Spotify Launches 'Discover Weekly' Personalized New Music Playlists for Users

If you're a Spotify user, you may have noticed a new playlist that appeared on your account on Monday. These playlists are a new feature launch from the company called "Discover Weekly," which creates a new personalized playlist of new music for each user every Monday, based on their listening styles.

The Discover Weekly feature creates a playlist based on what you're listening to using an algorithm. However, rather than play you all the songs and artists that are already your favorites, the feature gives you new songs. The new songs are based on the listening habits of people similar to yourself. Essentially, they look at the songs another listeners played before and after a certain song that you love before adding that new song to the playlist.

In addition to songs based on your preferred artists, Spotify will also occasionally throw in some new sounds to give you something different.

"We wanted to make something that felt like your best friend making you a mixtape, labeled 'music you should check out', every single week," said Matthew Ogle, the product manager for Discover Weekly.

The Spotify Discover Weekly feature also takes into account temporary changes in your music listening habits. As Peter Kafka at Re/Code explained, his playlist wasn't full of children's movie songs, even though his children have been making him play the Minions soundtrack on perpetual repeat recently. Spotify looks out for outliers when they're making the Discover playlists, so your "Let It Go" binge won't influence the playlist you get.

So far, the personal reviews have been pretty solid, with many people saying they're enjoying their playlist -- and even that the Discover Weekly playlist "knows you so well it's creepy."

Discover Weekly seems to be Spotify's response to Apple Music's "For You" suggested songs and artists. The main difference between the two is that Spotify's recommendations are made based on data, while Apple's are put together by human music experts. Regardless of how they are creating the lists, both platforms are now putting curated playlists and music discovery at the front of their strategies -- which can only mean more new music for everyone.

This is the author's first Discover Weekly playlist... (for the record, it's pretty awesome!)