For myself and a lot of people I know, discovery is nearly as much a reward as the music itself. And there is no comparison between the one- or two-dimensional "discovery" offered by social media and streaming platforms and the rich discovery experiences of any of the following:
1. listening to records with a friend
2. going to a dance club
3. attending a live performance
4. listening alone while reading liner notes
5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market
6. reading a book
So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways.
That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like.
The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.
The issue here is that no matter how "engaging" discovery is, it's not a viable business model on its own.
I'm working on the topic day to day in an adjacent field (movie & TV show discovery) and I'm currently not aware of any startup that has managed making money with the discovery experience itself.
It takes a lot of effort, data and persistence to get reasonable algorithms churning out something sensible and then, nobody wants to pay for it. If anything, it's usually an upsell to monetizing the content itself, which is why the only serious contenders to me here are basically Youtube and Spotify.
Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm less than thrilled.
And that's exactly because once you've got the perfect algo together that would be able to recommend you that niche movie Netflix features you've never seen in the interface that you're _really_ interested in (I can recommend "Last Breath" in that regard), the VP Content comes in and tells everyone something like "hey folks, whatever you do, make sure you're only promoting our originals, because they cost us far less in licensing... oh and let's give an extra in-your-face boost to King's Gambler to give it that extra buzz that lands us in Variety"
Discovery is hard, and once you made a name there, it's rather easy to screw it up by monetizing it.
> Even Netflix "had it all" with the million dollar recommender prize they set out in 2014, and I know their data science team is top notch. But if I scroll through their experience with my personal account in 2021, I basically still get "what all others are currently watching in {your_country} now" and I'm less than thrilled.
IMO, Netflix's recommender system suffers from the simple fact that the company itself doesn't want to collect accurate user ratings and make recommendations with them. If they did that, then a not insignificant portion of the content and deals they invested in would get memory-holed due to bad ratings or lack of interest, and that would make the company and its leaders look bad.
Netflix used to do that. You used to be able to rate programs between 1-5 stars and see the average rating. I believe it also recommended other programs to watch based on what you rated highly.
They did away with that system and replaced it with their custom recommendation engine. I believe, without any evidence, they did this to make bad shows look better. They once hosted a documentary about sex workers (can't recall the name, sorry) that had an average rating of around 2 out of 5 stars, and after the recommendation system change, it turned into a "75% match" on my account.
That sounds like functionality tunnel vision, to me. Matching users to movies isn’t an abstract metadata networking exercise— the larger goal is recommending things users enjoy so they keep watching. I’m far less likely to suffer a bad movie if it closely aligns with my interests. Poor representations of my passions and crafts frustrate the hell out of me.
Why don’t they want to collect accurate user ratings? Also, they know whether or not you finish something, how many episodes you binge, etc. There are many rating-independent signals.
Last.fm are perhaps the most successful discovery-mainly service. They had a ‘radio’ thing with a licensed catalog, but apparently finally dropped it in 2014. Otherwise, they are somehow chugging along for almost twenty years. However, I don't know how well their finances are, lately. The service doesn't seem popular in the past ten years or so, and I myself have just drifted away (in favor of less predictable and comfortable discovery by chance or by research, actually).
Do you mean not a viable VC-funded business, or not viable at all? From context, I think you mean the former. But there are plenty of "traditional" businesses (e.g. clubs and radios) that make a living through discovery.
Maybe the problem is VC funding then? Maybe one day we will hear of some bootstrapped strartup coming out of IndieHackers?
they don't really make their money through discovery, they make money through things they sell alongside discovery.
for radio, that is ads or subscriptions, but radio revenue has been down like the rest of traditional media. for clubs, that is the multiple rounds of overpriced drinks, and maybe a cover.
Spotify's monthly cost is comparable to about two or three mixed drinks, maybe one in an expensive city like New York or Miami. People blanche at paying any higher; remember how people reacted to Tidal being comparatively expensive?
> they don't really make their money through discovery, they make money through things they sell alongside discovery.
that doesn't contradict the assumption that it's a viable business. Search engines and social media services make money from ads but I don't think it would be fair to say that search engines or social media services are not viable business.
