>Given, the most of my music discovery is analog — through friends, magazines and music blogs, I don’t rely on recommendation engines as much. >I know what I l

>Given, the most of my music discovery is analog — through friends, magazines and music blogs, I don’t rely on recommendation engines as much. >I know what I like. In 2022, I tuned more to jazz classics, ambient electronica and ambient classical music for nearly 30,000 minutes. I think the reason the author is able to live without Spotify's recommendation algorithm is that many of the artists producing music in their genres are either dead ("jazz classics" i.e. 1930-1960) or few in number and studied intensely by human academics ("ambient classical", whatever that means). In other words, their music either has been or is currently being catalogued and classified by humans. For other genres this is not possible. I listen to a lot of jazz in general. Jazz is very much the Wild West; there hasn't been a lot of money in it for the past 50 years and I certainly don't have an army of humans or "piano friends" curating it for me for free. And to put it bluntly, there's a lot of bad or uninteresting music. Spotify does a pretty good job of recommending me good music, at high scale, based on content rather than popularity, and often from musicians that no one's ever heard of. I don't have a lot of time to triage, classify, and curate music myself, but even if I did, there's no way I could possibly get even close to what Spotify does via my manual human labor. So that's why I pay for and continue to pay for Spotify. >You wanna support your artists? Stop being lazy and go so see them live or buy their merch. My gut says a Patreon-style system for music is less viable. Internet content creators put out hundreds of hours of quality content every month. Musicians put out maybe 1-2 hours/year of recorded music that can be accessed over the internet (i.e., excluding private live performances.) Unfortunately for me and my wallet, there's less incentive to donate to musicians than other content creators given the difference in output and value to me. I'm not sure the content creator model can be the same for musicians; I can't name off the top of my head a single musician I like that regularly produced content worth $5/month or more for me. The mass distribution model sounds more effective for music: if a musician can produce content worth $0.05 individually to millions of people, it's profitable. Given the labor-intensive model of creating music compared to other content, the mass distribution style of business model makes more sense.