To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Photograph: Justin Paget/Getty Images
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If you’re listening to music right now, chances are you didn’t choose what to put on—you outsourced it to an algorithm. Such is the popularity of recommendation systems that we’ve come to rely on them to serve us what we want without us even having to ask, with music streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer all using personalized systems to suggest playlists or tracks tailored to the user.
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
Generally, these systems are very good. The problem, for some, is that they’re perhaps really too good. They’ve figured out your taste, know exactly what you listen to, and recommend more of the same until you’re stuck in an endless pit of ABBA recordings (just me?). But what if you want to break out of your usual routine and try something new? Can you train or trick the algorithm into suggesting a more diverse range?
“That is tricky,” says Peter Knees, assistant professor at TU Wien. “Probably you have to steer it very directly into the direction that you already know you might be interested in.”
The problem only gets worse the more you rely on automated recommendations. “When you keep listening to the recommendations that are being made, you end up in that feedback loop, because you provide further evidence that this is the music you want to listen to, because you’re listening to it,” Knees says. This provides positive reinforcement to the system, incentivizing it to keep making similar suggestions. To break out of that bubble, you’re going to need to quite explicitly listen to something different.
Companies such as Spotify are secretive about how their recommendation systems work (and Spotify declined to comment on the specifics of its algorithm for this article), but Knees says we can assume most are heavily based on collaborative filtering, which makes predictions of what you might like based on the likes of other people who have similar listening habits to you. You may think that your music taste is something very personal, but it’s likely not unique. A collaborative filtering system can build a picture of taste clusters—artists or tracks that appeal to the same group of people. Really, Knees says, this isn’t all that different to what we did before streaming services, when you might ask someone who liked some of the same bands as you for more recommendations. “This is just an algorithmically supported continuation of this idea,” he says.
The problem occurs when you want to get away from your usual genre, era, or general taste and find something new. The system is not designed for this, so you’re going to have to put in some effort. “Frankly, the best solution would be to create a new account and really train it on something very dissimilar,” says Markus Schedl, a professor at Johannes Kepler University Linz.
Failing that, you need to actively seek out something new. You could seek out a new genre or use a tool outside of your main streaming service to find suggestions of artists or tracks and then search for them. Schedl suggests finding something you don’t listen to as much and starting a “radio” playlist—a feature in Spotify that creates a playlist based on a selected song. (These may, however, also be influenced by your broader listening habits.)
Knees suggests waiting for new releases or regularly listening to the most popular tracks. “There’s a chance that the next thing that comes up is going to be your thing,” he says. But getting away from the mainstream is harder. You’ll find that even if you actively search for a new genre, you’ll likely be nudged toward more popular artists and tracks. This makes sense—if lots of people like something, it’s more likely you will too—but can make it hard to unearth hidden gems.
Knees therefore advises trying to actively dig into the “long tail”—the huge number of artists and tracks that have few listeners but might just be your niche. While you can manually trawl through obscure artists and back catalogs, however, your recommendations will still likely tend toward the mainstream. “Even if you’re in the long tail, it kind of pushes you back into the head, into the popular items, when making recommendations, because this is where the system is most stable,” he says.
As a general rule, if you want to diversify your listening, you’ll have to put more effort into music discovery rather than allowing the system to do it for you. Instead of just listening to personalized playlists, you could follow playlists curated by individuals. “If you’re relying on a platform to do the work for you, then you’re basically in the radio mode, as people were before,” Knees says.
There is another way that music recommendation systems can work, which could help bust the feedback loop: content-based recommendations. In this approach, recommendations are based on sound rather than other people’s listening habits. The system could quantify aspects of music such as tempo and find similar tracks based on those acoustic qualities. Schedl suggests you could even put a numeric value on things like “danceability” or “instrumentalness.” In this case, you could even adjust the system for diversity, by tuning how similar recommended tracks should be.
