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Business News Digital
Spotify to provide every user with a personalised weekly playlist
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 21 July 2015
As streaming music platforms continue to try to find new ways to help their users navigate the millions of songs in their catalogues, and all the new tracks labels insist on plonking in there each and every Friday, Spotify has launched a new service called Discover Weekly.
Basically, it’s a weekly personalised playlist for each subscriber based on what that user has listened to previously, and what other listeners and playlisters on the streaming platform have been up to.
Announcing the new service, Spotify says: “For the first time ever, we’re combining your personal taste in music with what similar fans are enjoying right now. This means every song in Discover Weekly is based both on your own listening as well as what others are playlisting and listening to around the songs you love – making your playlist completely unique and full of deep cuts and new discoveries. It’s like having your best friend make you a personalised mixtape every single week”.
Yeah, my best friend makes terrible mixtapes. But I’m sure Spotify will be much better at it. For starters, it will have the two billion playlists already in the Spotify system – created by labels, media, fans and the firm’s own editors – to tap into, which should help. Though I did just ask Andy what he thought of his personal Discover Weekly selection and he said that he hated the first three tracks and has been indifferent to most of the rest so far. So that’s good.
Matthew Ogle, formerly of Last.fm and This Is My Jam, and who has led on the new feature since joining Spotify at the start of the year, confirmed to Music Ally the value of all those existing and evolving Spotify playlists in informing the new personalised song selection service.
He said: “Each playlist, especially when combined with other activity on Spotify, captures someone’s deliberate curatorial intent, and teaches us a ton about the relationships between songs. So we take that universe of music, then look at what you’ve been listening to, giving more prominence to your more recent spins. By combining those two things, we can find the missing songs”.
Discover Weekly will appear at the top of each user’s playlists folder, and can be stored offline and shared, as with any other Spotify playlist.
Depending on how much curated playlists on Spotify really do influence Discover Weekly recommendations, it could further boost the importance of having tracks playlisted on the streaming platform, in turn increasing the need for labels to start PRing playlist owners in the same way they do other media. This is a trend we review in this month’s CMU Trends Report – premium subscribers can read up on it all here using the password in this week’s CMU Digest.
