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Posts tagged with "spotify"

Spotify Introduces Daily Mix

At WWDC in June, Apple announced ‘Discovery Mix,’ a playlist of Apple Music songs based on your musical taste, similar in name and substance to Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. When iOS 10 launched, the name of Apple’s music discovery playlist had changed to My New Music Mix and was joined by a second playlist that wasn’t discussed at WWDC – My Favorites Mix. Both Apple Music playlists are updated weekly.

Spotify didn’t have a favorites mix of its own until today when it responded with Daily Mix, a daily playlist featuring tracks that users mark as favorites as well as new music. According to Spotify:

As your music taste evolves, so will your Daily Mix. In fact, the more you listen, the better your Mixes will become – offering an effortless music experience based entirely on your personal listening habits. Don’t like that new discovery? Simply “ban” a tune to remove it from future playlists. If you love it, be sure to “heart” the hit to add it to your collection.

Spotify’s Daily Mix adds some nice touches that differentiate it from Apple Music’s My Favorites Mix. I like the idea of a more frequently updated daily mix, but I wonder whether adding new music to the mix makes sense in this context. One of the benefits of a favorites mix is knowing you will like everything played. Adding new music potentially undermines that.

Daily Mix is currently available on iOS (in the latest update to the iOS app) and Android only. Spotify says other platforms will be added soon.

Sonos Adding Support for Amazon Echo and Spotify

In a March blog post announcing layoffs, Sonos CEO John MacFarlane made cryptic comments about bringing voice control to Sonos that specifically called out Amazon’s work with the Echo. According to The Verge and Variety, Sonos unveiled plans today to integrate Sonos with Amazon’s popular line of voice-controlled products beginning in 2017. A video released by the companies shows a family using an Amazon Echo Dot to play music, skip tracks, get artist information, and pause music. It is unclear from reports whether the Amazon integration is limited to Amazon’s music products or will be available to use with other services too.

Variety is also reporting that Sonos has struck a deal with music streaming service Spotify to allow Spotify customers to stream music to Sonos speakers directly from Spotify’s mobile app. Spotify will begin beta testing the new integration in October.

In February, Sonos added support for Apple Music in its own app. With these latest deals Sonos appears to be taking a Netflix-like approach to ensure it remains relevant by integrating with as many services and platforms as possible. The strategy makes a lot of sense given today’s highly competitive music streaming landscape.

For more on the Amazon/Sonos announcement, check out the video after the break.

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Spotify’s Release Radar is Discover Weekly for New Music

Release Radar's first take.

Release Radar’s first take.

Earlier today, Spotify unveiled Release Radar, an algorithmically-generated playlist updated Friday and designed to recommend new music. Like Discover Weekly, Release Radar tailors suggestions dynamically for your tastes, with the difference that it highlights newly released music from the past few weeks instead of anything you might be interested in. Essentially, Release Radar aims to be Discover Weekly for new song release.

The Verge has more details on how Spotify approached Release Radar after the success of Discover Weekly:

“When a new album drops, we don’t really have much information about it yet, so we don’t have any streaming data or playlisting data, and those are pretty much the two major components that make Discover Weekly work so well,” says Edward Newett, the engineering manager at Spotify in charge of Release Radar. “So some of the innovation happening now for the product is around audio research. We have an audio research team in New York that’s been experimenting with a lot of the newer deep learning techniques where we’re not looking at playlisting and collaborative filtering of users, but instead we’re looking at the actual audio itself.”

As a Discover Weekly fan, I think this is a fantastic idea. Discover Weekly has brought back the joy of discovering new music into my life, but the songs it recommends aren’t necessarily fresh. I can see Release Radar complement Discover Weekly as the week winds down with songs that I don’t know and are also new.

Already in today’s first version of Release Radar, I’ve found some excellent suggestions for songs released in the past two weeks. Spotify has their personalized discovery features down to a science at this point.

Conversely, I’m curious to see what Apple plans to do with their Discovery Mix feature of Apple Music announced at WWDC (shown here with a screenshot). Discovery Mix still hasn’t become available after four betas of iOS 10. I’m intrigued, but also a little skeptical.

Spotify Launches Two New Radio Shows→

Rich McCormick at The Verge:

Swedish streaming service Spotify is launching two new radio shows today, both of which feature musicians talking about the kind of music that they like listening to while they’re making their art. The first, AM/PM, will feature artists like electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre and Terry Hall of ska icons The Specials talking about the music they listen to in the mornings before work, and in the evenings after a day spent creating. The second, Secret Genius, speaks to the songwriters and producers behind major songs, and features the actually-pretty-well-known James Blake, among others.

Looks like Spotify’s “In Residence” radio shows which launched last year were successful enough for Spotify to commission these two new shows. The comparison to the radio shows on Beats 1 is unavoidable, but it’s a good move on Spotify’s part. They may not be for everyone, but those Beats 1 shows are one of the best benefits of the launch of Apple Music. Spotify’s radio shows aren’t live like some of those on Beats 1 are, but I don’t think that makes a great deal of difference to their appeal to listeners.

Speaking of live radio and Beats 1, I’d be very interested to find out how many people listen to Beats 1 live, compared to how many just listen to the recorded radio shows when it is most convenient for them.

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Spotify Brings Back the Tab Bar on iOS

As I mentioned on Connected earlier today, I’ve been using both Spotify and Apple Music for the past few months. I prefer how discovery is more skewed towards indie artists and songs I don’t know in Spotify, but I keep Apple Music around because of its exclusives, colorful interface, and system integrations. I’ll write about this eventually.

