By now you’ll likely have seen the news that Spotify has launched a new set of personalised playlists for its listeners under the banner of ‘Daily Mix’. Announced yesterday, the feature is rolling out to Spotify’s users on iOS and Android over 24 hours, with other platforms to follow in due course.
Each user will get 4-6 mixes per day based on ‘clusters’ of their listening tastes: mainly songs they love with some new tracks they should love thrown in too. Spotify’s Matt Ogle explained the new feature to Music Ally. “It’s sort-of imagining in some ways what an inverse Discover Weekly looks like. Something especially for more casual fans who as we grow are making up a growing piece of the pie of listeners,” he said.
“The idea is a one-touch world. ‘Hey Spotify, take the wheel, play me some good stuff’. It’s a feature that essentially flips Discover Weekly on its head. What if, instead of being hyper-personalised in terms of stuff you haven’t heard, we could create a series of listening experiences for you, hyper-personalised based on the stuff we know you love, and then mix a bit of discovery in?”
It’s Spotify’s latest move towards radio-like listening: something made overt by Ogle in our interview. “We are pulling in pools of songs in each of the areas of your taste that we know you love, and then sprinkling in some new stuff. We are experimenting a little bit with sequencing in the way a radio DJ might,” he told us. “Let’s follow something we know you love with something from an artist you haven’t heard, followed by something from an artist you do know, but a song you haven’t heard.”
Two thoughts from us. First, this is an example of Spotify evolving the format of its playlists beyond a list of tracks: listeners can “ban” songs from their Daily Mixes, providing useful negative feedback to Spotify – something not possible in Discover Weekly, for example.
Second, the new feature is available for paying AND free users. While there’s been plenty of discussion about whether Spotify should window big albums for its subscribers, there’s been less about whether some of its algorithmic wizardry could also be windowed – for example, free users getting one Daily Mix but subscribers getting the full set. Spotify’s argument may well be that this kind of feature makes its free service even stickier for listeners, and it’s that stickiness that will ultimately drive them to upgrade
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