How much this sort of content-based recommendation approach is used, however, is unknown, and it can be a very risky strategy in terms of user experience. Play too much of the same thing and a user might get bored; but play something too far out of their comfort zone and they might just leave.
“You have this trade-off between sticking to really solid, no-risk recommendations by just doing what everybody does and, on the other hand, letting the computer make a recommendation based on the sound properties alone without knowing anything about the cultural aspects of music, which might completely break that expectation,” Knees says. This could be good—it might find the perfect song just for you—or it could completely undermine a user’s trust in the recommendation system.
Meanwhile, if 2021 is the year you get back into music discovery, you’ll have to take the initiative to explore outside of your filter bubble. It’s likely, in fact, that you listen to a greater range of music since using streaming platforms than you did before. Perhaps, muses Knees, it was the extra effort required to find an artist or track in the past that made it feel more precious. Put in the work, then, and it might pay off.
One of Spotify’s most powerful features is its recommendation system, which allows you to find great songs you may not have heard yet. Here’s how to discover new music on the streaming service.
Spotify’s Discovery Features
Aside from having shareable playlists generated by both the community and by the company, Spotify has a ton of ways of directly recommending you new music. Since it’s the largest music streaming service, it has extensive data on all the music that you’ve listened to as well as what other users listen to. That’s why it has a robust set of discovery tools that let you find new songs or genres that you might enjoy.
Spotify’s discovery features include personalized playlists such as Discover Weekly and Release Radar, suggestions for songs to add to your existing playlists, and radio stations based on tracks, artists, and albums. These dynamically change based on your listening habits or selected songs.
Discover Weekly
The most straightforward way of discovering music on Spotify is via the highly personalized “Discover Weekly” playlist. Every start of the week, you’ll get a playlist filled with 30 tracks that you have never listened to on the platform. These tracks are selected based on what you’ve been listening to over the past week and are custom-made for each user. There are often many smaller artists featured in these playlists that you may not have heard of.
To access your Discover Weekly playlist, go to the “Discover” section in Spotify. It should be the very first playlist and will feature your Spotify profile picture on the cover.
While listening to your Discover Weekly, you can add your favorite tracks to your own songs library by clicking the heart button next to them. You can also follow your playlist so you can access it at any time, or set the toggle to “download” so it’ll be available for offline listening on your device whenever it gets refreshed.
Release Radar
Similar to Discover Weekly, the Release Radar is a dynamic playlist that populates itself based on your listening habits and library.
Every Friday, the playlist is updated with 30 brand new songs from artists that you’re currently following, as well as new music from artists that you might not have listened to. This playlist exclusively features tracks that have been released within the last seven days.
If you’re someone that frequently keeps up with new releases, this is a great way to keep track of your favorite artists. It often features special versions, live recordings, and b-sides that aren’t featured as prominently on an artist’s page.
Playlist Suggestions
Spotify can create dynamic suggestions for what tracks to add to a playlist based on the playlist title and the songs already in it. For example, if you make an album called “Disco Music” and add mostly funk, disco, and soul songs, it will immediately suggest similar songs from other artists during the era.
To do this, create a Spotify playlist and give it a descriptive title. Add several songs to the playlist that have to do with the genre, mood, or period you’re trying to capture.
At the bottom of the playlist screen for both mobile and desktop, you’ll see a list of several songs that you can instantly add. Just press the “+” button to add them, or you can also select the song to listen to the track before you add it.
You can also hit the “refresh” button at the bottom of the screen to get another set of recommendations. The suggestions tend to change every time you add new tracks, so you should also try browsing out of the playlist and going back to it to see an entirely new set.
Spotify “Radios”
Another great way to discover new music is by using Spotify’s radio feature. It allows you to select any song, album, or artist, and generate a series of tracks that are similar in genre, theme, or subject matter that you can continuously listen to for hours.
You can find the radio via the additional options button on each song, album, or artist. While playing the radio, you can save the songs you enjoy by pressing the heart button next to each track.
Finding new tunes takes time, but the top music-streaming services offer a number of ways to inject new artists and songs into your daily routine.