One of the design decisions I couldn’t stand in the Spotify app for iPhone was its hamburger button and hidden menu that required far too many swipes and taps to navigate in the app. Interacting with the menu was slow, getting search to open quickly never worked, and it epitomized many of the reasons why several companies (including Apple) have been advising against using a hamburger menu with navigation hidden by default.

The good news today is that the classic tab bar is back in style at Spotify. Starting today, the company is rolling out a redesigned navigation experience on the iPhone (pictured above) with five tabs across the bottom – Home, Browse, Radio, Library, and Search in the middle.

There’s nothing exceptionally inventive about this design – it’s the good old tab bar you’ve known since the iPhone debuted nine years ago, with a docked mini player that’s highly reminiscent of Apple Music.

Hello tab bar, my old friend.

Hello tab bar, my old friend.

Everything old is new again, and, I have to say, I was looking forward to Spotify rolling out this design since I saw screenshots of an A/B test they ran a few weeks ago. While it was fun to experiment with various spins on the hamburger button for the past few years, I’ve seen several apps go back to a traditional tab bar design with navigation elements always shown. As it turns out, the tab bar is faster, it’s more intuitive, and it’s just more comfortable to reach on large displays.

The same applies for Spotify: navigating across sections is faster, and resetting a view to its initial state takes only a couple of taps (tap the tab bar icon to change view, and tap it again to go back to the initial screen). There are some instances in which a hamburger button with side menu makes sense, but I’m glad Spotify has gone back to a tab bar.

You can get the latest version of Spotify from the App Store. If you don’t see the tab bar yet and you’re based in one of the supported countries (I have an American Spotify account), try force-quitting and re-opening Spotify. That did the trick for me.

SongShift Eases the Transition From Spotify to Apple Music

When Apple Music debuted last summer I switched to it from Spotify. I wasn’t on Spotify all that long, but I did have a few playlists I wanted to take with me, including a big one with all the songs I had favorited. At the time, I found a script that logged into both services, tried to match the songs, and replicate the playlists on Apple Music. It worked reasonably well, but not great. SongShift automates that process. In my tests, SongShift did a solid job matching songs between Spotify and Apple Music, but because it is an import utility and not a sync service, it is a little cumbersome to use as a way to keep up with playlists you follow on Spotify that are frequently updated.

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Spotify Adds Concert Recommendations→

Earlier this week, Spotify announced a feature I’ve long argued would make sense in Apple Music: concert recommendations powered by Songkick.

From the Songkick blog:

As of today, you can now view a personalised list of recommended shows from right inside your Spotify app on iPhone and Android, and in just a few taps purchase tickets seamlessly through Songkick.

Based on the artists you’ve been listening to, the Concerts feature will surface upcoming Songkick events for your favorite bands, as well as undiscovered acts that you’re destined to fall in love with.

Songkick is an excellent service I’ve been using for years to stay on top of concert announcements by my favorite artists. The service works by scanning your music library and external accounts to look for music you listen to. It makes perfect sense to combine this with a streaming service on a smartphone. I still believe concert recommendations would make for a solid addition to Apple Music’s Connect in the future.

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IFTTT Launches Spotify Channel→

This is an interesting idea by IFTTT: a Spotify channel to create automated recipes for the music service so you can connect it to other apps. Triggers include new saved tracks and tracks added to a playlist (the same are available as actions). I haven’t kept my Spotify account since switching to Apple Music, but this is the kind of integration that likely won’t ever come to Apple’s service, and it seems like you can create some pretty cool recipes with it. Worth checking out if you’re a Spotify user and are into web automation.

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Spotify Launches ‘Discover Weekly’ Personalized Playlists→

The personalized playlist game is heating up after the launch of Apple Music. Spotify has announced Discover Weekly today, a personalized playlist that will be sent to users every Monday morning with a selection of deep cuts and new discoveries based on listening history and other users’ listening sessions.

From the press release:

For the first time ever, we’re combining your personal taste in music with what similar fans are enjoying right now. This means every song in Discover Weekly is based both on your own listening as well as what others are playlisting and listening to around the songs you love - making your playlist completely unique and full of deep cuts and new discoveries.

It’s like having your best friend make you a personalized mixtape every single week.

As your music taste evolves, so will Discover Weekly. In fact, the more you listen, the better it gets. And because it’s a playlist you can access and listen to it across all your platforms and devices. Plus, sharing it with friends or making it available offline for your Monday commute is super easy.

Dan Seifert was able to try Discover Weekly for The Verge:

I had a chance to check out the Discover Weekly playlist ahead of launch. It served up 30 tracks totaling almost two and a half hours of music that ranged from dad rock, to sad rock, to hipper chillwave tracks. Some of the artists were ones that I’m closely familiar with, while others were complete unknowns to me. But all of the songs were new to me, either completely so or different versions of songs I’d heard before. From my experience, Discover Weekly fulfilled its mission of delivering songs I hadn’t heard before, but would likely enjoy.

This seems like a good idea from Spotify given their tech and expertise in algorithmic recommendations, especially because it doesn’t try to compete with Apple Music’s combined human-algorithmic approach of the For You section yet.

It’ll be interesting to see if Spotify will eventually expand editorial staff to deliver human-made picks and playlists, but until then they’re going to use algorithms and users to build personalized playlists. Not surprising and likely not as unique as Apple’s For You (my favorite part of the service), but probably a good option for Spotify right now.

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