Spotify has financial incentive to obfuscate their UI to tilt people toward mindlessly consuming playlists. This is because labels pay Spotify to put certain songs on large playlists, and Spotify knows playlists are a good habit to push onto their users.
Radio was used to discover new music decades ago, but paying a radio station (directly) to play a song is illegal (payola), so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.
This is detrimental to music discovery, because discovering a song is a lot less meaningful than discovering a new album and consuming the project as a whole and appreciating its composition.
So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
How I fixed this:
1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature
2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)
3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.
4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.
Radio was used to discover new music decades ago, but paying a radio station (directly) to play a song is illegal (payola), so DJs had to break new songs, styles, and have a wide array of music offered (within the theme of the station).
Spotify now has the ability to engage in a legal version of "digital" payola, so their handcrafted group of artists by major labels are peppered into their hundreds of in-house playlists, disguising this business practice as a wide array of music selection.
This is detrimental to music discovery, because discovering a song is a lot less meaningful than discovering a new album and consuming the project as a whole and appreciating its composition.
So you're discovering new music, but none of it is memorable, because listening to music in 2024 (for a lot of people) is often a wall of slightly groovy background noise, with the occasional standout track that you probably toss into your own personal playlist.
How I fixed this:
1. Disable the 'autoplay' feature
2. Don't use playlists and listen to albums (except for when I'm in a pinch or hosting a party)
3. Intentionally discover a new genre every few months and go down a rabbit hole. My current new genre is South African Amapiano. Excellent stuff.
4. Discover music across different genres and time periods using RateYourMusic.