My 6-year-old daughter was singing “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X recently, and—despite the fact that the song broke the record for longest hit single on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart—my wife didn’t recognize it and was confused as to how my daughter knew it. I politely suggested she dust off that music subscription we pay for and listen to some new songs.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, 80 percent of recorded music revenue now comes from streaming music. But are subscribers really digging in to discover new music or sticking to old favorites? Finding new tunes takes time, but the top music-streaming services offer a number of ways to inject new artists and songs into your daily routine.
We’ll focus on two of the most popular services—Spotify and Apple Music—but rival services like Pandora and Tidal have similar capabilities.
TL;DL (Too Long, Didn’t Listen)
If you need an easy way to shake up your music listening and discover some new songs, try Spotify’s Stations. It’s unlimited music in a separate, streamlined app. You select an artist, mood, or decade, and it will just keep playing music.
Give music you like a thumbs up; after you like 15 songs, a ” My Favorites” playlist will appear. Anyone with a Spotify login can listen, but Spotify Premium users get ad-free listening and unlimited skips.
Apple Music’s Radio tab, meanwhile, features Beats 1, an internet radio station staffed by real people that plays music (and music-related content, like artist interviews) 24/7. Access to Beats 1 is free, but those with an Apple Music subscription can save songs and create custom radio stations.
Use Artificial Intelligence
Most music services go beyond human DJs and use artificial intelligence to quickly serve up new recommendations, largely in the form of automated playlists based on your past listening habits. The more you listen, the better the song selections.
Spotify offers two primary automated playlists—Discover Weekly and Release Radar—though there are others in the Made For You section. Release Radar is one of the best ways to stay up on the latest releases, with new albums and songs added each Friday.
Discover Weekly, which arrives every Monday morning, is more scattered in its song selection. It’s not beholden to any specific genre, but it does a fantastic job at finding the best songs you’ve never heard before.
These automated playlists should appear front and center in your Spotify app once there’s enough data to populate them with music recommendations. On the desktop app, click Browse > Discover. Be sure to save favorite tunes to a playlist before a new Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlist arrives and replaces the previous week’s songs.
On Apple Music, AI playlists appear under the For You section of the mobile and desktop apps. Apple has four playlists set up automatically, updating weekly—Friends Mix, Chill Mix, New Music Mix, and Favorites Mix. Three of them cycle in new songs with different points of focus while Favorites Mix re-introduces music you’ve played a lot, but may not have listened to in awhile.
Get a Digital Mixtape From Your Friends
Back in the day, your friends or significant other might have made you a mix tape to share new music; these days, we have Apple’s automated Friends Mix. Every Monday, those who have connected with friends via Apple Music will get a 25-song playlist populated with tunes their friends have been listening to.
To connect with someone on Apple Music using the mobile app, tap the For You section at the bottom and then the circle in the top-right corner. From there, tap on View Profile and scroll down to find and invite people. Then, keep tabs on what friends you follow are listening to on Apple Music in the For You Section.
Spotify, meanwhile, offers a “Collaborative Playlist” option, which lets friends add music to a playlist you created. On desktop, r ight-click on any playlist on the left side of your screen and click “Collaborative Playlist” in the pop-up window. On mobile, tap the three-dot menu and select “Make Collaborative.” You can then share the playlist via any number of messaging apps or email.
To find friends on Spotify, tap on the gear icon in the top-right corner and then tap on your profile name at the top. On the next screen, tap Find Friends to connect with Facebook friends. Control social listening under Settings > Social.
Ask Your Music Butler
If you want to dig into music discovery just a tiny bit more than automated playlists and stalking your friends, there are several third-party services that can help you uncover new music.
Musicbutler.io is handy service that helps keep track of all the new music being released from artists you’ve listened to in the past. Apple Music and Spotify have both been moving in this direction to keep you up to date, but Musicbutler still does it best for now.
It can monitor multiple services at once and provides links to get to the music on Amazon Prime and various apps. It also adds music release details as the artist announces them, and does a good job at keeping you alerted with regular emails.
