I do wonder how people can be satisfied with automatic music playlists. I was entertained by this for maybe a few hours when Pandora was new, but they all seemingly always devolve into either playing weird shit, playing the same 50 songs over and over again, or playing whatever new release shilled crap the record companies are paying to promote. Yet it seems like everybody else these days is a Spotify addict. I guess most people are fine with it.
Pandora is the only one that even remotely came close to something worthwhile, for me. It usually picked stuff that I wanted to hear; and that was a decade ago. Every other selection service regularly fed me garbage.
Pandora was worthless, though, because of their skip limit (even in the paid version). Even with its effectiveness, it would still feed me junk.
This guy is a classical music guy, though, and all the pickers suck, for that. Classical has been treated badly, forever. I am extremely disappointed that Apple segregated classical into its own app, because I have always enjoyed mixing it in with my regular music.
One thing about classical music, is that every performance is a “cover.” Who performs the piece is just as important as who wrote it. None of the selection services seem to understand that.
MP3 tags are pretty much worthless. They are incredibly limited, and I don’t know why they have never been improved.
What would you add to MP3 tags? ID3v2 already has separate fields for section/title/performer/conductor/composer/lyricist, it isn't the spec's fault Spotify doesn't use them.
It's the "pick any one" nature.
You have to classify every title as one type.
How would we classify Zappa, or Secret Chiefs 3? Are they jazz, alternative (a worthless category), rock, pop, heavy metal, comedy? Depending on what you listen to, it could be any one of them. Also, each song could be in multiple categories. Boz Skaggs was known for disco-style pop, but he was an outstanding blues performer, and many of his songs reflect that mix.
This is really a music industry problem, and software just reflects that. The bug is really in the Requirements phase.
Well, it's less of a technology problem than it is an industry one. You can have multiple entries in the genre list and they're freeform, for example Ambient;Electronic, in both ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. For Vorbis Comments, you have multiple GENRE= tags. Some players support this.
In my interactions with distributors, it seems streaming services tend to support up to two genre classifications; though they're pretty outdated and general (even more general and dated than the Winamp genre list). I don't think they use the metadata presented much in the classification; in fact Spotify does its own estimation of 'energy' and other subjective emotions using various classifier algorithms.
It's the record companies/publishers which don't use them. I don't think I know one record company which reports metadata well.
I've fallen back to keeping my classical collection on my Plex server. Many of the recordings are ones I've personally participated in the performance of, and others are just ones that I prefer. Elgar performed by London philharmonic with Daniel Barenboim is what I prefer, and when I hear a different recording, like the Berlin Symphony one that Spotify likes to trot out, it feels wrong. It drags where it's not supposed to and speeds at other times.
It's not wrong, it's just not what I like
I listen to a lot of old music - 1950s, 1960s. I don't really have peers who listen to it so discoverability is a real issue. Pandora was amazing for me ~20 years ago, it introduced me to songs I never would have heard. Especially in the 50s you had a lot of "one hit wonders" so just listening to a band wasn't a great way to find other songs that I would like.
I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best replacement so far.
The old stuff is the good stuff alright,
(1930s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpc
(1950s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6isIPytpk40
(1960s) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qssa6ec7faQ
Good stuff in any time, just harder to find:
(2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8hPNPInXh0
(2024) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef-c-9G52jU
(2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C1EDbkl2CU
(2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvcNvVZl9AA
(2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr2sx-HHTBw
>just harder to find
But this is the problem. Before, people where naturally exposed to classical and jazz and OSTs etc.
This is the problem with current society.
How do you find it in the modern era that’s really the problem we’re asking to solve
That New Order cover is tight, thank you for this.
> I don't really use Spotify so I can't compare but Pandora was awesome. I've found Youtube playlists to be the best replacement so far.
You do realize Pandora is still there, right?
For me, it's been 'gone' since 2017, when they shut down in Australia. They used to be available everywhere, but locked off international audiences when laws became inconvenient.
(Obviously you could VPN in, but it's a meaningful hassle.)
> They used to be available everywhere, but locked off international audiences when laws became inconvenient.
The coverage I could find suggested that they were available in three total countries: the USA, Australia, and New Zealand.
So there was no point at which they locked out "international audiences". They had a branch in Australia, and they closed it.
From 2005-2007 it was available everywhere. It was a purely US operation, but the internet is international unless you take active steps to stop it.
In 2007 the copyright lawyers caught up with them and they locked it to US IP addresses: https://mashable.com/archive/pandora-international
Australia-specific operations were 2012-2017.
It got shut down in my country about 10 years ago.
It’s never been good though
Not really. I stopped using it at some point a very, very long time ago, and I don't recall why. I've moved to Youtube so it hasn't occurred to me to revisit.
I've found a lot of great music through Pandora.
It's very miss-or-miss; you need to be willing to thumb down 95% of what Pandora thinks you'll like. But with enough care, it's a good discovery channel.
Spotify's discover weekly was genuinely good when it first came. It was on another level from other recommendation services. Maybe 90% of the music I've bought on Bandcamp, I would never have known about if it wasn't for discover weekly (Bandcamp's own recommendation/discovery features are lousy).
But somehow, probably from a combination of rights owners gaming it and Spotify gaming it, DW is a pale shadow of its former self.
I've been working on and off on something [1] that tries to address this problem through somewhat manual curation. You choose what genres you're interested in, and get auto updated playlists created from your music library.
I have a few other experimental features in the pipeline that will expand the music selection, but they are not there yet.
[1] https://riffradar.org/
My observations are that the average person is bothered by the slop of modern playlists full of AI music, but they don’t care enough to do anything about it.
Personally I dropped playlists long ago for YouTube dj sets which are a million times better than Spotify’s AI dj. Some of this is not a tech failing but the DJs have access to unreleased tracks, their own private edits, and are more willing to do more bold things. The AI DJ will never drop a surprise change that makes the crowd scream.
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