Discovery of new music is so much easier now with Spotify/YouTube/etc. In the past you had a slim-to-none chance of coming across a band/artist/album outside your local scene, no matter what the genre. Back then you kind of had to be "in the know" for that to happen.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spotify maybe, I've never used it. And Google Play music used to be the best for this, but YouTube music has me stuck in a loop of my last 10 or 20 songs and I hate it.

If I'm listening to some techno, and I change gears to old school country/bluegrass for awhile, then, YouTube will never ever recommend techno to me again. Not unless I manually remember some of my favorite songs, search for them, and retrain it that I like techno. But then of course country slowly dies. God forbid I mix in hard rock, punk rock, or rap. It just confuses it more.

And it's not just a genre problem, even within a genre of repeats the same dozen or two songs every time I open the app.

It's not just me, I have a family plan and my brothers have both separately complained to me about the algorithms being worse than Google Play music, which is what we used to use.

I literally created a playlist called YouTube music sucks, where I save my most liked songs, so I can reseed the algorithm when I want a change of tunes. I need the playlist because I have a terrible memory and can't remember all the songs I've liked.

Why don't I change? Because I'm cheap, and it's bundled with YouTube premium for the whole family. And it has no right to be as bad as it is. I keep thinking they're gonna fix it, but I guess maybe people like being spoon fed their last 20 liked songs?

[–] maltasoron@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

Spotify is really good with recommendations. I think they use different algorithms for the different personal playlists: the Release Radar seems to use my followed artists and all my playlists, while Discover Weekly uses my recent listening history.