Music Discovery and Usability

jamieu

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At the weekend, locked down and growing a bit bored of listening to the same Albums/Tracks on heavy rotation I decided to write some scripts to grab the playlists from my favourite shows on my local radio station and create Tidal playlists from them.

In the end it turned out to be easier than expected and I now have a bunch of new playlists of music in Tidal…Yaaah! Although the ‘match rate’ against Tidal was somewhat disappointing, in some cases below 50%. So next I’m thinking of refactoring the code to also perform lookups against Spotify, Google Music and MusicBrainz API’s to see how they perform in comparison. With MusicBrainz being the baseline.

But it got me thinking, how do people ‘automatically’ discover new music, above the basic ‘New Albums’ and ‘Recommended features’ of your chosen streaming service.

I’m particularly thinking of services that come to you/are built into your player/streaming service rather than manually adding or favouriting tracks you discovered manually elsewhere.
  • Does the completeness of catalogue influence your choice of streaming service? At what point does completeness of catalogue override sound quality?
  • Do you find streaming services online catalogues overwhelming? If so, how do you make it more manageable? ie. manually creating playlists, filtering, favouriting, star'ing, rating, adding an alias to your local collection. What other techniques do you use?
  • Does a particular streaming services ‘recommendation engine’ influence your choice? ie. “New for you” or “Recommended for you” features.
  • If you’re using a streaming service’s app (or even a 3rd party app) how important is the UI (User Interface) in terms of ‘discovery’ (ie. finding music to play) to you?
  • Do you use ‘scrobble’ type features, to help ‘train’ your service/player to your tastes? Is this important to you?
  • Do you use an ‘infinite playlist’ feature (ie. continue playback of similar music after the last track ends like LMS's 'Don't Stop the Music' or RoonRadio) on your player/streaming service? How important is it that this accurately reflects your taste and isn’t ‘gamed’ by the streaming service to promote certain tracks/labels? Do you give thought to how a particular services wider user base may influence those recommendations. Are you happy with the recommendations it gives? Do you train it with up/down votes, or just leave it be?
  • How important are ‘public’ sources of playlists to you? I know playlists can be imported/transferred across platforms. But is it important to have a good selection ready to go in your chosen player/streaming service?
  • How concerned about 'lock in' in are you if you have invested time on 'moulding' a particular music service or platform to your tastes?
People seem to spend an exorbitant amount of time on here worrying that they aren’t streaming at the highest possible bitrates and being drawn, like a moth to a flame, to new marketing acronyms like MQA along with tweaking every last possible parameter on their system in the hope of an audible (or inaudible) improvement. But I hear very little talk about the software / interfaces / services we use to playback our digital music. In particular the usability of those services/interfaces, as opposed than what bitrates they support.

Are people happy to use a poor interface if it offers possible better SQ? At which point does usability win out? Surely when is all is said and done it’s the music that matters most. Or do people just playback the same dozen albums, change some interconnects or a DAC in the hope of an upgrade in SQ and then replay those same dozen albums again ;-)

Not saying you can’t have both, just interested in where users fall on this and at which point does usability / discoverability influence your decision re. services / software?
 
Last edited:
Last.fm

It helps of you can configure your chosen players and services to scrobble (i.e. send the currently playing track to last.fm)
The app on Android will do this with most music service apps. I also use Logitech Media Server that can also do the same.
 

Agree, it's certainly one of the better recommendation engines out there.

I have last.fm 'scobblers' on all my RPi endpoints, as well as LMS and Roon. Currently I only have it enabled in Roon as I was concerned about double scrobbling and it scrobbling radio and mixes.

Annoyingly Roon doesn't currently do anything useful with the actual last.fm data or recommendations and I think LMS only has 'light' integration via the LastMix/Don't stop the music plugin (but I could be wrong, I know the LastMix actually worked pretty well last time I used it). But I still like the fact that I have my usage data and recommendations from multiple platforms/devices stored somewhere central with a half decent API.

As an aside, I used to know one of the founders of last.fm and vaguely considered taking a job there back in the early 2000s (...so long ago, where did the years go)
 
When on the lookout for "extra" music I listen to Radio Paradise, as an App in LMS

I do use Spotify "dont stop the music" - often it just replays what I already have, but the odd time it does set off down a different path, which is good .......

Dont write "scripts" ....... pencil and paper here .. :)

LMS rocks, and I like Raspberry Pi :lesson:
 
Usually, I find music through Instagram just going through the hashtag Soundcloud... there's a lot of trash but I found a good artist the other day called Michael mayo he put out an album called unprecedented which had 4 songs that I like I just followed them on Spotify.
 
Cheers Guys I used Last.fm years ago but assumed it was obsolete.

Agreed, I'm also more for listening to the music and discovering new and new "old" bands as opposed to bit rates etc.

Another thumbs up for Radio Paradise and I'd also suggest pick a presenter that plays your preferred style of music and download a couple of their shows as you get some nice surprises.

Self and mates have been recommending an LP per person per day for last 12 weeks or so, its built up a tidy library of music with few rejects.
 
I'm a member of a few Facebook groups on certain artists I enjoy. From there we get a lot of posts of other artists and tracks that sound similar. The best night I had was when someone asked to post a track they'd recommend that others may not know. I think we got over 80 tracks and the op added them all to a Spotify playlist and shared it out. I went through each track and over 40 of them were added to my own playlists.

I tend to just use Spotify release radar and recommend engine. It works well for me. I have tried Tidal a couple of times now. I found an iOS app that basically matches your playlists from all of the main streaming services. I did a playlist match from Spotify to Tidal and of the 101 tracks, Tidal had 83 of them. I had a similar issue with the catalogue the last time I tried. Until their library can match Spotify, I'll live with the lower quality. My 46 year old ears and entry level Hi-Fi setup (Yamaha RN-602 and Monitor Audio silver 6 floorstanders) didn't really notice any difference if I'm honest.
 

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