Spotify is a music, podcast and audiobook streaming platform known for its algorithm-based music recommendations for listeners to discover new music genres and artists and keep up with new releases from their favorites. Spotify often releases its own compilations of music playlists based on different genres, moods, trends or even viral moments. Additionally, Spotify uses its algorithm to make playlists specific to each user, like the Discover Weekly playlist and its more recent addition, the Daylist.
The Discover Weekly feature was launched in July 2015 for users to discover new music weekly. Every Monday, the playlist will generate a compilation of 30 songs that the user has never streamed before. Spotify uses different approaches to recommend new music to users, like collaborative filtering, where Spotify filters through users with similar music preferences and recommends songs that way, or content-based filtering and audio features, which finds music similar to what the user usually listens to. In using these different processes, Spotify can recommend music that the user may like, often providing them with something new and different from what they typically listen to.
Spotify’s Daylist feature is a newer music recommendation feature, released in Sept. 2023. The Daylist is a playlist of 50 songs that changes throughout the day, updating every few hours based on the user’s daily music listening habits. The playlist features music that the user already listens to while also including new songs that the user may enjoy. However, its popularity is largely credited to the unique titles given to each playlist update, which indicate the mood for that particular blend as well as the user’s typical listening habits for that specific part of the day.
In contrast to the Daylist, Discover Weekly covers a more generalized overview of the user's music taste and has been criticized for being boring for repeatedly recommending similar songs from week to week according to Medium. Spotify Weekly tends to focus on one specific or popular genre that the user seems to enjoy rather than diversifying their music library. On the other hand, Spotify discusses how the Daylist dives into the “niche music and microgenres” that the user listens to and expands on all genres they may enjoy. Despite the Daylist’s more personalized playlists, the Daylist update rotation has a much shorter duration than the Discover Weekly playlist, and if users want to save the specific blend of music for later, they must add it to an existing playlist or create a new one. Users have less time to engage in the new music recommendations with the Daylist than they do with the Discover Weekly playlist, and the Daylist has more songs on it, which can potentially be inconvenient for those with busy schedules.
The Spotify algorithm works in different ways to recommend music to its users and keep its audience engaged. Both the Discover Weekly and Daylist playlists are ways in which they put the algorithm to use, and each of them has successes and failures regarding their ability to suggest new music. How music listeners choose to stay up to date on music or find new music is up to user preference, and the Discover Weekly playlist and Daylist are just two features available for music lovers.
By: Elaina Irving, Staff Writer
Graphic by Shae-Lynn Henderson, Editor in Chief