Really? In my experience clubs hire DJs and radio stations are typically national and have the record labels pitching new content to them. I’m not sure either are interested in the “discovery” we’re talking about.
yes and DJs can be seen as discovery facilitators as per grandparent's comment, so it is fair to say that this is a viable business, which is based on content discovery - or maybe I misunderstood what you're saying?
> radio stations are typically national and have the record labels pitching new content to them
leaving aside the fact that you just described a very narrow subset of all commercial radios - how does this make radios not related to content discovery?
Re: discovery, I’m surprised no one has mentioned TikTok. It might be the most successful music discovery engine out there.
> 1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book
All of these things point to the fact that listening to music is about cultural participation as much as anything else. And TikTok represents a culture and many subcultures, and seeing people you already like (people you follow) appreciating a certain type of music is powerful.
Probably because it's not so much about discovery, and more about rewarding conformity. I only used the app for a scant few hours, but all I saw were musicians from large labels being echo-chambered into every video I could find. The few "diverse" acts that I came across were already huge in another country or being pushed heavily as a result of massive advertising investments. Like the other comment suggests, TikTok is as much of a discovery service as radio is.
I disagree. “75% of TikTok users in the United States said that they used the platform to discover new artists, and 67% said they were more likely to seek out a song on a streaming platform if they heard it on the app” [1]. This full article is worth reading.
“Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams," re-entered the Hot 100 more than 40 years after hitting No. 1 on the chart, spurred by a viral video from user Nathan Apodaca… The album from which it hails, Rumours, also rocketed into the top 10 of the Billboard 200.” [2]
This one ^^ is particularly compelling to me. It’s easy to dismiss cases where growing artists grow faster because of tiktok. But this is clearly caused by tiktok alone. Also if you want examples of unpopular artists who grew a ton from tiktok those lists are very easy to find.
This ALONE shows how BAD discovery is on TikTok. I dont understand your point other then TikTok has alot of sheep, very little content (that is not based on viral trends), and very bad recommendation engine.
ie. If <teen boy> show <teen girl with ass hanging out>
if <teen girl> show <teen boy with tattos and shirt off>
Netflix's recommendation engine is just as bad. It cant even work out that i watch a show all the time to put it to the front of my list. I type 2 letters into the search bar, and all it does it search alphabetically give me a stupid suggestion.
> Radio is the most successful music discovery engine out there
Is it? When I grew up, all they played was top 40. Stuff more than a year or two old just disappeared. Even today, they'll run the same hit every 20 minutes. Makes me want to scream.
Going to college was a revelation. So much I'd never ever heard before.
The same thing when I started going to clubs - great music I'd never heard before.
I think it depends a lot on the radio stations that happen(ed) to be available in your listening area. When I was living in Tampa ~30 years ago, there were certainly a lot of "hot hits" type stations, but there was a great commercial AOR station I listened to more often -- and a few years later I discovered WMNF, an eclectic non-commercial community station that played virtually anything depending on which show you found.
Now, of course, my "listening area" is the whole internet. KCSN in Los Angeles is a rock-focused public radio station; KCSM up in San Mateo is a terrific Jazz station; Great Big Radio is an internet-only station that's technically oldies, but covers everything from the 1960s through the 2000s and likes to get into deep cuts. I do subscribe to a streaming music service and use it pretty frequently, but I suspect I find just as much new music through internet radio as I do through "discovery." (Although both curated playlists and algorithmic recommendations surface stuff I find interesting occasionally.)
As someone who considers them very much a music aficionado I disagree with your conclusion. According to Spotify's 2021 review, I listened ~55k minutes of music across ~3300 artists. It is impossible to think I would have found 75% of those artists had it not been for Spotify's discovery recommenders.
Release Radar was my most listened personalized playlist and it constantly introduced me to new artists in and around the genres of music I was listening to. I listen to a pretty diverse range of genres (everything from death metal, edm, hip-hop and country).
Perhaps I never grew up having to dig through piles of records, I was a child of the era of 100+ page books of CDs and the introduction of Napster but I still very much find discovery through these services to be hands down more efficient and cost effective for me. I could not afford to listen to the amount of music I consumed last year if I were purchasing records/CDs/tapes.
