I’ve been surprised by how poor Spotify’s recommendations were - they bought the Echo Nest, and seem to have people who are quite smart working on it but when I tried it after Rdio closed no matter what I started with it’d be top 40 after a couple of tracks, enough so that I wondered if there was a background deal with the record labels.
Apple Music is notably better – and has the benefit of not funneling your money to the likes of Rogan – and the recommendations will be fairly good within a genre but it does overweight your library a bit (I wish it had a “I’m looking for something new” / “familiar” toggle).
I am curious what Rdio did differently as I had a very good success rate with their suggestions and it seems unlikely that there was some secret sauce nobody else has been able to figure out.
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of using the DJ X feature in Spotify, it does a decent job mixing in some new things I like, but you’re definitely on to something when it comes to popular record labels. I don’t like any of the new pop, but every other “set” that DJ X provides has Chappel Roan or Taylor Swift or Sabrina Carpenter or some other flavor of generic pop I never am interested in. Play counts for some of these popular artists are probably inflated due to that kind of thing.
Apple Music is notably better – and has the benefit of not funneling your money to the likes of Rogan – and the recommendations will be fairly good within a genre but it does overweight your library a bit (I wish it had a “I’m looking for something new” / “familiar” toggle).
I am curious what Rdio did differently as I had a very good success rate with their suggestions and it seems unlikely that there was some secret sauce nobody else has been able to figure out.