Tag: Discovery

“It’s really helped – both externally and even internally to be honest – to dispel the myth that discovery is a niche thing. A tastemaker thing.”

The speaker is Matt Ogle and the ‘it’ is Discover Weekly, the personalised playlist that Spotify launched in July 2015, customised to each listener’s tastes – and originally developed by Ogle’s team at the company for an internal hack day.

Ogle joined Spotify early that year following three years at This Is My Jam, the music startup that he co-founded to help people share their favourite songs. Before that, he worked at Last.fm and The Echo Nest.

Discover Weekly has been a hit. In its first ten weeks, Spotify users streamed more than 1bn tracks from the playlists, with the total reaching 1.7bn by December. Now, in 2016, Spotify is preparing its first marketing push for the feature.

Ogle and his colleagues, meanwhile, are working on some aspects that he thinks would ideally have been included at launch.

“When we tested Discover Weekly early on and realised that it was potentially the hit that it has now become, we actually took a lot of shortcuts,” he admits.

That included no ‘onboarding’ process whereby the new feature would be explained to Spotify users – for example a pop-up message explaining what it was and how it worked.

“We literally just added it to users’ playlists, which was how we tested it. All the way along I’d been saying internally ‘Oh, we’d never launch it like this. We’d never be so rude as to just jam it in everyone’s playlists!’” says Ogle.

“But this will now become a thing we talk about as core to the experience, so we have been figuring out the best way of telling new users ‘Hey, guess what, it’s your third week on Spotify and we’ve made something for you’, and getting their expectations up and running around that.”

Discover Weekly has clearly been making ripples within Spotify, and not just around discovery of new music. Its weekly update has quickly become a habit for many users: on the one week so far when the refresh was late, many protested.

That idea of an ‘appointment to listen’ may seem strange on a service where people can listen to whatever they want, whenever they want. But just as scheduling has become important to popular YouTube creators, so it has found a place on Spotify.

“Something that Discover Weekly really has ignited within the company, which we’re going to be exploring in a bunch of different ways, is the power of that weekly ritual or cadence,” says Ogle.

“Right now we’re thinking about what the things are you might want to do on Spotify every day, what the things are that you might only want to do once a month. This periodic delivery isn’t the right fit for everything, but we think there are perhaps more opportunities than we perhaps realised initially to creating rituals and habits like that.”

Specific details on Spotify’s plans are under wraps for now, but Ogle does offer some hints. For example: “’Hey, here’s the hip-hop on Spotify at the moment’ – but you’re actually seeing a personalised ordering of all that content.”

He also suggests that Spotify is thinking about whether a standard playlist is the best format for this kind of personalisation. Spotify users have made more than 2bn playlists of their own, so they understand how they work. But an ordered list of songs could be improved.

“Playlists are the atomic unit of Spotify. We’ve got over two billion of them, so obviously we’ve got a pretty robust system for storing and serving them. However, as robust as that system is, it was designed for user playlists,” says Ogle.

“It was not designed for ‘Let’s set 75m of them to all get updated in a ten-hour window on Sunday night!’. So behind the scenes, we’re going ‘Alright, if we want to have 20 personalised playlists in a given week, what sort of a system would we need under the hood?’ What would we build so that you could just seamlessly serve that?”

Ogle also explains that while there are advantages to Discover Weekly being a playlist – Spotify’s users understand how to use and share them – there are also disadvantages.

“If we get a recommendation wrong you can’t tell us, and if you share Discover Weekly it’s just called ‘Discover Weekly by Spotify’. Hopefully your face is on it, but beyond that you can’t really tell whose is whose,” he says.

“We want to play with the playlist format a bit. It’s not the right tool for every job, and you’ve seen the start of this with our Genius stuff that came out recently.” By which he means the “Behind The Lyrics” playlists launched with Genius in January, which show lyrical excerpts, annotations and stories as the playlists play.

“If you imagine that every day of the week we might have a new type of content experience for you, being able to play with the playlist format itself is also something that we are thinking pretty deeply about,” says Ogle.