Personally, I fell in love in their Discover Weekly algorithm. If you in previous week listened music from artists which tracks haven't been listed in any user-made playlist nor played magical 10,000 times and there is a problem with getting a vinyl / CD you wouldn't expect any songs from such artists but in Discover Weekly you may found similar tracks - they match same genre, they are also from the same decade, they are not covers and they are unique - not only per week, but I haven't heard them in my whole life. If Spotify is going to close, please share access to it, because it is amazing.
Protip: You can generate a new random "Discover Weekly"-style playlist manually by putting a bunch of songs into a playlist, right-clicking the playlist (in the desktop app) and selecting "Create similar playlist".
This is actually exactly how I do music discovery. I create seed playlists with maybe 5-10 songs and start the radio from that. Any songs that I like from the those stations get added to a separate playlist, unless I explicitly decide that I want that song to influence the future selection of songs.
Thumbs-up or thumbs-downing songs in a radio playlist will change the songs that show up, but I find just having a seed playlist is more reliable and repeatable and easier to fine-tune.
Indeed, I would call myself as user who uses "Create similar playlist" on daily basis. Sadly, it isn't so awesome as Discover Weekly, because for certain tracks it won't generate any new tracks, i.e. When you put single track (Price - Controversy) and click to create similar playlist you may notice exactly the same track (Prince - Controversy). Also, it usually generate the same output for the specified list of tracks.
Oh, thank you so much for that! I find Spotify to be an even bigger turd than iTunes (at least in the ways that matter to me), but I use it for the discovery. This tip is a good addition!
