Spotify is a good idea. Too bad that the implementation is pretty horrible.

For starters, Spotify makes it very hard to find new music to listen to. I can search just fine, and Spotify even has a modest amount of the music I listen to. But why can’t I find any new music?

If I look at the “radio” tab, I see eighteen categories, none of which describe the music I like, and a slider to pick a range of decades of music. The big problem here is that the categories are horribly generic.

I listen to a lot of electronic subgenres, yet the only thing vaguely resembling my taste is “techno” — and I don’t listen to techno. After 30 minutes of listening to music in this strange techno category, I heard one single song I could maybe classify as techno. The rest was trance, goa trance (which, of course, isn’t the same as trance), drum and bass, synthpop and futurepop. I can’t think of any way to make Boards of Canada qualify as techno.

They need to take a long hard look at last.fm. There I can participate in social tagging and tag artists and groups with whatever genres I think they fit into. Looking at the EBM tag at last.fm I see a fairly accurate representation of actual EBM – though I don’t really know what Covenant is doing that high up on the list.

Another thing they need to borrow from last.fm: Where are all the other users? Why can’t I add friends? See what they listen to? Find other users with similar taste in music that way?

Spotify is a nice idea. But it feels too much like Web 1.1 with one-way communication from the music industry to a silent crowd of passive consumers, rather than the social activity you can get at last.fm with user taxonomy, forums, discussion and music comparisons letting you find new music.

If I want to find new music on Spotify the only way is to play the incredibly vague “techno” category and hope I stumble upon something I actually like.

This is me on last.fm. At a quick glance you can see what I’ve listened to recently, what my favorite music is, and if you’re a registered user, get a comparison to see how our music tastes match.

Get to work, Spotify! We’re not in the 1990s any longer.

Last-minute edit: One minute after posting this Spotify gave me opera song and instrumental chamber music… which is apparently techno.

Update: It does seem that they actually listen, and last.fm scrobbling support was recently added. It’s a small step forward, at least.