I appreciate Spotify’s regularly changing playlists. I have trouble keeping my daily playlists in any shape (they tend to converge on way too similar music), but I like the Discovery Weekly and the Release Radar a lot.

Sadly more often than not, my Discovery Weekly ends up with 90% weird black metal that I’m really not that interested in. Those weeks I usually end up listening to my Release Radar, or if that’s not good either I just fall back to my local collection.

On good weeks (like this), Discovery Weekly can be really nice. If I manage to feed enough variety to the algorithm, it’s a great playlist of artists I don’t listen to much. I try to do that by consciously listening to more varied artists, like chilling with jazz or lo-fi before going to sleep, or blasting Be’lakor for my gym workout. When it works out, it’s really nice.

The only problem with these playlists is that they’re awfully short. Under three hours means I pretty much know the tracks by heart by Wednesday. When it gets too repetitive I either (again) fall back to my safe-to-shuffle amazing local library, or if I’m feeling adventurous (or really liked some of the songs), I try to find a Spotify radio that goes in the right direction. Alas a “playlist radio” for Discovery Weekly tends to get really skewed, because even with variety about 60% of my Discovery is some sort of metal, and that makes the radio in turn about 95% metal.

Also Spotify if you’re reading this please stop translating song metadata (artist names, song titles). It screws up my Last.fm stats and it’s super weird.