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Comment by sumitgt | Hacker News Reader

I prefer how Google Play Music does suggestions and wish Spotify could adopt some elements of the same.

Eg. GPM does suggests things like: 1) Looks like you are at work, here's some music without lyrics for concentration. 2) Looks like you are at home, here's some relaxing music.

.. and so on.

Also Spotify sometimes gets things too right, and it stops me from discovering new music. GPM does a better job introducing noise into the suggestions.

However, the catalog of GPM is smaller than Spotify. Cannot find famous songs like "Hotel California" on GPM for instance.

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I have three main criticisms of Spotify, just in case there's a Spotify PM reading.

1. I hear repeat songs in my discover all the time, this isn't ideal. I curate my own playlists for moods and know that i'm getting when I play those playlists, surfacing songs I've manually curated in my discover doesn't add value to my experience.

2. I wish I could more easily surface the discover playlists of my friends or those whom I follow. I know that my friends like similar music but the small differences might provide insightful curation data and help me discover new music, so, it'd be interesting to see the data on discovery curation through social connections.

3. There's some chatter about daily mixes here. I find that my daily mixes don't change enough. I'll try them once, two times, then I'll churn from using that feature.

Just want to reiterate gripe #3. The Daily Mixes were, at first, the Best Thing Ever. But that was like a year ago, and they don't seem to have changed at all since then. I've listened to a lot of different music this past year, but keep hearing the same old songs on all the Daily Mixes. I'd expect them to update in more overt ways as my tastes evolved.

>1. I hear repeat songs in my discover all the time

Something is wrong. Discover Weekly is supposed to have only songs you have never listened to, even once. That's how it works for me.

I get repeat songs now and then. Not a lot, but a noticeable number.

Perhaps you've listened to the regular version of a song, but the Discover Playlist has surfaced its "radio edit" or some other very, very similar version?

Most definitely not. Same songs. Not referring to radio edits (though I have seen them too, sometimes).

The case I most often encounter is "oh, you liked x? I'm sure you'll like every remix of x for the next month of your discovery weekly!". Technically not the same song.

>GPM does suggests things like: 1) Looks like you are at work, here's some music without lyrics for concentration. 2) Looks like you are at home, here's some relaxing music.

Spotify does this too. Under Browse, many of the suggested playlists are context-dependent and will change depending on the time of day.

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