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Not much substance in the article so allow me a bit of a rant: As someone with both Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriptions, I think the more accurate tak

by jakear 5y ago

Not much substance in the article so allow me a bit of a rant: As someone with both Apple Music and Spotify Premium subscriptions, I think the more accurate take is that discovery is not a solved problem, at least in the algorithmic sense tech companies want. Spotify’s idea of “discovery” is dedicating more and more home page real estate to bullshit podcasts I have no interest in, and showing me endless “upsell” notifications when I’ve already bought their damn product. I have “Product News” and “Spotify News and Offers” notifications off, yet I still find that whenever I open their app I need to close out of some popup telling me about some new bullshit their PM’s want to boost engagement on. They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me. I will admit their “Daily Mix”’s are decent. Apple Music is better about keeping out of the way, but their generated playlists often feel either boring or stale; good when I want to listen to throwbacks but I can’t recall the last time I heard a new artist I really liked from one. In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio, especially college radio. The good news is that having been a part of college radio pledge drives, I can pretty confidently say that the discovery service provided by local/college radio is indeed a viable product. Just not in the algorithmic world-scale sense tech companies want to see.

nluken 5y ago
Great points. I'd even go a step further and suggest that "discovery" is not really a problem that can or should be solved in the manner that tech companies would like. I ran a radio show in college on my college's station, and from my experience most of that crowd is uninterested in further tech penetration of music.
baran1 5y ago
do you just Shazam the songs you like from the local college radio?
- jakear 5y ago
  That or I check the online playlist.
bwanab 5y ago
I’d add Radio Paradise to the list of good discovery tools.
mrweasel 5y ago
The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks. I have no idea, but my take is that streaming services are trying to find other artists within the same genre, or using the listing patterns of other users to match you up with new music. This makes a weird assumption that I actually like everything a band makes, which is rare, or that because I like an artists or a few songs within a given genre, then I must like all music with in that genre. Mostly I listen to music from a wide number of artists, across generes. There a musicians where I like most of their work and some where I just like the sound of one particular track. What I want, is button, when I press that, "The Almighty Algorithm" will analyse the sound, the beats per second, the vocals, the instruments, the lyrics, anything that affect the sound and locate other songs with similar profiles. Bonus points for letting me input stuff like: higher tempo, less bagpipes, the singer has a high pitch voice which hurt my ears. The social stuff is easy and the streaming platforms can quickly implement something similar and put you out of business. Actually analyzing the sound profiles and using that to help you create playlists and discover new artists, that not something I've seen done and I bet it's because it's will require actual work.
- rabuse 5y ago
  "The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks." Agreed 100% on this. I find I like a certain BPM and "type" of sound to songs I often have on repeat.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Also agreed. I've had days where I was in a really productive mood and wanted some really high tempo music to go with it, and end up searching for 30 minutes and only finding things that slow me down. And other moods and modes have their own vibe, that has nothing to do with genre and a lot to do with tempo and timbre.
n8cpdx 5y ago
So many of the things in this comment section are things that were solved by Zune very well (e.g. the social features were great, if you knew anyone else who used Zune - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Social https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Social) Zune had the Channels concept - essentially what Spotify-owned playlists are nowadays - but they partnered with radio stations and Billboard (among others) to provide content. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUU3R-Y21I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUU3R-Y21I (Notice how 10 years later that UI is still largely fresh and modern; I miss Zune)
- officeplant 5y ago
  Was an original Zune adopter from the earliest days (30GB Brown Fat Zune). I ran into two people on my college campus with Zune's and each time we shared a song to each other. After a month I never used the song sharing feature ever again and never really had anyone bring it up. I really loved my Zune, the desktop software was some of the worst ever created. It helped pushed me towards eventually just getting an iPod to flash with Rockbox so I could just use common lightweight sane software on my desktop to manage the library on my devices. Things are so much better now that I can just load up 200GB of music on my android phone, manage it via a normal file explorer on desktop, and use the VLC app to listen and create/manage playlists.
  - meepmorp 5y ago
    Please help if you can - I seem to remember reading that the preferred verb for the song sharing on zunes, per MS marketing, was "squirt," as in, "to squirt a song." I doubt myself in this, of course, because it's patently idiotic. Is this anything you have the slightest recollection of?
    - officeplant 5y ago
      https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-squirting-107255 https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-squirting-107... I really didn't remember it being called that, but reading this makes me vaguely remember my assistant manager making fun of the feature name because she also had a Zune.
luma 5y ago
I see a lot of replies about discovery not being a solved problem here, which it isn't, but that also isn't what the OP said. > Discovery is not a viable product I'm parsing "viable" as "commercially viable". You may solve the problem (for some definition of "solve" and "problem"), but can you make money doing so? I don't know, I have no experience in this field, but OP seems convinced that the answer is "no".
- jakear 5y ago
  Radio stations solved the problem and they make money doing it, so I say yes discovery is a viable product - but not in a way tech companies have been able to automate.
  - tedmiston 5y ago
    I have no idea how much radio stations make, but perhaps the implication was viable [tech] product where returns likely have to be much higher to get an ROI for a venture-backed startup.
joconde 5y ago
> In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio In my region(s) of France, they either suck or only play very big names. I envy people who live in range of a good local radio.
- zeku 5y ago
  You might like this website then: http://radio.garden/ http://radio.garden/
dsizzle 5y ago
I'm curious why you pay for two music subscriptions. What's the process for deciding which one to listen to?
- jakear 5y ago
  Got my family on a family account for Apple Music a while back, then at some point picked up a personal Spotify account to test the waters for their generated playlists, support for networked devices (chromecast/smart tv's), and API's (jkbx.fm). I can't migrate my family away from Apple Music and I don't want to give up Spotify's feature set, so I keep both.
notyourwork 5y ago
> They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me. What discover tab are you referencing, I've never found a place in the app where you cannot directly play from and all their apps support cross device management.
- jakear 5y ago
  Huh... so for the past couple weeks there was a top level "discover" tab on the iPhone app (so Home/Discover/Search/Your Library), and when you clicked it it would just a random song in a weird full-app video playback UI, with the only exposed controls being "go to this album" and "skip", no output device selector. I went back to check today to confirm that even if I had an existing network device selected it'd disconnect that and only play locally, but clicking on the tab just showed an error page. I force quit the app and relaunched, and now the tab is gone entirely. Guessing I was in some A/B experiment of a pre-release feature, it'll probably have more functionality in the full release (assuming they didn't can it)
jay_kyburz 5y ago
I'm a bit late to the discussion but I like the way Bandcamp does discovery. They have a carousel that you can very easily listen to 20-30 songs in quick succession, and they have these curated blog posts where you can read and listen to the music on a topic. I really get the feeling that the folks and Bandcamp are actually into music. Everything else I've tried just seems to make it very hard to break out of the bubble they decided to put me in.
nikanj 5y ago
Discovery is not a viable product, but Payola is - and Spotify is a repeat offender

