Tired of your Discover Weekly sucking? Spotify thinks you are, which is why it’s making fundamental changes to how the algorithmic playlist operates (again), just a few short months after it told Business Insider something similar. Despite Spotify’s updates, it seems the issue has persisted — and is possibly worse than ever — with users reporting (via The Verge) the playlist dishing out the same songs again, with no real distinction between genres.
Spotify ups its Weekly Discovery game
As Discover Weekly turns ten, it’s clear that Spotify is committed to making it suck less. According to the company, the playlist has garnered more than 100 billion streams in the decade since it launched, and it’d like to keep those numbers rolling in. As such, it’s introducing a refreshed look for the playlist and, more importantly, offering listeners a way to “guide the vibe”.
It’ll do so with five new genre buttons at the top of Discover Weekly, determined based on your listening history. Clicking one will update the playlist with 30 fresh tracks, effectively taking the number of tracks delivered per week to 180, up from 30. Spotify says these updates are starting today, and “rolling out on mobile over the coming weeks.” Spotify says these are coming to Premium users first, before coming to all listeners eventually.
For all Spotify’s talk of the update rolling out to mobile devices in the coming weeks, our Android smartphone already has the update, while the desktop app is still awaiting the change. Perhaps it still needs refining, however. Our personalised genres included some fairly vague suggestions like ‘Hip Hop’ and ‘Rock’, but also lost the plot a little with ‘Christian Hip-Hop‘ and ‘Baroque Pop’.
