Apple Music has garnered some decidedly mixed reviews, but one thing every critic can agree on: The streaming service’s daily recommendations of human-curated playlists are undeniably awesome.
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“We wanted to make something that felt like your best friend making you a mixtape, labelled “music you should check out”, every single week”, said product manager Matthew Ogle, who co-founded music-discovery startup This Is My Jam before joining Spotify in January. Apple Music’s playlists feel like you’re getting suggestions from the old record store owner who knows way more about music than you and doesn’t have a problem telling you what to play next.
Instead Spotify has turned to a combination of algorithm and human intervention, the company tells SlashGear, though it’s not clear what proportion of both is involved in the “secret sauce” of Discovery Playlist.
The music streamer’s new service, Discover Weekly, analyses users’ listening habits before creating a tailored, two hour playlist that is updated every Monday. Spotify offers themed playlists from friends, magazines (Entertainment Weekly), personalities (fashion icon Rachel Zoe) and even president Barack Obama.
The Discover Weekly playlist will be located at the top of your Playlists folder, across all of your devices. Because it updates each Monday, the Discover Weekly playlist should become a tool for subscribers to routinely check and find new material.
He added that while localising Discover Weekly, he discovered that the most idiomatic name for it in Hungarian translated to “this week’s adventure”, which he thinks captures the intention of the new feature.
Apple’s new music service is a valiant effort to catch up in the emerging business of offering unlimited music on demand for a monthly price.
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– Apple Music is also a giant song recommendation machine. New playlists will show up every week. Spotify created a 30-track playlist that was new-ish to me, but not exactly unknown.
