I vehemently disagree. This may be true for the general case of music listener but there is a long tail (of both listeners and musical works) that Spotify is very very bad at.
Yep, I'm not even a big music person, but Spotify is terrible at predicting music for me, it's so bad I barely try new music because most of it is trash but then again Spotify thinks I like 350+ genres so there is a lot of room for failure.
There are also two kinds of people, people who like albums and people who like singles. I'm not an album person because it's often lackluster and repetitive, few bands can really create good albums that surprise me but singles on the other hand can shine and the band knows they can. Just because I like one song doesn't mean I'll like 5 other songs from a band. Most of my favorite music is pretty unknown. I'd imagine hits are just like that hit or miss and good marketing is what really helps a lot of things sell.
In my experience, Spotify generally picks 20-40 top songs from each genre and recommends them to any listener that has showed interest in that genre.
To a listener new to the genre, this yields a pretty good hit rate and the perception that Spotify is great at recommendation, but after spending any reasonable amount of time listening to the genre, the same 20-40 recommendations get stale and Spotify is completely unable to surface relevant songs from deeper in the genre catalog.
Really interesting because it’s amazingly accurate for me and has very consistently given me amazing recommendations every week
I will note though that I have been in machine learning since 2011 and generally know how these systems work so I can give them inputs that I know will reinforce their pathways for recommendations in a direction I want it
I vehemently disagree. This may be true for the general case of music listener but there is a long tail (of both listeners and musical works) that Spotify is very very bad at.