A few months after Spotify released Spotify Running, the popular music streaming service has revealed another trick up its sleeve — a new feature called Discover Weekly.
At a time when curated playlists are coming back into vogue, Spotify is making use of their large cache of data to automate curated playlists specifically tailored to our tastes in music. By gathering information about the music you listen to, and what other Spotify users with similar tastes in music are listening to, Discover Weekly will offer you two hours of music recommendations on the worst day of the week — Monday.
As Spotify as describes it, it’s “like having your best friend make you a personalised mixtape every single week”.
“High Fidelity’s Rob Gordon had it right — the making of a mixtape is a very subtle art. That’s why we created Discover Weekly,” says Gustav Söderström, VP of Product at Spotify. “There’s never been a simpler, more personalised way to discover music, with every playlist tuned just to you every single week.”
Their latest competitor to enter the market, Apple Music, has been said to be great at this, with their curated, recommended playlists being pulled from a Beats-styled music preference quiz as well as information from your iTunes library.
The popularity of Apple Music, and the introduction of Discover Weekly by Spotify, proves that listening for the lazy is becoming much easier. Nobody has time to search for specific songs or sift through hit-or-miss playlists anymore. It’s all about telling you what you should be listening to, while making damn sure that you will want to listen to it. Discovery without the effort. No room for skips.
As with every new feature, Spotify will be rolling out Discover Weekly globally over a few weeks, and for now, it definitely looks like it’s worth the wait. If they’re trying to be a friend making you a mixtape, then the only question afterwards is how good of a friend they are.