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Comment by jcomis | Hacker News Reader

Their recommendation algorithm? really? I find it to be the worst I've encountered. It constantly just keeps shoveling the same few songs I've liked once over and over.

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This has not been my experience. Have you used Spotify a long time so that it has had time to get to know you? My Discover Weekly is uncanny in its ability to find me music I love. I tried going to Apple Music and came running back due to how good that is on Spotify.

I have been using Spotify regularly since 2008 and the recommendation algorithms work pretty poorly for me. For me the only reason to use Spotify is that it gives me access to almost all music I am interested in, and does it in one place.

Not the original poster, but I have been using Spotify for about 3 or so years fairly heavily (free version, not premium), and it still fails to update Discovery Weekly a good 90%+ of the time. The only time I get it to update is when I listen to a wildly different genre (Death metal to K-Pop, for example) and then wait about a month for it to figure out I listened to something different. Only then does it start showing new stuff. Searching around Google, this seems to be a somewhat common issue.

Daily Mix or Discover Weekly? Daily Mix seems to be tailored to give you a bunch of roughly genre separated playlists of stuff you already listen to, whereas Discover Weekly seems to be the "play new stuff that I might like" one.

It also might be that you haven't liked/listened enough for it to be useful yet.

Same -- that and it pushes new releases by the same artists -- which for someone reasonably engaged is kind of redundant.

OTOH when I used google play for a few months, they managed to recommend a new to me band that was based in roughly the same area and playing the type of music I listened to.

So at least for that type of music, they were a lot better than anything I've ever got in multiple years of using spotify

Maybe I'm biased because I don't use recommendation algorithms often, but on the rare occasion that I have to use Spotify it always surprises me how long it keeps me entertained before I have to skip a track. Depending on how you view / listen to music that might be a bad thing though.

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