No algorithmic suggestions and therefore, no curated daily taste playlists, no sorting your library by genre (at least not as granular and specific as Spotify unless you put in as much work as they do at tagging your music), finding new music manually takes at least 10x more effort and you’re limited to the taste you already know you have
I haven't used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There's not really much to them other than "people who liked X tend to like Y" or "here's something that sounds similar to an artist you like". It's discovery sure, but it's discovery on autopilot. It'll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.
I usually don't want something "similar to…X" when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I've found probably a dozen.
I think this is a really important point. Music streaming services are incentivised to concentrate attention and create filter bubbles in much the same way as other tech. I've been discovering some new music through internet radio stations and it's reinvigorated my sense of adventure in music. There is so much good stuff out there which is ignored by streaming service algorithms. Nothing beats discovering a new song/artist/album out in the wild and falling in love with it.
I haven't used Spotify much, but I found Google Music and Pandora to be very shallow with regards to discovery. There's not really much to them other than "people who liked X tend to like Y" or "here's something that sounds similar to an artist you like". It's discovery sure, but it's discovery on autopilot. It'll keep you treading water in the same shallow area of the ocean forever unless you make a concerted effort outside of its algorithms to listen to something new.
I usually don't want something "similar to…X" when finding new music. I usually want things that are completely different. I subscribed to Google Music for around a year and found maybe two new artists I liked to listen to. I switched back to a manual discovery process around five years ago and this year alone I've found probably a dozen.
I think this is a really important point. Music streaming services are incentivised to concentrate attention and create filter bubbles in much the same way as other tech. I've been discovering some new music through internet radio stations and it's reinvigorated my sense of adventure in music. There is so much good stuff out there which is ignored by streaming service algorithms. Nothing beats discovering a new song/artist/album out in the wild and falling in love with it.