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Daily mixes mostly contain music from your library with a new song here and there, so basically be mostly old stuff.
Discover weekly though should contain mostly songs you have not listen. But you should venture a little bit outside Spotify algorithms and they will become more useful in the future. Here are a couple of suggestions I tend to use:
- Follow the playlists of popular magazines like Rolling Stones, Pitchfork, and NPR.
- – It’s built by one of Spotify engineers and contains all music genres available and each has autogenerated playlists.
- – I recently discovered this and it allows you to browse the catalog by music labels and build playlists based on their releases. Since labels usually sign similar artists its great to find new stuff this way.
- – listen to songs never played on Spotify
- – Reddit about Spotify with a lot of user playlists posted each day.
Just listen to some new stuff and add what you like to playlists. Spotify will start to recommend better stuff eventually.
Spotify, featuring more than 50 million tracks, is a great place to discover new music when you do not know what you should listen to or where to find some new music. It is certainly boring to listen to the old playlists you added before. You need to discover something new to fresh yourself. Here we list all the best ways to discover new and awesome music with Spotify.
Method 1: Make Full Use of Browse on Spotify
When you launch Spotify, you will see a little tab on the top left corner called Browse. This is the first place you should approach to start your new music collecting journey. This is a place in which Spotify will offer everything it has. If you have no idea about what you should look for, just open this area to start discovery. It is divided into 5 parts (Overview, Charts, Genres & Moods, New Releases, Discover, Concerts) which provide unique way to offer massive libraries.
Charts: Spotify provides the Top 50 and Viral 50 songs for the countries where Spotify is available. You can view this chart to find new music you may love.
Genres & Moods: You can choose different categories here, like Pop, EDM, Hip Hop, Country, etc. Each of them contains dozens of playlists.
New Releases: Spotify updates its library every day. It is organized by albums or singers. You can click the albums or singers which attack you to find new music. Spotify also launched New Music Friday and Release Radar in August of this year, another 2-hour algorithmically personalized playlist that features newly released songs from artists each user already listens to, but updated on each Friday.
Discover: This page is specifically directed at your listening habits. You can find recommendations and suggestions that might meet your tastes.
Method 2: Discover Weekly
Discover Weekly refreshes playlists on each Monday. It is a playlist contains 30 tracks recommended in accordance with music preferences and popularity, but also explores some less popular music. Discover Weekly will know more about your tastes and preferences if you use Spotify frequently. It means that the more music you listen to, the more new music will be recommended and discovered.
Indeed, Discover Weekly is a great way to discover new music. You will like most of the recommended music and add them to your own playlist.
Method 3: Radio Stations
Users also can discover new music by listening to the hottest sons on the radio. You can find different genres of radio, artist radio, and songs radio here. If you want to start a genre station, click on Radio on the top left and scroll to the bottom of that page. Here you’ll find over 25 different genres, including Blues, Funk, Reggae, and Soul.
Method 4: Social Networking
You can take full advantage of the social feature to discover new music on Spotify.
Browse Your Friendsʻs Playlist: You can link up with your friends on Spotify and view their playlists they have made available. Then click the “Follow” button to subscribe to a playlist you like.
Related Artists or Follow Artists: You can follow your favorite artists or users on this page. Once you follow them, you will be able to see all the songs they shared. And you can find related artists on this page, but most of time these related artists are within the same genre and have a similar sound. If you like, you also can connect Spotify with Facebook, if you have many friends who are active on Spotify and like sharing.
Tips: How to Save Your Favorite Spotify Tracks as MP3
You probably want to convert your favorite Spotify tracks or playlists to MP3, so that you can enjoy them on any other portable devices or keep them after canceling the subscription. Here Spotify Music Converter (For Windows | For Mac) will help you record and convert Spotify to popular formats like MP3, AAC, FLAC, AIFF, or WAV.
