Apple Music’s Discovery Station Is a Worthy Spotify Alternative to Discover Weekly (Finally)
Apple Music is a handy alternative to Spotify, but it consistently lags behind in one important area for a music streaming service: recommendations. Spotify users have long praised its app’s algorithmic ability to give them helpful music recommendations, and those who’ve tried both services seem to agree that Apple Music just isn’t that good at it. To their credit, Apple is working on it. The latest attempt to fill this gap: Discovery Station.
What is Discovery Station by Apple Music?
Discovery Station is a new algorithmic playlist that aims to find songs similar to those in your Apple Music library. It only highlights music you’ve never heard before, making it stand out from all other Apple Music playlists. If you fall into the trap of listening to the same songs over and over again, Discovery Station offers an easy way to expand your horizons.
While I’m digging. As someone who is constantly on the lookout for new music across a wide variety of genres, I find Discovery Station to be a great way to personalize this experience.
For those of you coming from Spotify , this new feature is pretty close to Discover Weekly, which helps you discover new music with a playlist that’s updated every week. Discovery Station is an algorithmic playlist that automatically updates based on your music preferences.
However, Discovery Station still lacks one thing compared to its Spotify counterpart: it doesn’t show you the full list of songs in your playlist. You can only see one upcoming song and you will have to keep listening to find out more.
How can I try Discovery Station?
Apple doesn’t make it obvious where to find Discovery Station in the Apple Music app. Go to the “Listen Now” tab and swipe right under “Best Pick” until you find it. It’s distributed all over the world, so if you don’t see it right away, you’ll just have to wait a bit until it appears on your device.
Even though Discovery Station is pretty good, it will always recommend songs you don’t like. If this happens to you, open the Music app and tap the mini player to expand it. This will show you the album art and the title of the song below it. Tap the three-dot icon next to the song name and select Suggest Less . This will help you tell the algorithm that you want to hear less music like the song in question.
Apple Music still lags behind Spotify
Even with this new feature, Apple Music has ways to recommend music. The Listen Now tab has a lot of great options, but Spotify offers at least five Daily Mix playlists that are automatically updated every day. It also has a Release Radar playlist that features new music you might want to try out.
If you’re not happy with the playlists that Apple Music creates, we’ve got a guide for creating your own algorithmic smart playlists . It will teach you how to define your own algorithm (no coding required) and create playlists to your liking. It only takes about 10 minutes, but if it’s too much work, you can transfer your favorite Spotify playlists to Apple Music instantly .