1. a music recommendation engine
2. social sharing of playlists
3. a music subscription service
To me, those are more important than the player itself -- in fact, I'd say #2 and #3 on that list are the defining aspects of Spotify for the general user, where #1 is more of a personal killer-feature for me.
Music subscription was on my list. But, if you already have all the songs you'd listen to, and don't care for finding new music, what do you use it for?
Disclaimer -- I have only recently started to use Spotify on a daily basis. And typically I am playing an already known-good-to-me Artist channel, and I am admittedly a newbie to using spotify in general.
With that said though, there was some feature, I believe it was called "discover music while you listen" or some such thing that would play some other artists amongst that which I chose to shuffle/play.
The genres werent even in the same galaxy!
I listen to EDM and industrial almost exclusively. It was interjecting Taylor swift, some country-sounding stuff and some other stuff that I couldnt identify but was the complete opposite of the spectrum from what I was into...
Further, finding a particular song that has the same word in the title as some song that is being heavily pushed seems impossible.
There is some band called TOVE LO -- and any time I search for a song actually titled "habits" not by them - the only thing it shows me is this TOVE LO page...
so, yeah - my experience with their recommendations has been worse than sub par.
I would recommend giving Spotify another shot, maybe spend some time favoriting and saving songs you do like, as it's recommendations have been on point for me.
Maybe she isnt on Spotify... But ill give it a try...
p.s. Do you really find that Spotify's music discovery is better than last.fm + curated reviews? New Releases could be a differentiator if they would at least offer a filter for full albums (not to mention filters by genre or "recommended for you").
Discover Weekly has been great. Shared playlists are great too. As for radios, they were OK when I first threw my music at them, but now I just hear the same old stuff.
I agree. I think most users find it very difficult to differentiate between features, so Spotify is 1, 2 and 3 all together. This is a sad state of affairs, because it means users are far less able to choose a product or service that solves the problems they actually have.
I /do/, however, have a large music library for which a web player/library would be awesome.
