If Your Weekly Discover Playlist Sucks, Try This
Your Discover Weekly probably doesn’t suck – the feature is so popular that it’s the subject of long, colorful profiles on tech and business blogs . Spotify even built an ad campaign with users tweeting how they liked the feature . Every week, every active Spotify user gets a new list of 30 tracks, and more than half of them find a new favorite . But depending on your Spotify habits, you might get Discover Weekly junk. Here’s what’s going on and how to fix it.
Spotify uses several methods to create your personalized playlist; it analyzes how songs are described on music blogs and even compares them to actual digital audio content. But Spotify’s primary way of determining whether a song should appear on your Discover Weekly playlist is by comparing your listening habits to those of other users. So if you listen to a lot of REM and Spotify knows that REM fans also love Dinosaur Jr., it will add some Dinosaur Jr. to your Discover Weekly.
In 2015, the Discover Weekly Spotify team gave Quartz nine tips to improve your Discover Weekly playlist , and more recent reviews show they still work. Some highlights:
Skip songs you don’t like.
If you miss a song before it hits the 30-second mark, Spotify will register it as a disliked song and won’t show you similar tracks in your Discover Weekly. So if you have a huge “favorite songs” playlist but miss a lot of tracks, you can tell Spotify that you hate the songs you really like.
Play some new music for a while.
This requires actually changing the listening habits. If you suddenly discover a completely different genre, Spotify won’t fully recommend similar music because it thinks someone else might be borrowing your account or using the same computer. Keep playing this music for more than a day or two.
Put your favorite music into playlists.
Spotify interprets when you add a song to your playlist as a sign that you like it. So if you fill your playlists with music you don’t really like — for example, an ever-changing “tryout music” playlist — you might be sending the wrong signal. This is a weaker signal than when playing music, but if you use playlists heavily for blind or “ironic” listening, consider just using your library instead.
Don’t worry about children’s music.
Spotify thinks it’s easy enough to find new children’s music, tracks with background sound effects, or Christmas music, so if you don’t play these genres all the time , it ignores them and recommends new music. It’s the same with private sessions and the game itself at Discover Weekly.
Try radio stations and create new playlists.
If your Discover Weekly is still bad (or if you’re looking forward to next week’s playlist), make some playlists of what you really want to hear more. Spotify will recommend similar tracks below. These guidelines are taken from other people’s playlists, so if you create a themed playlist, the algorithm will stick. For example, here’s what Spotify recommends based on my collection of 74 covers :
These are ten fresh cross-genre covers of hits from the 70s and 90s. Some (like “Like a Virgin” Caught a Ghost) are good, some are clichés, but this is exactly the kind of music I wanted to try.
None of these methods are reliable; Spotify does not disclose every component of its recommendation algorithm, as this is one of the service’s biggest advantages over competitors like Apple Music. And, of course, the algorithm is evolving like any other part of the service. Therefore, pay attention to the signals you send and how you can change your musical “workflow” to get better recommendations.
The Magic That Makes Discover Weekly Spotify Playlists So Damn Good | Quartz