I use YouTube Music today as its family plan is reasonably priced (although the price is increasing next year) and it includes YouTube Premium…but I have found with it (and every other service I’ve tried) that I have to use other tools for actual music discovery.

I tried Spotify for a while but the promotion of Podcasts caused me to speak with my $ and stop using it…plus its music discovery is no better than YTM.

I still use LastFM as my primary source for recommendations and it does okay.

But I will never forget how wonderful Rdio was to use…it felt (atleast to me) like a service for people who loved music and discovering new music

https://www.jamesacaster.com/my-music/

In general I find Spotify's recommendation to be slightly worse than just listening to the radio.

I don't have a good alternative at the moment though. A long time ago I built a music recommendation system based on Discogs that made a vector space based on the genres and then found the most similar albums of one album. When I listened to a track I'd then lookup the album for the track, find the most similar albums and then play some random songs from those albums, but with some controls to make larger jumps possible. It was not using a vector database like FAISS so it was kinda slow and had other issues and with too much bitrot I'd need a complete rewrite to get it working again, but I found lots of new music with it.

Maybe there's some services like that out there now that can hook up to streaming services like Spotify?

Eventually there were enough things missing on Tidal that I gave up and cancelled the sub and went back to Spotify.

Spotify does everything well enough for me that it's still the best streaming service. The fact they listened to Adele and changed the functionality of how album playback works has a good side too!

For me what would be awesome would be if they paid artists more. But that's true of any and all platforms like this.

I’ve been on a good streak lately though with some new artists that make me go “why have I never heard these before”. But on the other hand I’m still mostly stuck in mono-genre land.

Also Spotify keeps pushing these “highlights” on me as if I don’t remember what I listened to this year.

[1] https://funkwhale.audio/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iNIBySph9Vc (Sorry, youtube made it a short and I don't know how to make it a video.)

I used to do the ipod thing with winamp back in napster days, then i kept a personal library just of cds i've bought, then i tried the subsonic thing i really liked dsub app for android. It was great but i really dont want to do server stuff at home...metadata on discs and bringing it over to digital audio, its never perfect and bugs me to where i'll spend hours cleaning it up...

I've been using Youtube music/Google music for many years, abandoned my digital files and i find a lot of my music on youtube and recommendations on YTM. I usually pick the bands im into and they have similar artists and drill down that way, im not a huge fan of auto discovery playlists.

YTM are going to be raising their rates, i pay for family premium, $15 -> $22/mo in april for me. So now im looking at alternatives and trying to avoid running a server and/or managing files. I think YTM has more music because of the youtube side but the client side UI sucks.

That being said.... nothing ever changes. Any cloud music platform has always been just another radio-- whether they brand themselves that way or not. For the year or so that I used spotify I did find some gems, but I would forget about them as quickly as I found them.

I think of my media library as something I have to put work into to have it be meaningful. Organizing it, deciding what you keep and what you toss out, what to pay for what to skip, all make it more important to you and more memorable. Having a library in itself is also of course a useful UX thing to remind yourself what you like and continue to go back to it.

I have used iTunes since the very first iPod and still have an iPhone. I customize my own id3 tags and album artwork -- sometimes I find the internet has made their own better perfect album art.

I have over 20,000 songs, mostly from Bandcamp and YouTube these days, but still sometimes ripping CDs here and there. A ton of my music is esoteric stuff I'd never find on Spotify -- some strange soundtrack put together by fan artists of video games, or something like a Japanese noise band.

Audio quality frankly doesn't matter much beyond 128kbps for me, and portability of a format is more important than anything else. I use m4a (AAC) mostly these days, and only a few select albums really deserve the FLAC/ALAC treatment IMO. So I'll store these separately for later... maybe when I retire.

Just to demonstrate how my music is fundamentally incompatible with Spotify, here's some examples, just picking randomly from my library to see if they exist on Spotify:

beatmania IIDX 29 CastHour soundtrack -> Nope

Lost Ark Soundtrack -> Nope

Driven To Madness - Dance with the Dead -> Yes

Blutkind - :wumpscut: -> No, but they have lots of other wumpscut stuff

Creid - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope, and this is his best work, RIP Spotify

One Last Kiss - Utada Hikaru -> Yes

follow slowly - Nekomata Master -> Nope

Masada Gestalt - Zen Albatross -> Nope

Yin-Yang - Victor Wooten -> Yes

Zipangu - Wednesday Kanpanera -> Surprisingly, yes

Xenogears: Revival the first and the last - Yasunori Mitsuda -> Nope

Bastion Original Soundtrack - Darren Korb -> Yes

Dark Black Forest - Steve Rhyner -> No

The Skywatcher's Handbook - Skywatchers -> Yes

So anecdotally that's 6/14, or about a 40% rate.

That's actually better than I expected, but still Spotify is something I'd just never, ever use because it's fundamentally incompatible with my ideals behind listening to music and how important it is to me, especially in the long term.

My only gripe with Plex is that the only voice assistant that interacts with it is Alexa, and it requires me to have my Plex server shared over the Internet. On the other hand, that’s been handy a couple of times when I was out and about and wanted to stream a couple of songs (which it did as well as Spotify).

Just go to YTM?

I stopped using Spotify when their client became slow and bloated. Then I went to GPM which was easy (didn't care for my library much).

Then onto YTM (which in the beginning sucked), but is now close to parity with GPM. Took them a while but they are close to there now.

I also found the recommendation algorithm of GPM better than Spotify and also YTM has better recommendations.

i do have vinyl as well for some of my favorites. but digital is still my primary listening mode.

This included:

    -Playlists
    -Streaming history for the past year (you can request history for the lifetime of your account too)
    -A list of items saved in your library
    -Search queries
    -No. of followers, accounts you follow, and blocked accounts
    -Payment and subscription data
    -User data
    -Family Plan data
    -Inferences
    -Voice input
    -Podcast interactivity
    -Spotify for Artists data

Is it possible to make them export it for you - via a GDPR request?

Specifically, I discovered amazing artists through the Discovery Weekly and the Artist's Radios. But also the "Fans also listen to" section in an artist profile. I found all sort of things, even obscure indies with a few thousands of listens and other "hidden gems". I'm really happy they now added the "Enhance" function to playlists.

What I noticed though, is that I have to be very careful with my interactions on the platform to "train" the algorithm in the right direction. I have to like only specific genres that I want recommendations about, use playlists for anything else and use a lot the "i don't like this" feature on the discovery weekly. There was a period where I listened to more casual genres than usual and it completely broke my profile. My Dicovery Weekly was terrible at that time, it was a bummer.

What I think would be great is if Spotify would be more open about this. I would love to be able to tweak the discovery by myself (like suggest specific genres or artists, blacklist others). Maybe even create different discovery profiles for different genres. Instead I have to play the game of interacting blindly with the platform and see the results next monday on the new discovery weekly.

Going through my recommendations feels like a bunch of bad cover bands of things I like.

On the topic of vector search, I'm fairly certain that Spotify still uses Annoy (https://github.com/spotify/annoy). Like Faiss, it's a great library but not quite a database, which would ideally have features like replication (https://milvus.io/docs/replica.md), caching, and access control, to name a few.

Anything that I find myself liking a lot I head out to one of the very few record stores out here and buy it on vinyl. But then, I'm old and like having things in my hands and not just streamed. I buy paper books too.