It might be that discovery via Spotify is polarising based on genre? Some people seem to hate it but like you, I find it very useful and constantly come across new tracks/artists I really like. Never had anywhere near that much success in the past sourcing new music, and certainly nowhere near as easily. Sometimes with a custom Discover Weekly playlist, I will favourite 80% of songs it pitches to me.
And I also agree on the efficiency. My first music purchase was a record, then tapes, then CDs and so on. Getting recommendations right where I listen to the music makes it trivial to add to my list - usually via the desktop app while working or via CarPlay while driving.
I find myself purposefully diving through Tidal's playlists and genres, like I used to flick through CDs in HMV.
The auto-discovery can be really hit or miss (mostly miss) - but so was picking CDs without listening to them. But the nature of streaming means I can flit between genres day to day, maybe I'm feeling psychedelic trance one day, the next schlager, the next prog rock. Prior to digital music I'd discover a lot within my focused genre (ambient electronic) but little else. But now I have the chance to find songs that have that similar feel for me but vary wildly in genre and style without sinking hours into music I don't enjoy.
Yes it requires more intention to discover new music than the streaming services built in recommendations but I feel like my music library has never been so varied and rich.
For me, the richest discovery is playing the music on my instrument for myself.
The discovery of music in myself through improvisation is the richest possible discovery.
Besides jamming, for electronic music I also find the joy of discovery using something like Beatport LINK with something like dJay for iPad to listen to music. It's an alternative to passively playing a playlist or playing an album.
As a musician, it's often better for me to share my music on free and non-pay or login walled services like Soundcloud and Audiomack than on Spotify... Yeah, I'm on Spotify, but invested all of last year trying to promote there and gained little traction, whereas my music stats on Audiomack and Soundcloud make leaps and bounds over my Spotify stats. In all honesty, I make a really good rate for Spotify streams and it wouldn't surprise me if that's exactly why I don't get a lot of streams on there despite conducting plentily of promotional work.
People pay for subscriptions on Spotify, Spotify also sells ad space which is profit. All artists never make a full penny per stream like we did on Mp3.com 20 YEARS AGO... It's insanity pretty much. I stopped promoting the services that don't work and only promote the ones that do, and I constantly monitor them each for positive and negative policy changes regularly. I never deleted my mp3 library, and I only buy phones that allow micro SD storage, because I'll be damned if I let a algorithm with an agenda to pick my music for me if I can help it.
My personal go-to for solo discovery online (ie not counting chatting) is the reverse directory lookup in soundcloud: the "in playlists" link (also $TRACK_URL/sets) which lists all the playlists some track appears in. There usually isn't too many and you can quickly navigate towards niche stuff that some random human deemed somehow related.
I believe Spotify's discovery algorithms have factored in other user's playlists when trying to find songs associated to other songs -- that's why (in my experience, anyway) it has been better than the usual recommendation engines.
Since Youtube changed algorithms and I moved away from college, etc. I realized all my major discovery avenues disappeared. Other people mentioned radio, and I agree -- I don't think discovery has to be engaging, it just has to be low effort and not so bad that you turn it off.
I love bandcamp and most artists I've found lately have their music there, but music discovery on bandcamp is extremely difficult. All the music I've found there is due to people linking bandcamp on other websites/mediums.
So self plug: https://bandhiking.isandrew.com/ - it's basically a bandcamp radio (if anyone's interested). There's room for improvement but it works IMO, I've found good stuff regularly using it.
Some of the best music discovery I’ve had is actually Reddit. I primarily listen to electronic and the communities are 6/5. It’s just streams of music being recommended, with occasional discussion, in tiny subreddits for all the subgenres. I’ll let you find the subreddits yourself if your interested (just search for your intended subgenre). don’t wanna spoil them :)
Those subreddits sometimes become a really small echo chamber, and it's obvious its just a minor fraction of a genres listeners. I think everynoise.com and your ears is a way better initial genre exploration tool than Reddit even for genres that have been out there for a while and are still popular and being produced.
