Yeah I get that, I’ve been there. Its quite comfortable to use Spotify to get recommendations based on your played music. But there has been a solution before Spotify has been a thing: Scrobbling (as popularised by Last.fm) your Music.

Be it via last.fm and plugins to your music player or a different service like Listenbrainz all together.

I concede though that this process is a bit more involved.

And yes I agree with you, it’s weird.