For my part, I'm grateful for Spotify's "exclude from taste profile" feature. This lets me leverage my personally-curated "Flowstate" playlist ^1 for hours at a time while I'm working -- tracks that I've hand-picked to facilitate a "getting things done" mindset / energized mood / creativity or go-time vibe, and can stand to listen to on repeat -- without "polluting" my regular music preferences. It's apples and oranges, mostly - there's music I want to listen and attend to (as a guitar player and lifelong avid music listener across many genres including "serious" jazz), and there's audio (which could as easily be programmatically generated / binaural beats, whatever -- eg brain.fm) that I use as a tool specifically to help shape my cognitive state for focus / productivity.

I think it's kind of funny how some people get confused about the fact that there are many reasons to listen to many kinds of music.

When it comes to music discovery on Spotify, the "go to radio" option from a given track or album is a reliable way to surface new-to-me things. I usually prefer this proactive seeking to the playlists spotify's algo generates for me. (shrug)

1. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...