Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
I am a snob when it comes to music choices. I have spent countless hours in my teenage years arguing with strangers on the internet that Megadeth is overrated, or defending Nickelback from being smeared as the worst rock band ever. Now, while I’ve realized I have been wrong in imposing my music choices on others, I still maintain a high level of scrutiny when deciding which music tracks will remain in my Spotify playlists.
Yes, I rely on Spotify as one of my go-to music streaming services. With Spotify hogging the most significant chunk of the market among all music streaming services and serving more than 275 million paid subscribers monthly, I’m certainly part of the majority here. However, I have witnessed Spotify’s recommendations for new music getting progressively worse, and that has made discovering new music daunting, despite its drumming up of using AI to help you find music that matches your liking.
And while I’m not ditching Spotify entirely, I have taken matters into my own hands, rebuilding my Spotify experience brick by brick instead of being at the algorithm’s mercy. But before I explain myself, please tell me if you feel the same about Spotify and its automatic recommendations.
Are you satisfied with Spotify's default recommendations? 14 votes Yes, they serve me well 29 % No, but I'm sticking for features 29 % No, I'm switched to alternatives 14 % YouTube Music FTW! 21 % I only use Hi-Fi music services 7 % Streaming music is bad for artists 0 %
I stopped using Spotify, but came back
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
I have been a Spotify subscriber for almost seven years, and the decision to continue paying the Swedish (music) warlords stems not from its music discovery. In fact, it was one of the reasons that made me stop using it briefly, but I had to return.
I did so for the ease it offers with features like the easy-to-sort playlists, which I’ve found to be the quickest to download, especially when I’m flying and only remember to download some music just five minutes before take-off. That ease is also vital for me because I, as a phone reviewer, have to switch phones very frequently, sometimes every couple of weeks, and transferring all my music to a new device feels much easier with Spotify.
Another reason I couldn’t successfully relinquish Spotify was Blend. I love that Spotify generates a reasonably balanced and passable playlist with songs that both my wife and I like that we can play while driving. This is especially useful for road trips, so we don’t have to constantly juggle between two phones or actively engage with the phone and be away from the views outside the window.
Adam Molina / Android Authority
And finally, Spotify bridges the gap between the different Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers spread across my house. Honestly, I would have given up on it — since I care less about the other two reasons I mentioned above — if a single service, such as YouTube Music or Amazon Music, was available on both platforms.
Meanwhile, I can’t rely entirely on Apple Music alone for playing on my speakers, because despite its catalog and discovery, which I subjectively find better than Spotify and YouTube Music, it doesn’t do a good job at searching songs well, especially in my native language, Hindi.
But in spite of these reasons, I have constantly harbored a feeling of lack with Spotify, and its feeble recommendations. Let me elaborate.
Why Spotify stinks for me
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
Spotify has heavily broadcast its reliance on AI for managing user recommendations, churning inconceivably humongous volumes of user data, to offer personalized suggestions for features like radio or to help you discover new tracks or artists. However, I find those claims highly superfluous and quite contrary to “personalized.”
See, Spotify uses cues like your preferences in music — primarily segmenting them based on genres and artists. It also infuses data about the music users are listening to, which is why it always has a heavy bias for popular music, which inevitably also means it is bound to recommend bigger and more popular artists over niche or indie ones.
Despite its proclaimed AI, Spotify's recommendations feel flaky and thoughtless.
And while accounting for similar music based on other users’ liking, specific genres, and artists, Spotify does not account for nuances such as rhythm, tempo, use of certain exotic musical instruments, or the mood of the songs while recommending music.
What makes this worse is Spotify’s incorporation of demographic data and its incessant nudging for locally relevant music. I may have never heard a specific regional artist, but if the song or playlist is trending in my country or region with the same or a similar language, I am bound to get it recommended to me while playing the radio.
Spotify also completely ignores my playing habits. If I skip a track in the first five seconds of it being played, I would expect it to understand that I dislike it — or at least not like it much. Yet, it would go on persistently playing the same track until I actively remove it by tapping the cross button in the player (I also feel standard like and dislike buttons would be a better UX choice, but let me save that for another rant).
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
Besides these, what truly makes me question the credibility of Spotify’s recommendations is how it bends over backward for big artists and controlling music labels, or even allows creators to run “Spotlight” with special marketing tools. Here, the artistic value takes a backseat, while promoters, who can afford to spend the extra buck highlighting their clients’ music, bring more visibility.
Spotify is replicating the Meta ad model for music.
Essentially, Spotify here acts like any other colossal service provider (read: Google, Meta) and gives a free hand to anyone who is willing to throw money at it.
Now I know music is a highly personal experience, and a lot of people may not find it problematic to be recommended regional and popular music — it’s popular for a reason. But it doesn’t cut it for me, and this constant dissatisfaction with Spotify’s algorithm forced me to look for ways to fix it. Thankfully, I found some that drive off elbow grease.
How I took control of my Spotify
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
The first and easiest measure I took was to rely on custom playlists actively. This did not originally stem from trying to defeat the algorithm, but rather from bypassing Spotify’s limitation, which only lists the most played tracks on an artist’s page. While it gives you the option to view an artist’s complete discography sorted into albums, there is no way to see all tracks from them, which is something I dearly miss Google Play Music for.
Custom playlists also get automatic recommendations, but those are better tuned to my liking than arbitrary ones on the homepage.
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
So, in order to see my favorite tracks — and not the most popular ones — from an artist, I resorted to creating playlists. I also found it quite useful to follow public playlists created by other human users, rather than relying on the machine’s recommendations.
This is essentially leveraging Spotify’s best social feature — shareable playlists — to actively tend to creating a reliable set of recommendations.
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
It advanced a step further when I discovered a free service called Playlost.fm. With Playlost, I can find great, actually fitting recommendations without sharing my private Spotify data. Although there is an option to link your Spotify account with APIs, I found it more secure to just add a playlist using its ID and then let Playlost find matching playlists created by other users.
I used Spotify's best social feature to beat the staleness.
Playlost generates a fresh playlist by analyzing the existing tracks in my playlist. Since it does not account for my location or other demographic data, I find these recommendations to be quite refreshing and actually useful.
When I’m itching to explore new music, I take another step further and use Chosic, which makes discovering new music so much easier. There are options to search for new music based on a particular song, artist, category, or genre. I can even share my Spotify playlists and let it curate a fresh one.
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
Besides these abilities, what I truly enjoy about Chosic is that it allows me to customize my searches for attributes such as energy, happiness, the balance of acoustic versus electric sounds, and danceability. I even have the option to limit searches to a specific BPM, which is just phenomenal. These generated playlists can be imported into Spotify, saved, and synced across devices.
My Spotify feels now more grounded
Tushar Mehta / Android Authority
With these actions, I have been able to tame Spotify while still continuing to use it despite my differences with its automatic recommendations or agonies over how poorly it treats small artists, while sleeping over those who use AI to manipulate users and the algorithm.
The only slight challenge I have had with these tools is that they don’t have native apps, but that’s mostly not an issue as they work perfectly with the web interface.
As I mentioned earlier, I now realize that music is highly personal, and you may not need these measures as much as I did to continue using Spotify. That said, I would be happy to discuss music and listen to your suggestions for artists and music I should explore further. I’ll start with mine; if you like rock, you should definitely check this out!
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