Spotify’s Music Discovery Shortcoming

In case you haven’t heard, online music service Spotify has landed stateside. While there’s a lot to like, which we’ll get to, there does seem to be at least one notable shortcoming in regards to music discovery – and I’m not the only one to come to that conclusion based upon feedback found in my Twitter stream (above). Spotify offers social sharing elements, perhaps unlike and superior to all others, there’s nothing in the way of automatic “randomize & play cool stuff for me” functionality. Or, at least, it’s not something I’ve been able to turn up just yet. Other all-you-can eat music services, like Mog and Rhapsody do a better job of offering artist- or genre-based playback for those times when you want more of a “radio” experience.

XM and Slacker continue to be my sonic weapons of choice. Primarily because I’m lazy and just don’t keep up with music the way I once did back in the days when I hoarded hundreds of cassettes and crafted my own mix tapes. What I appreciate about both these services is that they’re professionally programmed. Further, Slacker let’s your skip tracks and enables station “fine tuning”. Yet most folks don’t seem to be aware this feature (and even I usually have problems tracking down these settings). I’m here to help. Currently, one way to get at these options is by clicking on the station name, within the web interface, clicking Edit Station, and then hitting the Fine Tune button towards the upper left. It’s also accessible from within Slacker’s iPhone app: From a playing station screen, click the Menu button in the upper right, select Edit Station, and tap Fine Tune.


Click to enlarge.

14 thoughts on “Spotify’s Music Discovery Shortcoming”

  1. Completely agree here.

    Signed up for both a month of Spotify and a month of Slacker Premium. I much prefer listening to Slacker as it exposes me to new music which I can then later purchase or even just on-demand “bookmark”. To me, that is much more valuable than paying $10 a month to put my music “in the cloud”.

  2. Spotify in the UK and elsewhere does have better music discovery features. For whatever reason they haven’t implemented that on the US version yet.

    In the meantime there are 3rd party apps that do a decent job of generating a custom playlist. The one I like the most leverages your info on Last FM, so if you don’t use Last FM it won’t be much help. But if you do use Last FM then you can go to http://www.soundmatch.me to have it come up with a bunch of recommended songs.

    My biggest problem with Slacker is the woefully smaller catalog of music it has. I’m into electronica and so many of my favorite groups are missing that I just can’t use them. Right now Mog is still the sweet spot for me with a good catalog and an easy yet pretty good “radio” feature. It’s not as full featured as Slackers, but until they boost their catalog I’ll mostly use Mog for music discovery for now.

  3. I’ve played with Slacker, Pandora, and other services… I use Grooveshark from time to time when I want to find a particular song that I don’t own, and I’ve been playing with Google Music’s Instant Mix technology to surface songs I own but haven’t listened to in a while in interesting ways.

    But honestly, I just keep coming back to Radio Paradise, a non-commercial internet radio stream with a single station that just happens to very closely match my musical tastes these days.

    When I was a kid I used to read the liner notes in album art to find out which artists a band thanked so I could discover new music. Today I’d rather do as little work as possible and let someone else tell me what’s good.

    16 year old me would hate 34 year old me for that… I’m fine with that though.

  4. I’m dissatisfied with Spotify because I can’t seem to find a way to make it play Surfin’ Bird on an endless loop, which is my major requirement for an interactive internet music service.

    —–

    KCRW’s music, (which streams on the simulcast channel for about 12 hours a day on weekdays, and more on weekends), blows away all the competition, IMHO. Best DJ’s in the world. It’s Anne Litt’s world, and we just live in it. Plus, it’s free.

  5. Is Slacker’s catalog that much smaller? I too find it to be the best service so far. Great stations, plus the Spotify-like ability to play CDs/specific songs with a premium subscription. And, one of the few services with an iPad app. Anybody have a link to a comparison of number of songs per company?

    Also: Dave – any chance you can turn on a plugin for WordPress so we can subscribe to comment feeds? I always drop a comment, I frequently forget to come back and check. :)

  6. Slacker’s catalog only bothers me when it comes to caching. I assume the licensing differs and why it represents a subset of content.

    I, too, would like to see comment thread subscriptions. Unfortunately, the one I used years past had the unfortunate habit of spamming people and I disabled it. I’m also not prepared to outsource to Disqus or Intense Debate at this time… but it occurs to me now and then. As Chucky will tell you, you can subscribe to a RSS feed of comments – either sitewide or post specific. It’s not elegant but it works.

