if I were in your shoes.
Definitely an exaggerated title but while I disagree with the author, it's definitely a worth-while discussion that I'm glad people are having. It's cool to see people feel strongly about support artists and their work.
Of all the digital services, I find Bandcamp is the closest to digging through stacks of records looking for something intriguing or interesting. I can spend hours on there.
And SoundCloud is good for discovery, but only if you put some work into finding people/labels to follow and then looking at who those people follow and repost etc. It takes a good bit of time/effort to make SoundCloud effective at recommendations, but it can work, especially as the recommendations are more than just "here's 1200 hours of more stuff just like that".
I think Mixcloud gets overlooked far to often. It's excellent for "long form" listening, in my opinion, and has a big range of things, from specialist "radio" shows to comedy.
I have never liked Spotify, Deezer, Google Play Music and similar services. I've yet to use one I consider worth paying for.
The slow death of the record shop has been a small tragedy for me, because I used to spend hours in them listening, talking and discovering.
I think this has more to do with how you use the service than anything else. I don't expect it to discover music for me. I expect it to track artists for me and let me know when they have a release. I'm tracking several thousand artists this way right now. I watch the release radar, and if I'm bored I'll play the discover weekly, maybe hunt up some playlists made by other music lovers that share my tastes and see what they are listening to. I think Spotify is missing out on a massive opportunity there - the platform has all the tools necessary to let users recommend music to other users through tastemaker playlists. They do a little of this now but they can go so much deeper with that idea.
AKA: I am a closet luddite and do not know how to engage with different ways of discovering music.
Music journalism was and is almost exclusively garbage paid for by the music industry. The author of the OP being one of those people, who the cynic in me says wants them AdBuckz, doesn't seem to want to acknowledge that. Same with most video game and movie reviewing. That is why more grassroots 'digital word of mouth' stuff is so important, and why music discovery is better and easier now than it was pre-net - so long as you put in the minimum required effort to find ways to discover it.
I regularly use a combination of:
And last but not least actual physical people irl.