For the genres I've been listening for a while or jamming to with my rig Reddit is usually underwhelming and I have more success by starting on everynoise.com or Beatport (which I generally dislike for discovery because their gatekeeping of genres is bullshit) and then listening to new stuff that the label for the artist I found is putting out.
Yep, some of the subreddits definitely kind of focus on one section of the genre but that’s what I kind of like. If I want to find some good new music with a specific sound, I know I can just check those communities out. When I was first discovering electronic though, all the subgenres and labels was overwhelming. Now that I have my tastes kinda figured out I now add in listening to labels I like and artists.
That everynoise site is really interesting, never heard of it before. Excited to check it out, thanks for the link!
Whenever I start feeling worn out of the music I have been listening too I spend some time just scrolling through and listening. I am not a big playlist person but rather a library person. (I use Apple Music for this reason as they emphasize libraries). When I find a song I like I just add it to my library. And Apple Music’s interface is great as I can retrieve it by either looking for the album, artists, or genre (albeit it’s classifications aren’t very good).
I can't speak for that user in particular but I use Reddit for music discovery as well. My flow is this: I'll look for stuff with the genre tags I know I like and look for new artists I don't recognize that have those tags. I'll listen to one or two songs and set their name aside if I like them and go back to browsing. After I get bored of looking for new stuff, I'll go back through and listen to the entire discography of that artist and add songs I like to my Spotify or Youtube playlists. I then move from artist to artist that I set aside earlier. After that, I'll look for any collabs they've done and check out the assisting artist or I'll check out the "people also listen to" suggestions on Spotify and start the process over but there instead of on Reddit. That cycle typically lasts about a year before I get the urge to look for new stuff again on Reddit like that.
> The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
Last.fm is really good about this. I can't stand Spotify recommendations in comparison because of this exact problem.
I'm perfectly capable of Googling "bands like X" and gleaning a surface-level idea of similar artists, which seems to be the extent of Spotify recommendations. Meanwhile, Last.fm is programmed well enough that it goes beyond the surface-level recommendations, and finds things I would never have found otherwise. I'm talking about bands and side-projects that broke up 30 years ago and only released a demo tape, but that demo tape is gold to fans of band X.
Can you expand on why you see activities 2 - 6 as music discovery?
In all those cases, I would probably be listening to known music, not discovering new music.
I for one, would probably pay the same for Spotify even if it did not offer music, but just the discovery features offered by itself and by 3rd party apps in it's ecosystem.
When using discover weekly, usually when I hear something I like, I mark it as liked which adds it to my library and then enqueue the top tracks of that artist/each artist if they are artists I never listened to before.
3rd party apps allow me to do this more often, or follow other discovery paths.
On the topic of engaging and active discovery, a good portion of my music library has been built through playing Guitar Hero, Rock Band or Clone Hero, funnily enough.
I may look into pursuing a side project next year along the lines of rhythm gaming and inspiration from current music tech: discovery might not be a strange goal to pursue in that domain. In any case, that Twitter thread couldn't have come at a better time for my own brainstorming.
I've discovered a bunch of music through Beat Saber, and Stepmania (and Mungyodance). The problem with that is there is a sort bias with the track selection. For example I enjoy the gameplay of SDVX but it's hard to find music for it that isn't fast paced Japenese electronic music.
I've never found any streaming radio or service that had a shuffle play across their entire catalog. That I would like, and it's a great way to discover music.
1. listening to records with a friend 2. going to a dance club 3. attending a live performance 4. listening alone while reading liner notes 5. pawing through a stack of records at a flea market 6. reading a book
So for "discovery" to be a viable product I think it has to somehow be at least as engaging as any of these more traditional ways.
That's not to say that various curated playlists and algorithmic suggestions are useless. But it's rare that I'm introduced to something new that I like.
The algorithms are good at guessing that if I like the Zombies, I'll like the Turtles (which is true) but it never jumps to (for instance) current, contemporary indie/DIY stuff that is influenced by '60s rock and '70s punk. I make those associations all the time. Indie/college radio DJs do it all the time, but Spotify never does.
But again, Spotify is trying to sell millions of subscriptions for people who just want something to listen to in the car or put on at their dinner party. For the "hands-off" experience, it's fine. But discovery by its very nature is not hands-off.