by jakear 5y ago

nluken 5y ago

Great points. I'd even go a step further and suggest that "discovery" is not really a problem that can or should be solved in the manner that tech companies would like. I ran a radio show in college on my college's station, and from my experience most of that crowd is uninterested in further tech penetration of music.

baran1 5y ago

do you just Shazam the songs you like from the local college radio?

jakear 5y ago
That or I check the online playlist.

bwanab 5y ago

I’d add Radio Paradise to the list of good discovery tools.

mrweasel 5y ago

The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks. I have no idea, but my take is that streaming services are trying to find other artists within the same genre, or using the listing patterns of other users to match you up with new music. This makes a weird assumption that I actually like everything a band makes, which is rare, or that because I like an artists or a few songs within a given genre, then I must like all music with in that genre. Mostly I listen to music from a wide number of artists, across generes. There a musicians where I like most of their work and some where I just like the sound of one particular track. What I want, is button, when I press that, "The Almighty Algorithm" will analyse the sound, the beats per second, the vocals, the instruments, the lyrics, anything that affect the sound and locate other songs with similar profiles. Bonus points for letting me input stuff like: higher tempo, less bagpipes, the singer has a high pitch voice which hurt my ears. The social stuff is easy and the streaming platforms can quickly implement something similar and put you out of business. Actually analyzing the sound profiles and using that to help you create playlists and discover new artists, that not something I've seen done and I bet it's because it's will require actual work.

rabuse 5y ago
"The algorithmic recommendation is broken, because it makes wrong assumptions. Every recommendation engine I've encountered appear to be based on the idea that I care about artists or genres, rather than the sound profile of individual tracks." Agreed 100% on this. I find I like a certain BPM and "type" of sound to songs I often have on repeat.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Also agreed. I've had days where I was in a really productive mood and wanted some really high tempo music to go with it, and end up searching for 30 minutes and only finding things that slow me down. And other moods and modes have their own vibe, that has nothing to do with genre and a lot to do with tempo and timbre.

