As TechCrunch reports, Discover Weekly will give you a new playlist of two hours of fresh listening every Monday. What you hear will be tailored to you by analysing what you normally play and what others with similar preferences to you have been trying recently. Advanced algorithms will then be brought in to curate your personalised playlist.
The playlist will become more specific to you over time as you listen to it more. Users will be encouraged to save the songs that they like into their personal collections after hearing them played in Discover Weekly.
The lists will be free from influence from music labels trying to push their tracks to as many people as possible. Spotify will be reliant on what you and people like you have been listening to.
Engadget’s Billy Steele writes that he is “cautiously optimistic” about the new feature after trying it out of the past few days, describing the first list as “a bit of a mixed bag.” The idea has been in development for some time and was first seen in April when a few Spotify users found they had received early access to it and posted largely positive comments in a thread on the company’s forum.
It’s easy to see this as another of Spotify’s weapons in its arsenal against Apple Music. Spotify has 75 million users but Apple Music has the potential to gain many more over its lifespan, helped by the app being included out of the box with every new iPhone.
Whereas Apple employs real people to recommend music, Spotify has taken a different stance, using software to encourage its users to try something different for a change and hoping that the algorithms will succeed.
It’s very different to Apple’s approach which has been very clear from the beginning that handling music requires a human touch, manifested in Apple Music’s “For You” section. As music discovery is a key part of a streaming service’s ability to attract and retain users, it will be interesting to see how the differing methods used by Apple and Spotify play out in the long-term.
