How to find "recommended" playlists in Spotify?

Question

I'm a big Spotify fan. I use it almost constantly at work.

But one thing Spotify is not good at: music discovery. Despite all this newfangled tracking of my music listening habits, I still overwhelmingly rely on recommendations from friends, year-end lists, Pitchfork reviews, and Soundcloud mixes to find interesting music I've never heard before.

How can I use Spotify to find new (to me) music that I like? I think the answer lies in identifying playlists built by users like me. But how can I find them? Searching playlists by song doesn't seem to work.

Is there another way to find playlists I might like?

Answer 1

Among Spotify music genres you find things like: "Party", "Workout", "Sleep", "Travel", "Focus", etc. With this kind of music genre classification, Spotify seems to be unable to provide any sort of useful suggestion. For most music genres I listen to it simply does not work; for more poppy stuff it can, but requires a lot of work (i.e. plenty of search and hearing).

However, you can easily hook Spotify to your Last.fm account. Since at Last.fm genres (i.e. tags) are set by users and statistics are properly used, suggestions are much more to the point. And you have concert suggestions as a plus.