You + Discovery = A Lie.

You heard it once, or maybe more…
You don’t remember where. Maybe it played while you were boiling pasta, or while walking through the noise of a store, or while you were knee deep in deadlines for work.

It had a voice that cut through for just a second. It was good, but not good enough to take action.

You didn’t save it. Now you couldn’t even if you tried; the playlist had already moved on - how many songs back was it? 3? 7? Are you going back to your recently played to find it? Really?

And now, it has gone and been chewed back into the algorithm. Oh no! You’ll never hear it again. You’ll never find it. It was designed not to last in that moment. Relax, it will come up in next week’s discovery. Since you didn’t skip, you’ll get it again. Joy.

That’s the shape of discovery now.

Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, YouTube. Each one insists it knows what you like. Not just what you listen to, but what you want to hear, or at least what it needs you to hear. The machine isn’t neutral anymore, oh no. It guesses what fits your taste, your history, and your mood at 11:42 on a Thursday morning. It delivers songs with mathematical confidence.

But something’s wrong, maybe it was wrong from the start. 

You’ve never had more music at your fingertips; we’ve talked about it before, drowning in sound. Yet you can’t remember what you loved last week. Songs appear, sound good, and disappear again. Artists land in your “Discover Weekly” or “For You” feed and vanish by morning. And it isn’t because they aren’t good, it is because they blend quickly into the next. 

It’s not that we’re not discovering music; we’re discovering more than ever.
It’s that discovery doesn’t mean anything anymore (yes, we are back on active or passive engagement) in most cases.

The platforms don’t curate, so you find something you adore. They optimize for engagement.
That means click-through rate. Completion rate. Time spent listening.

You, on their platform, for as long as possible. 

Finding something you really enjoy is a bonus now, maybe not the actual goal. 

Discovery playlists, “Made For You” mixes, and mood-based algorithmic stations all promise something personal. Something yours. But the selections are made by matching data points: tempo, timbre, key, release timing, and artist adjacency (stuff that sounds like who you already listen to). Your listening history gets compressed into a very neat profile. Not a personality, it’s not really you.

Just a set of ‘easy-to-build-an-algorithm-around’ traits. And as much as we might flex, our discovery playlist looks like a bin fire of multiple genres. The same applies here, too. They mix it up to match you mixing it up; you’ll listen to the whole thing. Have you ever wondered how many other people get the same discovery as you? Even more so if you are into pop, lo-fi, or a single genre.

A near-infinite stream of songs that sound familiar enough to pass, but not specific enough for you to stop, and if you do, it isn’t as often as you like.

And so you listen. You nod. You say, “This is good.”

This isn’t a mistake. It's designed this way, or at least this is where we are now.

Songs that sound like something you’d like are prioritized over songs that might take you off the platform in search of information, videos, Reddit threats, or anything else. What matters isn’t impact. It’s how long you can keep the playlist on, without skipping. A song that makes you pause, rewind, think, or feel sad is a risk. The algorithm prefers the song you don’t skip. The one that plays through without you really having to notice it at all.

What we get are playlists engineered to be pleasant. Playable. And completely forgettable.

Because if an artist is placed in a thousand playlists but nobody remembers their name, was it worth it? Play numbers look great, but they are far from the whole story for an artist.

Most songs don’t reach listeners through albums anymore. They arrive mid-scroll on social media or are dropped into curated playlists with names like “Chill Vibes,” “Late Night Drive,” or “Deep Focus.”

Listeners don’t know where the song came from, who made it, or what it was meant to do. They are not expected to care; music streaming services seem to prefer it if they don’t. You’re one song in a queue of forty, played like Muzak.

The result is a kind of aesthetic flattening. 40 bedroom pop, slow, dreamy tracks play from start to finish, maybe 20% or more built with AI. All of it flows one into another so beautifully, you don’t need to do anything, and that is the point.

In a world where music is sorted by ‘algorithm vibes’ instead of intentional selection. There’s no liner note to read, TIDAL removed credits back in April, and the rest are sparse. It becomes a smooth handoff, again and again.

This kind of curation doesn't elevate the listening experience. It erases it, or at the very least diminishes it.

The platform doesn’t care what the song means. And artists have little option but to join in; the promo churn is an endless cycle.

The release calendar is a wheel artists are expected to run, competing with 27 thousand new songs a week. Teaser drops, visuals for Insta, TikTok, YouTube, their own website - and more. Every song has to fight for attention before it even finds an ear.
And even when it does, it’s often received in silence.

(Unless you're Justin Bieber, and you can drop an album with zero promo and smash records.)

Not because it isn’t good. Not because people aren’t listening. But because listening has become invisible and passive. There’s no feedback loop. A track can rack up thousands of plays without a single comment, repost, or save. Artists don’t know who heard it. They don’t know if it mattered.

This is what it means to disappear AFTER it has been discovered. A million plays, no fanbase is easy with playlist placement, but it means nothing.

You make something that feels personal and meaningful. It sounds like the work you want to deliver to the world. You spent years getting it there, not to mention the years it took you to learn to play the instrument in the first place, moving through the valley of despair until you could finally play with confidence and knowledge. You pay a fortune to get the mix polished. You rewrote the second verse at least 25 times. You stay up late rehearsing how to phrase the release caption so it doesn’t sound desperate.

Then it lands in someone’s Discover Weekly. It plays quietly between two other songs from two other artists; no one really knows. And then it ends. And the next one begins. And yours is gone.

Even if you made the best song you’ve ever written. Even if it connected deeply with your personal experiences. The system forgets. The listener forgets. You’re left hoping that an influencer somewhere picks it up and it becomes a trending sound.

