If you, or anyone you know, has had a Spotify account registered outside South Africa, you’ve probably heard them enthuse about the ‘Discover Weekly’ feature that offers up a playlist of 30 tracks the service’s algorithm suspects you might like each Monday. Well, now those of us with local accounts can enjoy the feature, too.
Not sure what we’re on about, and still living in mp3-land? Spotify is an online music service that not only gives you access to millions of tracks (for a R60/month fee), but keeps track of the music you’re into and recommends new music based on previous listening activity. Sure, Apple Music and Deezer do similar, but in our experience, Spotify does it best.
The (all-too familiar in the Stuff Office) Daily Mixes are a half dozen playlists of tracks Spotify thinks you’ll like, loosely grouped by genre. Some will be tracks you know, some will be fresh finds. Discover Weekly differs in that it is a custom-made, 30-song playlist of recommended songs. These can be old tracks or new ones, all bets are off.
Paid Spotify users (there’s a free tier too) will receive a Discover Weekly playlist automatically every week. They will take a few things into account when compiling your Discover playlist — your listening habits, the playlists you have created, the tracks you’ve skipped or loved, and how frequently you listen to Drake. Yeah, Spotify’s come in for some heat for recommended Drake so aggressively some users have complained it constitutes advertising even though they’re paying for what’s meant to be an ad-free service once you cough up the monthly subscription.
Discover Weekly will also include tracks based on tracks other people who have the same (possibly odd) musical taste as you do have added to their playlists. It’s a great way to find new music, and one of our favourite features of the service.
The playlist will update every week, so you won’t grow bored of listening to the same Drake tracks over, and over, and over. Closely related to Discover Weekly (which arrives on Monday) is the Release Radar playlist (which arrives every Friday). Release Radar consists of 30 new releases from artists you’ve indicated to Spotify you like via your listening habits. It won’t always be 30 new songs, as it depends how much new material has come out in the previous week, and we find it more hit-and-miss than Discover, but it’s still cool.
Spotify is available on all devices, including iOS and Android, and if you’re new to the Spotify squad, have a look at our guide on how to get the most out of it.
