Spotify: Discover Weekly reaches 40 million users, all seeking their own personalised playlists
Discover Weekly, the playlist that Spotify creats specifically for you every Monday, have you already discovered it?
Spotify’s Discover Weekly has proven to be a great success. A few days ago, the company revealed that it is used by 40 million users, who have streamed 5 billion tracks.
The success was something of a surprise to Spotify too. ”Discover Weekly started as a hack project, and if ten other people had hack ideas we didn’t have the resources to push them out,” says Matt Ogle, who helps lead development of music discovery and personalization at Spotify. “The update to the infrastructure will allow us to experiment a lot more. We can now do this kind of deep personalization at scale across a number of different products.”
Matt Ogle – who helps lead development of music discovery and personalization at Spotify – photo via Musically.com
This function analyses the chronology of music listened to by the user and combines it with new releases and popular tunes to create a playlist that is updated every Monday with 30 new tracks based on the preferences of the user and other Spotify fans with similar tastes.
Spotify boasts 75 million active users and approximately 40% of them use Discover Weekly. Over half of Discover Weekly users save a track and listen to at least 10 tracks a week.
Spotify has claimed that it is also good news for artists: it has been observed there are over 8.000 artists for whom more than half their plays come from Discover Weekly.
The segment that makes the most use of the feature is aged between 25 and 34 years and has been defined by engineer Ed Newett as the “the years after college” target group, that period of change in which one is keen to find new ways to discover new music.
It is not always easy to find new sounds and new groups and that is where Spotify’s feature comes in. There are plenty of streaming services with a vast catalogue of tracks, but without an effective search function, most of these tracks remain trapped behind the search box.
We will soon see if other streaming services choose to follow in Spotify’s footsteps or whether the music industry will find alternative methods to suggest new music to fans on the constant search for new sounds.
