Why Did Spotify Do That?

I used to ride my bike outside as often as I could. Now I have turned into a warm-weather cyclist. The weather has turned cooler so I prefer to ride on my trainer inside instead of out in the cold even though I have the clothing for it. Unfortunately riding inside is insanely boring and so I pass the time listening to music. Normally I listen to songs on Spotify but I am thinking about finding a new streaming service because of problems that recently surfaced.

I have painstakingly gone through and created a list of my 150 or so favorite songs to listen to while exercising. Recently I started hearing the same song played over and over. At one point the same song played 3 times in a row. That prompted me to go through my playlist and remove duplicates of the same song. Once I confirmed only one version of the song exists in my playlist, things went well for awhile.

Since Friday I have noticed another problem with my Spotify playlist. It has started playing "recommended" songs. I don't know what changed and can only assume Spotify did this. The problem is I don't like a lot of the songs that streaming music services recommend based on the songs on my list. While I like most Blink-182 songs, I don't like them all and have purposely left them off my playlist for a reason. I also don't like a lot of songs by All American Rejects but keep getting them recommended because they are similar to Blink-182.

Today during my indoor workout I got angry hearing "recommended" songs instead of the ones I chose for my playlist. I almost stopped listening to music altogether. Instead I just skipped the songs not on the list. The downside to that is I get to listen to more ads as I use the free service and don't pay for Premium Spotify. Basically the ad-to-song ratio went from 1:1 to an abysmal 4:1 which means I had to listen to 4 ads for every song. Secretly I think Spotify is trying to get me to start paying a monthly fee.

After my workout I immediately headed to my desktop computer and did a bit of research. I went into my settings and turned off the "Autoplay similar content" setting. My hope is that Spotify will now only play songs explicitly added to my workout playlist. If not, I will move on and give Amazon Music a try. After all I pay for Amazon Prime so I don't have to sign up for another streaming service.