If you noticed a new Spotify playlist on your way to work yesterday, just hangin’ out pretending like it was always there, you’re right – Spotify has introduced a new feature, the Discover Weekly playlist, which wraps up 2 hours of delightful, picked-just-for-you tunes and hand-delivers them fresh on Monday morning each week (which on a dreary Winter Monday goes some way towards making the morning bearable).
Perhaps in response to the widely acclaimed launch of Apple’s new Apple Music (the new and very serious potential usurper of the streaming throne), Spotify have unveiled what might be their best new function yet.
Discover Weekly brings together what Spotify describes as “our best-ever recommendations delivered to you as a weekly mixtape of fresh music… new discoveries and deep cuts, based on what fans are playlisting around the songs you love. It’s like having your best friend make you a personalised mixtape every single week.” Clearly they were creatively interpreting the concept of “best friend” because all this personalisation comes together with just a nifty little computer algorithm, promising to know you better than you know yourself.
Testing the theory, based on my playlist this week (which you can listen to, if you’re so inclined) I got a neat, punchy assortment of tunes, mostly from artists I’d not heard of, which flirted with some of the more unusual nuances of my music taste – a sprinkle of sparkly 80s synth pop, some ambient electronic dance and broader indie pop. Did it feel like a best friend had made it? Well, yeah, kinda – it was creepily good, and struck an impressive balance between introducing me to something new while keeping the familiar threads of my much-loved genres intact. Even better is that Spotify says “the more you listen, the better it gets”, so I’m interested to see what next week’s list includes.
Spotify sometimes creeps in new features from time to time (musical maps as a case in point), but unlike the sneaky manouevre of changing its icon colour (and the subsequent freakout from listeners everywhere), the Discover Weekly playlist is arguably a serious counter-move for rival Apple’s new streaming powerhouse, Apple Music. Apple Music does have a similar feature with its For You section, with the key selling point being its “human touch”; the idea being that algorithms can only go so far, but they need the creativity that people bring to fine-tune them. Equally, Apple Music promises to get better as you listen, making it a question of time to see which playlists end up trumping the other in the “I know you more than your mother does” stakes.
While I remain in the dark as to what funky algorithms and freakishly brilliant software developers collided to create Discover Weekly, we’ve come a long way from the clunky, hopeless likes of Spotify Radio (it’s still kicking around, but it sucked back in the day). These services mark a new age of music discovery, with technology that is sophisticated enough to show us new ways of listening, and can take a real role in shaping our musical preferences. In the 90s, it was taping from the radio and CDs, in the 00s it was Napster and iTunes, and now it’s streaming services who, more than likely, know our next favourite artist before we do.