[task_queue]

> I strongly disagree. Spotify has dramatically increased the variety of music that I listen to and introduced me to lost of tiny artists with great music.

I've used a number of music recommendation applications over the last decade.

With Spotify, I've noticed that it will become "stuck" in what I describe as similar artist troughs and valleys. In other words, the Spotify recommendation engine will pigeonhole your recommendations into certain subgenres, niches, or related artists more so than say Pandora or Last.fm would.

[myself248]

Yup, I've had to work around this. I'll pick a song I like, and do "song radio" to find more like it. But this makes a playlist which is basically 6 more similar artists, and no variety beyond that. But I want to branch out more, several steps beyond that. So I'll open a particular song from that playlist, go to "song radio" for that, and drag a bunch of songs I don't recognize back into the first playlist. Repeat this for a few more songs. Then once I've added a bunch more variety, do "playlist radio" again.

It's super obnoxious. I wish they had a slider for "be more adventurous" versus "hew close to the line". Do I remember Pandora having something like that?

[kazga]

Spotify automatically creates a playlist from songs you've "liked" while they're playing on radio. So just start a certain song radio, like the kind of songs that go into the direction you want, and then start playlist radio on the "Liked from Radio" playlist.

[c0vfefe]

You can simulate the slider behavior you describe by thumbing up everything for more variety, or thumbing down everything for more restriction.

[AwesomeFaic]

Wholeheartedly agree. While my musical tastes are a bit all over the place, I can say that for the past month or so almost all my generated suggestion playlists consist of music I've not only listened to recently, but many I already liked and saved to my songs.

[RandallBrown]

Spotify made a Tastebreakers playlist at the end of the year to recommend music I might like but is outside the genres I typically listen to.

I thought it was decent.