You can add a second to your list. Spotify doesn't have a lot of my favorite music, and the recommendations have always been bland and boring or downright bad to me.
I prefer to use YT Music s it seems thoroughly confused by having each person in family use from my service account to the point the suggestions are general in nature. They still do not get played though. I refuse to click on suggestions in any product as that reinforces their data on me/us. I’m quite ok if any music engine thinks I’m a polyglot toddler with penchant for death metal, Thai ballads, and ancient Chinese orchestral Music. Such a profile makes me soooo much less likely to get other music or junk marketed to me ;-)
Sure, I've had some good recommendations, but I'd expect any recommendation engine to do that just by chance.
What I can say is that Spotify has never proposed something truly new and interesting to me. If I listen to a lot of metal, it'll recommend me the most bland stuff in the same genre. What's even worse is that it keeps playing the same songs over and over again. It's like the recommendation engine just gives up and starts repeating its suggestions again.
I simply gave up on it. Why have access to everything when I only got the crap. Going back to my personal collection increased my good/bad song ratio considerably.
"It" being reality?
>If Spotify's recommendation engine wasn't as good as it was, it would not have the users it has
Now that's just confirmation bias + circular logic.
A streaming service can have users regardless of how good its recommendation engine is. YouTube has crappy recommendation (and has had worse for most of the time it existed) but tons of users.
For Pandora and Spotify, merely offering a convenient way to stream music, a free tier, and a big catalog, was enough.
You seem convinced of some bizarro idea that a media/streaming service can only succeed based on its recommendation engine.
Where did you get that from?