Discover Weekly, Spotify’s runaway hit that digs up music you’re likely to love, is inspiring what it’s building next: a bunch of new playlists that find the best new music on the service that nobody’s listening to yet.
A set of five new playlists under the ‘Fresh Finds’ moniker dig up undiscovered music in hip-hop, electronic, vocal pop, guitar driven and experimental genres. The overall playlist, Fresh Finds, combines every genre to create a 2-hour mix every week.
The feature taps into blogs and music news sites to spot new bands, as well as anonymous listening data on the service. That sounds a lot like how Hype Machine’s indie music discovery service works, which also monitors indie blogs to spot breakouts.
Spotify says it’ll be analyzing listening patterns from “music trendsetters” on its service to spot those golden undiscovered artists and uses that data to predict others as well.
From there, the service uses a combination of automation and human curation to create the ultimate mixes for each playlist that refreshes every Wednesday.
For its part, Spotify touts that it already used Fresh Finds to discover five of the artists that it’s invited to play at SXSW: TOTEM, Kacy Hill,
D.R.A.M, MUNA and Anderson .Paak.
Discover Weekly was one of the things that drew me back to Spotify, after a long stint using Google Play Music. It’s an unparalleled, friction free way to find new music and I’ve discovered a lot of great bands I’d never even heard of there.
Everyone’s able to get Fresh Finds today from within the browse section, but you’ll have to remember to save the tracks you like, just the same as with Discover Weekly or they’ll be lost when updated.
➤ Fresh Finds [Spotify]
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