Spotify will be providing its users personalized playlists on a regular basis, to try and combat the human-curated playlists offered by Apple Music and Google Play Music All Access. Discover Weekly aims to create a highly customized “mixtape” for each subscriber, based on the user’s previous listening habits combined with songs listened to by other users with similar tastes in genres, artists, and songs.
The playlist itself is updated every Monday, and consists of two hours of music Spotify believes the user will enjoy. Speaking to Recode, the streaming service built Discover Weekly using a small team over the last few months, based on data generated by 75 million users. As the user listens to more music, Spotify claims the playlist suggestions in Discover Weekly will evolve over time to match new usage trends it spots in the user’s song history.
While Spotify does offer automated playlists, in contrast to the human-created versions in both Apple and Google’s streaming services, it does include some aspects to its algorithm that should improve music selections. It is suggested that, while a user’s normal music selections may be of one era, Discover Weekly will detect these main “taste clusters” and notice if there are sudden unusual selections where the account is being used by other users. In theory, the service could then disregard these songs from its results, keeping the playlist closer to what it expects the user to enjoy.
Spotify is rolling out Discover Weekly to all of its users, starting from today but potentially taking a few weeks, with it appearing at the top of the user’s playlist folder on all devices.
