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Comment by chewz | Hacker News Reader

I have used Spotify Audio Features API to display albums and playlist on a radar charts showing acousticness, instrumentalness, energy etc. And to make recomendations (generate playlists) for similiar music based on these charateristics.

It has been fun project but now I am glad that I have never considered making anything serious out of it.

I did this project because my impression is that Spotify had been always trying to steer me not to music that I like but to music that Spotify makes most money of. It had always been paid promotions over user's tastes in music.

And I am not on Spotify anymore for years now. Apple Music have really tasteful recommendations and music curation.

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I worked on the Apple Music frontend and can't help but be pleased people are still using it and are pleased. I remember recommendations being a bug priority, but I wasn't involved with that. Spotify's recommendations aren't as bad as they used to be, but it still thinks I'm more into early 2000s emo rock than the kinds of metal I'm actually into.

I use Apple Music over Spotify whenever possible. The Spotify UX has always been, to me, inferior. Thank you for your work!

I'm torn. I've used both, and I find the Apple Music UI generally superior, but the way that Spotify handles music taste prediction, and how it presents that to the user, is quite a lot better than the Apple Music equivalent.

It's funny, I had the opposite experience - Spotify understood my taste while Apple Music didn't. (Specifically, Apple Music pushed a lot more Hip Hop/R&B music than I was used to - this was in early 2016 mind you so things may have changed since).

In my experience with both (currently subscribed to both) Spotify is quicker to extrapolate from less information, and Apple is more patient and observes longer-term patterns. They both eventually get to my tastes, but I can more-rapidly alter the primary genres of my Daily Playlists on Spotify than I can of the various weekly playlists on Apple Music.

I like each for its own reasons, though if I had to choose one forever, I’d probably pick Apple, but it wouldn’t be by a landslide. :)

Had opposite experience with spotify. I used my wife's account one time, and played an hour of nature music. 3 of her daily mixes for the next several months were nature sounds, whale music, etc. No amount of playing other types of music seemed to have any effect. Was getting ready to shut the account down and retry (or move away), but it started to get better.

I regularly do a full data request from them, (and imo everyone should, never know when one day they’ll just delete all your playlists).

Would be cool if I import my detailed listening data from Spotify into Apple Music and basically pre-train their recommendations for me to conclude if it’s better/worse than Spotify’s.

Similar, and recently. Apple Music has some wild ideas of what music I'd like to hear, and if one of my kids plays a song on my account I'm in for the extra special treat of hearing a lot of their music for a while. Even constantly telling Music that I don't like the songs. Spotify has been nearly magic in its ability to predict what I would enjoy listening to.

This, and AM had a horrible penchant to get “stuck” on certain genres/artists, and focus primarily on what I already liked, even when moving to other genres. I did successfully find some new songs I liked, but Spotify had a much better hit/miss ratio, especially with foreign and indie bands.

Apple Music ui is so confusing. It takes so many clicks to favorite a song or to play an album. Idk how people can use it regularly it seems like it’s not designed for creating playlists

Wdym. It takes one click to favorite a song and one click to play an album.

What do you mean because playing an album takes several taps, and favorites are also several taps away in a playlist. Unless you meant recently added? Because in that case it’s easily littered with singles, is only a few recents, and once again it’s more than one tap.

Apple Music UI is atrocious.

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