n8cpdx 5y ago

So many of the things in this comment section are things that were solved by Zune very well (e.g. the social features were great, if you knew anyone else who used Zune - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Social https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_Social) Zune had the Channels concept - essentially what Spotify-owned playlists are nowadays - but they partnered with radio stations and Billboard (among others) to provide content. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUU3R-Y21I https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UmUU3R-Y21I (Notice how 10 years later that UI is still largely fresh and modern; I miss Zune)

officeplant 5y ago
Was an original Zune adopter from the earliest days (30GB Brown Fat Zune). I ran into two people on my college campus with Zune's and each time we shared a song to each other. After a month I never used the song sharing feature ever again and never really had anyone bring it up. I really loved my Zune, the desktop software was some of the worst ever created. It helped pushed me towards eventually just getting an iPod to flash with Rockbox so I could just use common lightweight sane software on my desktop to manage the library on my devices. Things are so much better now that I can just load up 200GB of music on my android phone, manage it via a normal file explorer on desktop, and use the VLC app to listen and create/manage playlists.
- meepmorp 5y ago
  Please help if you can - I seem to remember reading that the preferred verb for the song sharing on zunes, per MS marketing, was "squirt," as in, "to squirt a song." I doubt myself in this, of course, because it's patently idiotic. Is this anything you have the slightest recollection of?
  - officeplant 5y ago
    https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-squirting-107255 https://www.newsweek.com/zune-should-go-beyond-squirting-107... I really didn't remember it being called that, but reading this makes me vaguely remember my assistant manager making fun of the feature name because she also had a Zune.

luma 5y ago

I see a lot of replies about discovery not being a solved problem here, which it isn't, but that also isn't what the OP said. > Discovery is not a viable product I'm parsing "viable" as "commercially viable". You may solve the problem (for some definition of "solve" and "problem"), but can you make money doing so? I don't know, I have no experience in this field, but OP seems convinced that the answer is "no".

jakear 5y ago
Radio stations solved the problem and they make money doing it, so I say yes discovery is a viable product - but not in a way tech companies have been able to automate.
- tedmiston 5y ago
  I have no idea how much radio stations make, but perhaps the implication was viable [tech] product where returns likely have to be much higher to get an ROI for a venture-backed startup.

joconde 5y ago

> In my opinion, the best source for music discovery continues to be local radio In my region(s) of France, they either suck or only play very big names. I envy people who live in range of a good local radio.

zeku 5y ago
You might like this website then: http://radio.garden/ http://radio.garden/

dsizzle 5y ago

I'm curious why you pay for two music subscriptions. What's the process for deciding which one to listen to?

jakear 5y ago
Got my family on a family account for Apple Music a while back, then at some point picked up a personal Spotify account to test the waters for their generated playlists, support for networked devices (chromecast/smart tv's), and API's (jkbx.fm). I can't migrate my family away from Apple Music and I don't want to give up Spotify's feature set, so I keep both.

notyourwork 5y ago

> They do have a dedicated “discover” tab on the app, but you can’t stream the audio from it to a network speaker so it’s basically useless for me. What discover tab are you referencing, I've never found a place in the app where you cannot directly play from and all their apps support cross device management.

jakear 5y ago
Huh... so for the past couple weeks there was a top level "discover" tab on the iPhone app (so Home/Discover/Search/Your Library), and when you clicked it it would just a random song in a weird full-app video playback UI, with the only exposed controls being "go to this album" and "skip", no output device selector. I went back to check today to confirm that even if I had an existing network device selected it'd disconnect that and only play locally, but clicking on the tab just showed an error page. I force quit the app and relaunched, and now the tab is gone entirely. Guessing I was in some A/B experiment of a pre-release feature, it'll probably have more functionality in the full release (assuming they didn't can it)

jay_kyburz 5y ago

I'm a bit late to the discussion but I like the way Bandcamp does discovery. They have a carousel that you can very easily listen to 20-30 songs in quick succession, and they have these curated blog posts where you can read and listen to the music on a topic. I really get the feeling that the folks and Bandcamp are actually into music. Everything else I've tried just seems to make it very hard to break out of the bubble they decided to put me in.

nikanj 5y ago

Discovery is not a viable product, but Payola is - and Spotify is a repeat offender