HN Explorer

Is there a music recommendation (service –| server –| program) that works?

6 points by jtode ↗ HN
Once upon a time, Spotify made good recommendations to me, but lately, they just want to shove as much Fleetwood Mac at me as they can, to the point that I had to ban the band from my feed (I like them fine, but not once have I chosen to play them, so WHY do they keep showing up?).

I do like the idea of discovering artists via a machine that pays attention to what I enjoy and finds more like it, with no agenda (ie, a need to make money from the process itself) of its own.

Does such a machine exist on the current internet?

I am willing to pay a monthly fee (with or without streamed music, but again, I would be paying because I am receiving a "pure" recommendation service that is not influenced by anything other than my choices), or setup a program or server, whatever is necessary. I just want a thing that clues me in on whatever is new in the world that sounds like my kind of thing.

4 comments

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r721
The biggest music recommendation services I know apart from Spotify are Last.fm (can automatically take listening data from Spotify) and RateYourMusic (you need to manually rate albums/singles there). Did you try them?
jtode
I have a RYM account but have done nothing besides read the reviews on the front page with it. I believe I have an account on last.fm from more than a decade ago, so I'm aware of it, but things evolve over time so I'm kinda hoping for an endorsement from an enthusiastic current user who is happy with the service they're getting and not having the most tired and insipid suggestions thrown at them repeatedly.
r721
I'm not an active RYM user (have circa 150 old ratings), but automatic recommendations it gives me are pretty decent. I think one needs to rate 30-50 albums or so (forgot where I got the number from) to get them. The strength of RYM is its unique crowd-sourced genre system, which it takes into account when recommending albums, so it's worth trying :)
surprisetalk
These sites create 2D music maps of music artists (with previews) that are fun to explore:

[1] https://everynoise.com

[2] https://everynoise.com/artistprofile.cgi?id=7w29UYBi0qsHi5RT...

[3] https://www.music-map.com/björk

It looks like Every Noise also has a Spotify integration:

[4] https://discoverquickly.com

It's not exactly what you asked for, but I personally recommend looking for the "best" music rather than music you like the most. A great way to do this is to scour the RateYourMusic charts by year and by genre (the genres get really specific).

[5] https://taylor.town/eschew-the-new

[6] https://rateyourmusic.com/charts

ChatGPT is also a pretty good music recommendation engine. Just make sure to use the term "uncommon" in your query to get non-obvious answers.

I've also been obsessively consuming music for 20 years and rating each album for ~2 years, so feel free to send me an email with your favorite artists and I'll create a personalized list of recommendations for you :)

[7] https://taylor.town/music

[8] hello@taylor.town