What's wrong with all music streaming services

Music streaming service has three jobs:

• be available
• play music
• discover new music

Be available

First music streaming service that offered decent recommendations was Audiogalaxy It was shut down by the Big Copyright.

A while later, Pandora came out, and it had mindblowingly good music discovery, but Big Copyright forced them to lock out everyone outside US. There's probably some way to access it with VPNs, but the hassle is just too great.

Play music

You'd think this would be trivial, but it's not. As a consequence of watching videos and listening to podcasts at high speed, my baseline speed changed, and I just don't enjoy any media below 140% speed.

That shouldn't be a problem, as browsers can inherently play audio and video at any speed, and there are browser extensions to add speed controls to sites without them.

Unfortunately services like Spotify and Deezer go out of their way to disable that, so I'd be locked to 100% speed at which all the music feels slowed down.

Sure I'm in tiny minority here, but who isn't in tiny minority one way or another when it comes to music?

As far as I know, this leaves me with just two options:

• Download the songs and play them locally
• Youtube

Downloading songs with tcpflow

Downloading songs lets me play whichever way I want, but there's not one shred of discovery there. The easiest way to download songs these days is youtube-dl, but you can use basically any source.

So funny story time! Once upon a time I wrote a music downloader that tapped into network traffic to get music from Pandora by tcpflow network intercepts. The music was just in MP3 files. Some minor complications was metadata being int separate XML HTTP requests, and songs being out of order for buffering purposes.

The whole thing was about 300 lines of ruby, it figured out which song and which metadata match, and then saved and organized all that.

It didn't mass download songs, and it didn't even interact with the website in any way, it was 100% passive and undetectable, it just saved everything I listened to in regular browser.

I needed those files to put them on a hardware MP3 player, as there was no way to listen to internet radio without the internet obviously.

I never mentioned it back then, as I would be way too much hassle for most people to setup, and if it got public they might change the API to make it more difficult somehow.

So I might have been the only person who got their music with tcpflow ever.

I have no idea if that still works. It's unlikely, as everything is routinely encrypted these days, so you'd need either a MITM proxy to strip the SSL, or capture music from a browser plugin, or something like chromedriver.

Youtube

As far as I know, all that leaves Youtube as the only option to me. It is available. It has more music than anything else thanks to all the covers. It plays music at any speed. It even has convenient downloads.

The problem is music discovery. It's not great. For ages it kept suggesting absolute garbage all the time. For example one thing I absolutely can't stand is male vocalists, but it kept doing this to me.

Now it seems it has given up and just plays same songs I already know, and occasionally some new mainstream hit.

Then again, what did I expect? It can't even consistently figure that after Part 4 of some let's play comes Part 5, and not Part 17.

For all the claims about imminent AI takeover, this is miserable. Maybe all those drivers who will lose their jobs to self-driving cars can get new jobs as music recommenders.

Discovering new music

So the last option is separating music discovery from music play.

There's plenty of sites where you put your favorite artists and they recommend some other artists. I don't think recommending based on artists is even a sensible thing, most artists create a range of different music, and good recommendations for someone who really likes this song would be really different from good recommendations for someone who really likes this one.

Of the services I tried, most are overwhelmingly awful. Sage is actually kinda OKish. Like 10% of what it recommends is actually good, and the UI of "click here to go to youtube search for the artist" is not the worst.

So overall I'm not too happy with all this, but it's not like it's possible to just fix it with some code, as Big Copyright would probably ban anything that improved the situation.