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For music discovery, nothing ever really rocked my socks like Pandora in its early days. I discovered many obscure bands with it - the software really lived to
by arcturus17 4y ago
For music discovery, nothing ever really rocked my socks like Pandora in its early days. I discovered many obscure bands with it - the software really lived to its promise of finding you tunes with similar musical characteristics. Almost two decades later, Spotify's radio feature is very lacklustre in comparison. It seems to be heavily based on social signals and not enough on the features of the underlying songs. I can and do discover music with Spotify but pace is very slow, and I have the feeling that things could be so much better.
- BonoboIO 4y agoPandora, the good old days. Using some USA proxy to get it in Europe and using some obscure downloader to save the best songs before music streaming was the thing. The recommendations where perfect! For any genre. It was a solved problem, Spotify sucks really bad at recommending things. Weekly playlist are rubbishy and the radio feature is also not really good.
- arcturus17 4y agoI used it from Spain and I don't remember even needing a proxy in its earliest days. I think the IP issues and fencing came later... I've considered trying it nowadays but I think one also needs a US card - way too much friction. I'm curious if it's still a good tool for music discovery.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoThere's an entire industry of pluggers and marketers doing whatever they can to get tracks on those Spotify playlists. And also businesses which link artists to playlist curators - for a fee, of course. There's no sense in which they're an organic reflection of anything at all. Pandora was never big enough to suffer much from that problem.
- hackernewds 4y agohttps://www.pandora.com/about/mgp https://www.pandora.com/about/mgp
- criddell 4y agoPandora is still there and still pretty good!
- arcturus17 4y agoNot where I live :( Glad to hear it’s doing well. Back in the day it felt like one of the most impressive pieces of software I had ever used.