    Sitewide:
    https://zatznotfunny.com/comments/feed/
    Post:
    https://zatznotfunny.com/2011-07/spotifys-shortcoming/feed/

    I’m hopeful that the official WordPress Jetpack plugin adds this functionality in the near future. But they’ve been pretty quiet these last few months…

  7. Another shortcoming I’ve found with Spotify is that due to their different licensing agreements in other countries, many albums show up as unavailable in the United States despite being available in Europe. Add to this the fact that they list full albums multiple times if they have different sets of bonus tracks. Check out David Gray’s Draw the Line album. Seven different versions of the album due to bonus tracks, with six of them cluttering up the screen because they aren’t available in the US.

  8. Regarding Last.FM scrobbling the last few days, Last.FM had some server issues that did mess up scrobbling totally. It’s now being fixed.

    Some Spotify pointers, first off try the hidden contextual search which saved my day like artist:scarecrow title:”black door” find all the types in Spotify.com under FAQ section

    About the discovery aspect. There are many other sites that generate suggested songs in a Spotify playlist from any artist you enter or from what you played by using Last.FM and also one (truShuffle) that generate suggested songs on the fly from what you play in Spotify in a auto updated collaboration playlist as you play tracks. :)

    Here’s a few links to truly awesome Spotify tips:
    1. http://pansentient.com/2011/02/ten-top-spotify-tips/
    2. http://pansentient.com/2011/05/another-ten-top-spotify-tips/
    3. http://pansentient.com/2011/07/ten-more-top-spotify-tips/

    There are many sited that use Spotify API and I’m sure more will come.

    And finally, here’s an possible new service to create:
    As Spotify does have Last.FM scrobbling it’s quite possible to build an service that build collaboration playlist for each and every genre the user have listened to, by decade, by previous played tracks and so on. Might be an idea for someone to build and eventually sell. Is such case the service would be a awesome discovery/personal radio feature. Might even be possible to have such a service in a business deal with Last.FM for a small subscription fee like 1$ a month. If I was Last.FM I’d go for such a deal as it don’t require any licensing fees to payed to the labels at all, money straight in the bank. :)

    I would love such a service and I think many others would as well.

  9. “It’s not elegant but it works.”

    Really simple syndication is pure elegance. It’s not particularly in fashion at the moment, but elegance and fashion don’t correlate at every moment.

  10. I’m also a bit lazy when it comes to doing playlists or programming Pandora stations, so I’ve always preferred Slacker; as such, I’m not very excited about Spotify until there’s a third-part site that programs Spotify “stations” like Slacker or SiriusXM do.

    I’m also very disappointed that Spotify doesn’t have a web interface (I mostly listen to music while at work — can’t install software on work PCs) and that you have to pay to use Spotify’s mobile apps (Slacker allows to use apps even on “free” tier).

    Bottom line — I let my Slacker Premium one-month trial lapse in anticipation of Spotify, but I’m probably going to sign-up for Slacker Premium ($10/mo).

  11. Well here I was all set to switch from MOG to Spotify given that MOG’s iOS app didn’t support AirPlay, but it turns out it DOES. Just press the volume keys to bring up the panel that has the AirPlay icon on it. Jeez.

    Probably stick with MOG since it seems to do what I want. Play specific songs. Pulls up what I’m looking for. Pick a song and it’ll generate a playlist based on it, with sliders for how close to adhere–just that artist, hardly that artist at all, etc. I don’t much like the U/I, and like others I’m NEVER going to get around to creating playlists. But it works for now.

    And yes I’m still paying my $5.95/mo for XM. Now on both cars… Still kinda pissed about it, but hey the wife loves it, so there you go.

  12. The problem with Slacker right now is that the latest iphone client stinks. Takes 90-120 seconds to open, crashes all the time and organizes your cached content horrible — by album name, rather than artist name. There are a number of functions that create 2 back-to-back pop up windows that need to be dismissed and it is slow as molasses.

    If you’re listening Slacker, please improve the client!!!

  13. Rhapsody has stations and a MUCH better selection than Spotify. #7 is right. Spotify’s catalog is a mess what with the duplicates and gaps in CDs.

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