By Christian Madsbjerg and Morgan Ramsey-Elliot

Last week I had a familiar experience: I plugged one of my favorite songs (by the excellent drone metal band Earth) into Spotify’s radio feature and their first recommendation was worlds apart from my original. Yes, the genre and vibe were similar, but the song felt completely different to me. Put simply, I hated it. So I skipped ahead to the next song and then the next. Like so many others, I gave up, and instead used Spotify as a way to stream music, not as a means of discovering great new songs.

This is a problem. Online content discovery is a huge opportunity for tech companies, and streaming music platforms are a hothouse of experimentation and dynamism. Unfortunately, the bigger players like Spotify, Pandora, and now Google’s Play Music, have yet to nail the music discovery process. Why is that?

Read the full article on Fast Company here.

[Banner image by Nubelson Fernandes via Unsplash]