Used by millions, heard in 15-second clips.

Some artists learn to game the machine. They cut intros down to five seconds. They write around playlist tags. They build songs for mood buckets instead of albums. They may even see the research about shorter songs becoming more popular. So they create music for the social media era.
Others burn out trying to keep up with trends they never wanted to follow in the first place.

Sadly, some just stop.
Not because they failed us, but because we failed to find them.
The streaming services, and how we consume music, aren’t really built for the new - it is built for the money-backed, primed for the big time, or already big.

Paid not for their work per stream, but by the % it is streamed per country. A conversation for another day. 

Not your favorites. Not your saved playlists. The stuff that came and went. Scroll through the last month. See if you recognize the names. The songs. The artists. This is where music goes to die. If everything you played was from a discovery playlist, nothing in there really matters much.

How many of them do you remember?

Not vaguely. Not in the way you remember background noise. Do you remember hearing it? Or did you just not skip?

Our accounts are full of songs we once tapped “like” on but never returned to, unless you are a solid Liked playlist listener or avid playlist builder. In which case, kudos.

It doesn’t feel like a violent removal of discovery joy; the streaming service didn’t snatch it from us. It just feels quiet, a careful move from how we used to do it to how it is done now. And for most of us, we floated along with the changes.

We don’t have to remember music because the system doesn't reward remembering. It rewards moving on. You’re not supposed to hold onto a song; you're supposed to listen to the new one and be ready for more the week after. You’re supposed to finish and move to the next.

There’s no tidy solution to any of this. But if you’re still reading, maybe you’re the kind of listener who wants more than convenience. Maybe you miss the effort it used to take.

It can make it sound like it's very dark and negative, and it's easy to fall into the trap of hating on music streaming services, almost for fun. Because what they have built, and perhaps more importantly, how they have built it, doesn’t seem to benefit the artists. 

It doesn’t take long to work out that even if an artist is streaming significant numbers, their pay is pretty low. 

However, if you, as an artist, aren’t on the music streaming platforms, you are forcing fans to either pirate or make physical purchases, and perhaps we will see more of that in the future. The last few years have seen a revival of physical, but not enough to discount the monumental beast that is streaming. 

We’ve spoken about discovery and how you can easily get stuck in a cycle of the same thing day after day, week after week. A music echo-chamber, and it is easy to find yourself in. 

One of the main criticisms of people who post that discovery has nothing for them and is always rubbish, and that they simply aren’t working hard enough to find the good stuff.

And maybe that’s partially true.

But, for the sake of balance, which there should be because this is a heavily nuanced topic, there are many positives to streaming and to those discovery playlists. 

Streaming doesn’t always fail you. In fact, sometimes it nails it by itself, and other times, with a bit of work, you’ll get the experience you really wanted. 

That moment when you’re doing absolutely nothing and a song hits you square in the chest, or tickles that part of your brain where you know it is a keeper? That’s still possible. The algorithm can and does get it right. A lyric or a bassline pulls you in. You save it. You obsess. That didn’t happen by accident; it was discovery at its best, it is what is meant to happen.  

Streaming services gave us astonishing access. Not just to the mainstream, but to niche, international, weird little corners of music you’d never find in a record store in your town. Our playlist for weird music was possible because of that. Want deep Turkish psych rock? Done. Japanese city pop from the 80s? Sure. Nigerian gospel or Bulgarian electro-folk? You’re two clicks away, and you have millions (maybe) of songs from that genre waiting for you. And that is the point of it all. 

You don’t have to wait for radio. You don’t have to hope your friend has good taste. You can wake up with a new favorite artist because you pressed play on the right playlist.

And for artists, it’s not all doom either. You can upload a song from your bedroom and be heard in Berlin, Seoul, and Buenos Aires within the week. You don’t need a label. You don’t need press. You just need a good song and a way in. Most often, it is TikTok and social media first, streams later.

Streaming lets artists build long, expansive, or even experimental catalogs without begging for a spot on a label or being tied to only certain styles of songs. They can try new music until something they release sticks. And yes, getting heard on a playlist might be fleeting, but it’s still a shot, something that didn’t exist at this scale before.

And let’s not pretend people don’t care. If they didn’t, the way discovery works, and their lack of ‘getting anything new’ is a common Reddit complaint. No one would spend the time to start the thread, and the hundreds of comments wouldn’t be there either. 

Discovery isn’t dead; we just had to remember to do it differently when we open up our streaming services. 

The system has problems, sure. But the idea that nothing beautiful comes from it? That’s not true either.

Some of the best songs you’ve heard in the last year probably did come from a playlist. Some of your favorite artists probably found their first audience on those playlists. You probably shared something you discovered just last week.

So, while it’s tempting to trash the whole model (and sure, it has many problems), the truth is more complicated. Streaming didn’t kill discovery. It changed it. And yeah, maybe it cheapened it a little, and for sure, they have their own revenue in mind when they are giving you your playlists, but it also gave more people more music than ever before.

If you know how to use it, it’s still one hell of a tool. 

If you've made it this far, you either want to take action on your discovery playlist or check if you can improve yours. Here are some tips to get you on your way.

We know, it was a long one. Streaming isn’t evil, and discovery isn’t broken, but many of us expected the discovery playlists to be the answer to our need for new music without any help from us. We let go of the wheel.

Platforms will do what they do: optimize, create echo chambers, monetize, and keep you there. But you, you still have the control.

Rediscover discovery.

Until next time,