Spotify Discover Weekly: Personalized Updates

Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist has been around for a full decade now, aiming to introduce you to singers and bands you don’t know but may like, with particular emphasis on emerging artists. It’s been great for me, but if it isn’t quite hitting the spot, you can now help it do better …

Discover Weekly is an algorithmic playlists that looks at your existing favorite artists, finds other subscribers with the same tastes, and shows you what else they are listening to.

It’s been a highly–successful discovery mechanism for many, and because it is biased to lesser–known artists, it can be a very effective way for emerging artists to find their fan base. Spotify says it’s helped subscribers discover over 100B new tracks, 77% of which are from lesser–known artists.

One area where it can fall short, however, is where your tastes are changing. For example, your own playlists are heavily biased toward indie rock, but you’re now developing a taste for hip–hop. Spotify is now letting premium subscribers steer the discovery process in the right direction, as TechCrunch explains.

Spotify Premium users will see new controls at the top of the playlist, which allow them to push their recommendations toward certain genres. So, if you mostly listen to 80s rock, but you’re starting to develop a soft spot for K-pop, you can select different genre filters to push the algorithmic curation in the right direction […]

To access the new-and-improved Discover Weekly, Spotify Premium subscribers can navigate to the “Made for You” hub, then navigate to their Discover Weekly playlist. There, if the latest Spotify version is installed, users will be able to see the new genre controls.

The change is rolling out now, so you may need to update your app to access it – and the controls are only available to paid subscribers.

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