This is one of the reasons I’ve gone with Apple Music. The way the app is setup, I can treat the catalog like an online store and my library like my personal CD collection. I made a self-imposed rule to respect this paradigm. When I hear about a new band or album, I go the “store”, add it to my library, and the next time I’m looking to listen to some music, I can see some the recently added list has a couple albums I added that were recommended to me organically as if it was 1994 again. The only real difference is that I’m not out $19 if I don’t like it. I can simply remove it from my library (akin to retuning it to the store), so my library contains the albums I actually like, or am currently exploring.
This has helped me a lot to avoid the infinite choice and overwhelm of having a 100 million song library, which is the case when engaging with a streaming service library directly.
That's how I use Spotify. I make playlists of music I listen to frequently, separated by genre. If I want to play a whole album, I click through for one of those favorites or search for it. Mostly I find music via YouTube and then search for what I specifically want to add, or I look for user-curated playlists.
I've been doing that since Spotify launched in the US, and I'm mystified by people somehow using it differently and letting algorithmic picks determine what they listen to.
This has helped me a lot to avoid the infinite choice and overwhelm of having a 100 million song library, which is the case when engaging with a streaming service library directly.