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Photograph: Justin Paget/Getty Images
To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
If you’re listening to music right now, chances are you didn’t choose what to put on—you outsourced it to an algorithm. Such is the popularity of recommendation systems that we’ve come to rely on them to serve us what we want without us even having to ask, with music streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer all using personalized systems to suggest playlists or tracks tailored to the user.
This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.
Generally, these systems are very good. The problem, for some, is that they’re perhaps really too good. They’ve figured out your taste, know exactly what you listen to, and recommend more of the same until you’re stuck in an endless pit of ABBA recordings (just me?). But what if you want to break out of your usual routine and try something new? Can you train or trick the algorithm into suggesting a more diverse range?
“That is tricky,” says Peter Knees, assistant professor at TU Wien. “Probably you have to steer it very directly into the direction that you already know you might be interested in.”
The problem only gets worse the more you rely on automated recommendations. “When you keep listening to the recommendations that are being made, you end up in that feedback loop, because you provide further evidence that this is the music you want to listen to, because you’re listening to it,” Knees says. This provides positive reinforcement to the system, incentivizing it to keep making similar suggestions. To break out of that bubble, you’re going to need to quite explicitly listen to something different.
Companies such as Spotify are secretive about how their recommendation systems work (and Spotify declined to comment on the specifics of its algorithm for this article), but Knees says we can assume most are heavily based on collaborative filtering, which makes predictions of what you might like based on the likes of other people who have similar listening habits to you. You may think that your music taste is something very personal, but it’s likely not unique. A collaborative filtering system can build a picture of taste clusters—artists or tracks that appeal to the same group of people. Really, Knees says, this isn’t all that different to what we did before streaming services, when you might ask someone who liked some of the same bands as you for more recommendations. “This is just an algorithmically supported continuation of this idea,” he says.
The problem occurs when you want to get away from your usual genre, era, or general taste and find something new. The system is not designed for this, so you’re going to have to put in some effort. “Frankly, the best solution would be to create a new account and really train it on something very dissimilar,” says Markus Schedl, a professor at Johannes Kepler University Linz.
Failing that, you need to actively seek out something new. You could seek out a new genre or use a tool outside of your main streaming service to find suggestions of artists or tracks and then search for them. Schedl suggests finding something you don’t listen to as much and starting a “radio” playlist—a feature in Spotify that creates a playlist based on a selected song. (These may, however, also be influenced by your broader listening habits.)
Knees suggests waiting for new releases or regularly listening to the most popular tracks. “There’s a chance that the next thing that comes up is going to be your thing,” he says. But getting away from the mainstream is harder. You’ll find that even if you actively search for a new genre, you’ll likely be nudged toward more popular artists and tracks. This makes sense—if lots of people like something, it’s more likely you will too—but can make it hard to unearth hidden gems.
Knees therefore advises trying to actively dig into the “long tail”—the huge number of artists and tracks that have few listeners but might just be your niche. While you can manually trawl through obscure artists and back catalogs, however, your recommendations will still likely tend toward the mainstream. “Even if you’re in the long tail, it kind of pushes you back into the head, into the popular items, when making recommendations, because this is where the system is most stable,” he says.
As a general rule, if you want to diversify your listening, you’ll have to put more effort into music discovery rather than allowing the system to do it for you. Instead of just listening to personalized playlists, you could follow playlists curated by individuals. “If you’re relying on a platform to do the work for you, then you’re basically in the radio mode, as people were before,” Knees says.
There is another way that music recommendation systems can work, which could help bust the feedback loop: content-based recommendations. In this approach, recommendations are based on sound rather than other people’s listening habits. The system could quantify aspects of music such as tempo and find similar tracks based on those acoustic qualities. Schedl suggests you could even put a numeric value on things like “danceability” or “instrumentalness.” In this case, you could even adjust the system for diversity, by tuning how similar recommended tracks should be.
How much this sort of content-based recommendation approach is used, however, is unknown, and it can be a very risky strategy in terms of user experience. Play too much of the same thing and a user might get bored; but play something too far out of their comfort zone and they might just leave.
