I don't fucking want "infinite personalized music", I want music conceptualized, created, and played by human beings.
(lemmy.world)
Automatic curation wasn't very good. Pandora and other tools tried to do it, and they had some success, but it wasn't like having a friend who would say "oh, you like X, you should really listen to Y".
Pandora and similar tools would say "oh, you listened to X, you must like music with distortion on the guitar, a lead female singer...". But, that kind of soul-less take on music often meant the suggestions were really bad. Yes, in n-dimensional space, it was able to find music that was a short distance from other music. But, that's not why people like what they like.
So, discovery really was (and still is) a problem that needs solving. But, the bigger issue is money.
A lot of people want to make money from music. Even musicians sometimes care about money. But, honestly, a lot of them would be making music regardless of the money, as long as they could afford to feed themselves.
The real people who care about money are the companies that own the IP for the music. They want you to listen to their music because when you do that they get paid. That means their goal isn't for you to find something you enjoy listening to, it's for you to select something that they make money from. That also means they want to interfere with anything that might make good suggestions for you because it might direct you away from what makes them money.
So, now on one side you have companies that want to sell you a tool that exactly meets your music desires, by believably simulating emotion, playing ability, and everything else, but one that can only interpolate from what it has been trained on, and can never innovate. On the other side are the companies that want you to choose anything you want, as long as it's from their catalogue and they make some money from it, and if it's not from their catalogue they'd prefer you never hear it. Everyone sucks here.