> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?
No, I don't think so.
Millions upon millions have been spent pouring money into recommendation engines (which is an advanced "based on preferences"). Companies like Netflix know that they can keep customers that much longer if they're good at finding the needles in the haystack for each specific customer, and they famously offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone that could improve their algorithm by even a few percentage points (and, just as famously, everyone recognized that it would be worth far more than a million dollars to them).
Pandora tried to do it by creating a "music genome" for every single song in its database, with dozens of attributes per song, thus linking disparate songs though much more than just "genre."
Nowadays it's pretty much "throw a massive database at a ML system, and pump out 'people who like these 10 songs tend to like this song'", but for a long time those systems were crappy. And, even now, its hard for those systems to find a balance between showing you something that matches what you've listened to, and playing you ten nearly-identical songs in a row.
No, I don't think so.
Millions upon millions have been spent pouring money into recommendation engines (which is an advanced "based on preferences"). Companies like Netflix know that they can keep customers that much longer if they're good at finding the needles in the haystack for each specific customer, and they famously offered a million-dollar bounty to anyone that could improve their algorithm by even a few percentage points (and, just as famously, everyone recognized that it would be worth far more than a million dollars to them).
Pandora tried to do it by creating a "music genome" for every single song in its database, with dozens of attributes per song, thus linking disparate songs though much more than just "genre."
Nowadays it's pretty much "throw a massive database at a ML system, and pump out 'people who like these 10 songs tend to like this song'", but for a long time those systems were crappy. And, even now, its hard for those systems to find a balance between showing you something that matches what you've listened to, and playing you ten nearly-identical songs in a row.