“You have this trade-off between sticking to really solid, no-risk recommendations by just doing what everybody does and, on the other hand, letting the computer make a recommendation based on the sound properties alone without knowing anything about the cultural aspects of music, which might completely break that expectation,” Knees says. This could be good—it might find the perfect song just for you—or it could completely undermine a user’s trust in the recommendation system.
Meanwhile, if 2021 is the year you get back into music discovery, you’ll have to take the initiative to explore outside of your filter bubble. It’s likely, in fact, that you listen to a greater range of music since using streaming platforms than you did before. Perhaps, muses Knees, it was the extra effort required to find an artist or track in the past that made it feel more precious. Put in the work, then, and it might pay off.
November 2, 2018
She dresses with an effortless cool, she knows the best hidden taco joints, and her music taste is always on point. She’s the friend who introduced to that new artist you’re streaming on repeat and brought you to the random concert that, in a nutshell, changed your life.
We’re here to tell you: You can be that cool friend. Whether you’re looking for your next favorite artist or for something a little outside your musical comfort zone, discovery awaits via scrolling and clicking. From personalized playlists to just-for-you radio, Spotify has your back.
Bookmark this immediately. Here are four ways to discover new music on Spotify.
1. Spotify Radio Playlists
If you like the ease of someone else choosing songs for you, you should try Spotify Radio
What it is: Choose a song, artist, or playlist, and we’ll play hours of similar music that matches what you like. For example, get going with Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” and breeze right into a mix of Tom Petty, Dispatch, and DMB deep cuts that you might have forgotten.
How to do it: Follow a playlist to save it to your radio library, and further personalize it by liking or disliking tracks. On desktop, head over to Radio and click CREATE NEW STATION. Enter a track, artist, or playlist and Spotify will create a station based on that music. Hit FOLLOW to save the station in Your Library, under Stations. Unfollowing the station will remove it.
On the app, hit Radio, then New Station on the top right. Search for a track, artist, or playlist, and choose the song you’d like to start with. On the Station page, tap FOLLOW to save it to Your Library under Stations.
2. Discover Weekly
If you like music that’s totally new to you but would work perfectly with your current playlists, you should try Discover Weekly
What it is: Based on your listening history and that of fans with similar taste, the Discover Weekly playlist is like getting recommendations from the more in-the-know version of yourself. It’s so famous among users for how well it just gets you that this feature has a fair share of groupies. (Seriously. Just ask around.) Because of how well it pinpoints your taste in music, it feels like your Discover Weekly knows you better than your significant other. Better than your sister after 15 years of sharing a room. You get the gist.
Discover Weekly is 30 new songs we think you’ll love, delivered every Monday. Remember that Discover Weekly refreshes every week, so make sure you save your favorites.
How to do it: On desktop or web player, you’ll find Discover Weekly in Your Library (Your Music on web player) under Playlists. On mobile, it’s in Home under Made for You for free users. For Premium subscribers, it’s in Your Library under Playlists, or in Browse under Discover.
The playlist is set to private by default, but you can set it to public, share it with friends, and follow other users’ Discover Weekly playlists. And those private sessions? They don’t influence your Discover Weekly, so your recommendations won’t get thrown off by a little out-of-character listening.
3. Daily Mix
If you like your music divided by genre, with a hint of discovery, you should try Daily Mix
What it is: Daily Mixes are personalized playlists based on the styles of music you listen to. Users can have up to six mixes, based on the variety and amount of your general listening history. So if you’re the kind of person who only listens to indie pop, you might have fewer mixes than your roommate, who wakes up to country, goes for Top 40 in the car and is also up to date on the punk rock scene. The mixes are fresh and familiar at the same time—a mix of new discoveries and tracks you already have on repeat and unbound, meaning it will load more songs instead of stopping.
How to do it: Liking a track ( 4. Release Radar
If you like keeping up with recently released music, you should try Release Radar.
