Spotify to deliver you a personalised playlist every Monday
Discover Weekly to provide you with two hours of new music for the back-to-work commute
Spotify is taking the fight to Apple Music, with the launch of a new feature that automatically provides a personalised playlist of music for each user every week. Dubbed Discover Weekly, the selection of 30 songs appears at the top of the user’s playlists.
With Apple Music making a huge play of its human-curated playlists and 24-hour radio station, Beats One, it seems Spotify is relying on algorithms to stop its subscribers jumping ship. The Discover Weekly playlist is based on your past listening habits, as well as what others with similar tastes have been listening to.
Spotify claims Discover Weekly is “like having your best friend make you a personalised mixtape every single week”, with a new selection timed to drop every Monday morning, in time for the commute to work. “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.”
Our first curated playlist made a fairly good stab at matching our music tastes, including tracks from The Style Council, Blur and John Lennon, as well as a few guilty secrets from Spandau Ballet, Deacon Blue and, erm, Simply Red.
The Discover Weekly playlist will seemingly be overwritten every week, so you need to save any favourite songs to other playlists if you want to go back to them.
The world’s biggest streaming service is facing its stiffest competition yet with the launch of Apple Music. Apple is currently offering a three-month free trial of Apple Music, before subscriptions kick in at £9.99 per month – the same price as Spotify Premium. Apple won’t offer an ad-supported free tier like Spotify, but it is offering cheaper deals for families, allowing up to six members to join the service for £14.99 per month. Spotify currently charges £5 extra for each additional family member, although the company has hinted that it’s prepared to match Apple’s subscription prices.
Spotify announced a host of new features coming to the service in May, including Spotify Running (a mobile app feature that matches the pace of the music to your jogging pace), and support for video and podcasts. However, these features are still yet to reach most of Spotify’s apps.