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This is a shortcoming of every music recommendation algorithm except Spotify and Pandora's. Spotify holds holds a pretty hefty patent portfolio of music classification algorithms and Pandora employs hundreds of music experts that spend an hour tagging each song.

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Spotify's Discover Weekly seems to be a healthy mix of close enough guesses and random but not too random suggestions. Song radio is okay. The pop up recommendation for specific new songs/ albums feels so unrelated to my likes that it must be a sponsored recommendation. """Smart""" shuffle exclusively sends me whatever was popular on the radio in the last 5-30 years despite my listening habits being the opposite.

Pandora was much smarter, but seemed to run out of songs instantly.

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