I guess that’s where the ListenBrainz/Last.fm part comes in (which is mentioned in the article).
I still get music recommendations via friends, concert/festival lineups and online forums, but that’s just for my “main” genres. For other stuff, Spotify is quasi the only solution for me as well.
Friends don’t work for me. I don’t know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there’s some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it’s incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn’t well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don’t think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they’d have to know to recommend them to me).
As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven’t used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda “meh”. You can also only start out with what you have, as you’re scrobbling what you’re listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.
So as much as I wish there was, there isn’t really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same “competence”.
I guess that’s where the ListenBrainz/Last.fm part comes in (which is mentioned in the article).
I still get music recommendations via friends, concert/festival lineups and online forums, but that’s just for my “main” genres. For other stuff, Spotify is quasi the only solution for me as well.
Friends don’t work for me. I don’t know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there’s some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it’s incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn’t well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don’t think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they’d have to know to recommend them to me).
As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven’t used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda “meh”. You can also only start out with what you have, as you’re scrobbling what you’re listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.
So as much as I wish there was, there isn’t really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same “competence”.
This isn’t a huge issue, listenbrainz supports importing your spotify history.