Hacker News Reader

Comment by fancymcpoopoo | Hacker News Reader

Very difficult with streaming. Rdio used to have a slider to recommend more unusual music. No other service has this that I’ve found. They keep playing the same songs and artist forever.

View on HN

Pandora has introduced different tunings that help a bit with this. Not a continuous slider but provides some presets to indicate how wide a net to cast in different dimensions. Normal, Crowd Favorites, Deep Cuts, Discovery, Newly Release.

I never understand why streaming services that work on subscription push some content over others. I would think if they have a monthly subscriber they wouldn't care what that subscriber is streaming as long as they are streaming.

I find this especially bad with video streaming where a service has a great library but only promotes about 30 titles all categorized under different genres.

I suppose they save on bandwidth if they can get everyone to just stream the same titles.

I still mourn the loss of Rdio. It was far and away better than any other option. It's such a bummer it lost out to Spotify.

So true. I remember those days very fondly. There was a real community of listeners back then. Within that circle you shared albums and playlists, commented on and discussed them.

Plus, it had a persistant queue that could handle single songs as well as albums and playlists as individual items which could be moved freely. Everything I was interested in was added to the queue and I could be certain it'd still be there tomorrow. Sort of like a musical backlog.

YouTubeMusic actually has this. With its "You Music Tuner" there are a lot of configurable parameters that control artist variety and music discovery. It doesn't quite nail tuning by curation, but it's a step in the right direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com