I would have agreed with you 3 years ago. But now not so much.

Spotify "Radio" feature just tends to want to give me music I've already listened to over new music. Whatever algorithm they are using has waaaay overfit to what I have already liked.

There used to be curated playlists done by humans, now almost everything is "made for you by Spotify" playlists which, have the exact same issue as the radio stations, suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music. If you want new music, you need to find a playlist made by a user instead.

Spotify « radio » is the best reason to listen to real radios ! [honestly the DJs on most of the radios I listen to are insanely skilled !]

Btw, is there somewhere a search engine to know when a given [set of] track was played where, in the internet radio world?

> suddenly it's all the same music you've already been listening to, very little new music.

However, if you expose the gods of the algorithm to a new artist, suddenly all the auto-generated feeds will try to include that band regardless of fit. Weird how these "social graph" systems tend to form and perpetuate bubbles.

On top of that, there are some weird shenanigans with meta-data. Listening to "foreign" bands may very easily taint the weekly mix with songs in a language you don't even understand and probably don't care about. An anecdata of course, I just looked at my "daily mix x", which appears to be in my local language, but with styles all over the place. Another mix contains mostly correctly turn of the century romantic pop.

I suspect the algorithm biases heavily on metadata so that it could be easily fed "albums/artists that publisher x paid to promote".

Spotify radio regularly makes me angry, and makes me want to press a "dislike" button really hard. But of course, that button is missing ...

Spotify has not viewed itself as a music company for longer than that. It's a platform for audio. And, while there are still music first people at the company, they are not in the power positions that they used to be.

The transition didn't start when they laid off Glenn MacDonald, but that sort of cemented it. They had already gutted curation before that and by this time you were far more likely to find people talking about AI in the halls than music. If you've never heard of Glenn, check out his book: "You Have Not Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music." Or his old online projects at https://everynoise.com/.

Anecdata incoming, but to offer an alternative view, I would really love to not use Spotify anymore since they change things constantly in ways I don’t like, but their music recommendations are fantastic for me.

Their generated playlists are great, and they do a good job recommending playlists I’d like from other users as well. And while I hate the format, their music shorts actually give me consistently good music. I just hate that it’s in the TikTok swipe style.

I wonder if it's a bit of a vicious cycle. For example, if you only ever listen to new music that Spotify gives you then at a certain point, the algorithm only knows how to output the things that it has already outputted. If you don't give it any new external signal then it doesn't have a good way to find new songs.

Does noone use the Spotify "daylist" playlist, that cycles between genres you have listened to previously?

This regular plays music I have never heard (both old and new).

YouTube is much better than Spotify for this in my experience.

This.

My guess/conspiracy theory is that Spotify has cut deals with record companies that pay less on subsequent listens to a track so the repetitive radio algorithms are more profitable.