What it is: Release Radar is a playlist of 30 songs is updated every Friday with music that has come out over the past few weeks, recommended just for you based on your listening patterns. It includes a mix of new music from the artists you listen to most, plus new singles we think you might like, so you never miss a new release. Maybe you’ve been listening to Justin Timberlake since your dorm room days, but didn’t consider yourself a true TN Kid until “Filthy” popped up in your Release Radar. Suddenly, you’ve got front-row tickets to his Man of the Woods tour.
How to do it: As with most playlists, the more you listen, the better it gets, and liking or disliking tracks will steer the playlist and help tailor future recommendations. Find your Release Radar in Browse when listening on desktop (Home on the web player), or in Home under Made for You on mobile.
Spotify allows you to listen to completely new tunes or current favorites mixed with some discovery. And you can always look to our playlists like RapCaviar and ¡Viva Latino! to influence what you want to listen to, right now. Either way, Spotify offers easy ways to explore music. Pro tip: Remember everything refreshes, so always be sure to save your favorites.
Spotify’s flagship Discover Weekly feature gets in-playlist and native ad sponsorship as the streaming service enters a new age
Amy X. Wang
Senior Editor, Music Business
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Spotify’s signature Discover Weekly playlist gets in-playlist and native sponsorship as the streaming service enters a new age.
Shutterstock / Christopher Penler
Spotify celebrated its 10th birthday in October — making it, by modern measures, a veteran tech company, long past the scrappy startup phase of existence. It’s gotten there by being very good at knowing what it does best. Now, to reach the next stages of profitability and long-term success, it has to amplify all that.
The Swedish streaming service announced in a memo on Monday that it will begin allowing advertisers to sponsor its signature Discover Weekly playlist, which refreshes every week with custom history- and preference-based song recommendations for every user. The new sponsorship’s in-playlist and native ads, which will be delivered to all users on the free tier, will kick off with a series from Microsoft tied to the software company’s “Empowering Us All” artificial intelligence campaign.
Spotify already offers brand sponsorships on some of its other editorial playlists, but until now it has kept Discover Weekly — which is heralded by both fans and competitor services as its flagship feature, and draws more than 40 million users a month — a more organic, unfettered experience. Yet the popularity of the playlist (i.e. the money in it) is irresistible in terms of revenue opportunity. (Despite explosive user growth and subscription-tier revenue, high royalty payouts and low free-tier ad revenue still make Spotify unprofitable overall.)
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Per Spotify’s memo, people who regularly listen to Discover Weekly stream twice as much as people who don’t. “Our new Discover Weekly ad experience positions advertisers for success and ensures that our fans are hearing messages that embody the ethos of discovery,” said Spotify’s global partner solutions head Danielle Lee in a statement. “Personalization has quickly gone from a nice-to-have to an expected consumer experience that delights audiences and marketers are craving opportunities to be part of it.” The company’s tech industry head Casey Weinreich added: “Spotify is a technology company. The magic with this partnership is we were able to identify a tech partner with a shared ambition to utilize technology, in this case machine learning, to enrich our user experience.” According to Microsoft executives in the memo, the debut campaign will focus on messaging about how AI influences a number of industries including philanthropy and healthcare.
While most of Spotify’s ads are programmatic (appearing as sidebars or in allotted boxed spaces like traditional ads on websites), the Discover Weekly brand sponsorship, which is currently in beta testing, will be open to native homepage takeovers and full playlist takeovers, the company said. Spotify, now that it’s almost a year out from its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange last spring, has to make good on its promise to make more money — which is especially crucial as its market price slumped amid a tech industry slide from a peak $35.3 billion in July to $22.7 billion in December. Its choice to do that by loaning out the audience of its most beloved product, though, has some wondering whether the service might be sacrificing some of its charm along the way.
If you find yourself in a music rut, don’t despair.
By Sophie Westergren, Ithaca College
Sounds x August 8, 2019
3 Ways to Get Into New Music on Spotify
If you find yourself in a music rut, don’t despair.
