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Comment by hkt | Hacker News Reader

While it is true that Spotify does recommendations, I'm sceptical that the majority of users value this part most. I'm happy to be corrected, but I'd guess it is simply the ability to stream music on demand that remains its main selling point. Put another way, the value of Spotify is its expansive collection, not its personalisation.

(Or so it seems to me)

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I know that some people find value in this, but for me, I wish I could turn off the recommendation engines on Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and wherever else they are in services that I use. Whatever notions of similarity that they use to generate recommendations have nothing to do with how I judge things, and for me this is just noise that makes those services slower to navigate.

I feel Spotify's recommendation engine works kinda OK since music is many small songs rather than long and few movies.

I mean if you are into a movie there might be only three ones like it which you allready have watched and surely are not on Netflix.

However, as soon as you use your Spotify account for kids or parties the engine gets messed up forever. It is a shame since it helped me find alot of artists.

> While it is true that Spotify does recommendations, I'm sceptical that the majority of users value this part most

Any time Spotify is brought up (which is really any time music is brought up) it's a good bet the quality of discovery of recommendations are mentioned. The Discovery Weekly and Daily Mixes are loved. My anecdotal evidence is the dozens of people I've talked to about this over the years. This HN thread is the first time I've seen anyone suggest otherwise.

I know for myself, if it wasn't for the discovery that Spotify offers, I wouldn't use it.

I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that everyone has the same catalog (at least for my fairly boring taste in music) and actively choose Spotify’s personalization over Apple Music’s tighter integration with my phone, car, etc. Just a single data point though.

Anecdotally, I love the personalized station Apple Music generates for me. I have pretty eclectic, cross-genre taste and the quality of the personalized station - the mix of stuff I already love and the new stuff that I don't know yet but that I end up loving - is by far the stickiest part of the service for me. It also seems to be improving over time? I know, anecdotal, but that has been my experience..

No, I choose Spotify's UI over Apple Music's.

I also prefer Spotify user-run playlists better, which I pick myself, searching for genres and songs explicitly.

Nothing to do with preferring the personalization.

> No, I choose Spotify's UI over Apple Music's.

"No" seems to suggest that you're disagreeing with your parent's post, but your parent is saying why they chose it, not why you did:

> I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that everyone has the same catalog (at least for my fairly boring taste in music) and actively choose Spotify’s personalization over Apple Music’s tighter integration with my phone, car, etc. Just a single data point though.

>but your parent is saying why they chose it, not why you did:

And I am saying why I chose it. You don't need to read too much into the "no", nor have to find some perfect formal consistency in a quick response. It's just "no" as in, "no, that's not my case".

It’s both

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