Of course I have. Specifically RadioParadise(.com) is great for this, which I’ve listened to through winamp’s shoutcast as well (multiple decades ago). I’ve even been a supporter for all those decades at this point. But it’s a very far cry away from the personalized (discovery) playlists. The efficiency diffference for discovering music is orders of magnitude: I find maybe 1-3 songs a month compared to 5+ in a week for discovery playlists (somtimes less, usually more). You can even skip songs you don’t like on there, but that still doesn’t make up for it being universal and not personalized.

It’s nice as a palate cleanser, or when I don’t wanna put effort into selecting what to play. But I’d lose my mind listening to it for truly extended periods of time. The music is great, and the (human) selection is superb, but just by the nature of personal taste, I only like around 30% of the music I’d say.

First of all, after recent events I’m not touching anything from “Plex” with a proverbial 10 foot pole.

But even that aside, no it won’t do what I want because it can’t. I can’t discover something outside of my library with it. It’s a music player for a Plex library. It can generate playlists of songs with similar styles, and that’s nice and all, but not what I’m looking for. I’m looking for playlists of things I don’t own, or know, or ever heard of, but that are still likely to be something I like. I don’t want a sophisticated “shuffle”.

Friends don’t work for me. I don’t know a single person who listens to even close to the things that I like. Sure there’s some overlap occasionally, and I might hear about one artist once a week or month. I get dozens to hundreds recommended by spotify weekly, and I actually end up liking a handful of those. With friends, it also only works with known artists, and it’s incredibly rare to get reommended something that isn’t well known but happens to fit my taste by them (don’t think that ever happened, actually). As an example just last week I got recommended an artist that has 60-something monthly listeners on Spotify (now 74!). I liked them so much I tried to see what I can find, and they got a youtube channel with 3 (live) videos and like 500-ish views each (38 subscribers). NOBODY is ever gonna recommend me those kinds of things, cause nobody ever heard of them, let alone anyone of my friends (and even if they have, they’d have to know to recommend them to me).

As for the listenbrainz/last.fm that is kind of a solution, but it takes a very long time to train up your profile to actually be useful. I haven’t used it in a VERY long time (decades), but last I did it was kinda “meh”. You can also only start out with what you have, as you’re scrobbling what you’re listenting to. I no longer have most of the music I listen to daily as an actual file/library. So getting that up to date would probably cost thousands of dollars, too. Not to mention it being incredibly tedious to actually gather them on various individual shops and sites like bandcamp or wherever those artists happen to be.

So as much as I wish there was, there isn’t really a (pracical) alternative. Let alone one of the same “competence”.

See my other reply to tofu. Not the same thing. You just couldn’t do what these services do even 2 decades ago. You could discover things, but at a very different pace and very different reach. You’re limited to discover what friends know from them. Discovering things via “press” isn’t free either, it takes time to read the articles, buy the magazines (do they still exists?) and you’re likely to only hear about popular things. You also need to find publications that suit your own taste, or learn which authors are compatible with it.

As for concerts you can only go to those that are near you, which is either local artists or those big enough to tour away from their home base. There are artists that don’t tour at all (probably a third of my catalog falls into this category).

So edgy.