By Sophie Westergren, Ithaca College
All too often, even people with the most decked out, eclectic music tastes find themselves in a music rut. It can feel impossible to find a single song that you really like, let alone a whole album of new music. It’s as if you’ve heard every song ever made, and now you’re left to listen to the same playlists on repeat.
First of all, you haven’t heard every song ever. You just haven’t; there are so many hidden gems out there, like that time you heard an absolute banger at a party and, with a stroke of luck, were able to Shazam it in time. So, if you’re wondering how to beef up your tracks (and you use Spotify), here are some helpful tips to rejuvenate your music library when it seems to have been sucked clean of all that is new and exciting.
1. Dive Into a New Genre Altogether
It’s almost impossible to find music when you haven’t narrowed down what you’re looking for, because there are just way too many songs out there, and you can’t expect to just shuffle the World Bank of Music and hope that you will find something that hits home. Figure out what you are missing out on, and what you want to dive deeper into, whether that’s metal rap by artists like City Morgue, or German pop with musicians like Lil Kleine.
Once you have honed in on the sound you want to get further invested in, take your favorites and build a Spotify playlist. This will help you wade into the pool of a new genre without being overwhelmed and unable to really sustain any of the new music you’ve just discovered, like you would if you had just added whole albums to a playlist that you’d probably only listen to on shuffle.
2. Make a Collaborative Playlist
There’s no universal reason why we like music; some people listen for a “summer never ends” feeling, others want to feel absorbed in a moment and really think about what is happening to them, some people appreciate a song’s production value and some just like certain artists. Whatever reason you have to love music and want to further your collection, find someone who holds similar values and create a playlist together.
Again, it’s very easy to be too broad when you’re deciding what kind of music to include in this step in your discovery, so to manage this, try to pick a theme, situation or type of scenery that you both want the playlist to center around. Perhaps you want the playlist to make you feel like you are driving in a low-rise car past a brightly-lit city at night, or like you’re on a beach with crumbling gray buildings all around you. You’ll be surprised what your friends can come up with.
3. Listen to the Album
A lot of the time, when we are in a music rut, we’ll find one good song and get bored of it in a week. Before you ruin a perfectly good song, check out more from that artist or the album it’s part of because, chances are, if you like the one song, you will like at least a few others on the album. In the days of feel-good, hand-tailored playlists, it’s easy to forget the beauty of a complete album. The producers and artists have already taken the time and care to fit the songs together perfectly in terms of flow, pace and style, so just sit back and press play.
4. Related Artists
So, you’ve worn out a certain artist, and you want to know how you can find more artists in the same genre of the new music you’re exploring. Where do you go next? Spotify has employed a system to promote related artists on the pages of all the bands you search. For example, if you just got into Pink Floyd and you want to find a similar vibe and feel in another artist, just search for the band and their page will have a tab labeled “Fans also like,” where you can see the names of artists like Rush, Led Zeppelin and Yes that deliver a similar feel to your newly-rockified ears.
5. Never Forget About Spotify’s Discover Weekly
Holy cow, Spotify users, have you forgotten about this feature? Well, listen to this: Discover Weekly is an expertly-designed algorithm that takes the songs you listen to on the regular and finds songs that other people with similar music styles listen to.
Sure, it won’t be the perfect Band-Aid for your musical wound — no computer-generated system is perfect, no matter how much we wish they could be — but it’ll give you some new music that can point you toward another genre you might want to crack in to next or an artist you might want to investigate. So please, remember: There are systems in place for this emergency you’re dealing with.
The real trick to climbing out of a music rut is to keep it specific, because you are never going to find the music that truly speaks to you and your brand (whatever that might be) if you don’t clarify what that brand is. You can’t just say, “I like German rap” into your phone and expect it to generate a beautiful list of golden songs that you’re guaranteed to like. We are not that advanced yet — nor should we be, as that would eliminate a lot of personal creativity. You have to dive into yourself to find what you really like.
