The world’s most popular genealogy company, last week, teamed with Spotify in hopes of answering a simple, albeit loaded question: “What is the sound of you?”
A partnership between Ancestry.com and Spotify still seems unlikely, but the gist of the value proposition is this: Plunk down $99 for the ancestryDNA program, mail in some of your saliva, and Ancestry not only paints a picture (figuratively speaking) of your heritage, but provides a soundtrack to accompany it thanks to Spotify.
What is the sound of you? AncestryDNA teamed up with @Spotify to give you a custom playlist based on your DNA.
All you need to do is log in to your Ancestry account and click Connect to Spotify: https://t.co/WfbwHMOYVr pic.twitter.com/dRiqK9Ucvd
— Ancestry (@Ancestry) September 20, 2018
So what is the sound of you? For some, it’ll be flamenco music, or maybe tribal fusion. Others will attempt to understand the intricacies of Mongolian throat singing. For me, I think my sound is something more akin to anxious nail biting with under-the-breath mutterings about deadlines or administrative tasks. Are there playlists for this?
“It’s so much more than the stats and the data and the records,”Vineet Mehra, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Ancestry told Quartz. “How do we help people experience their culture and not just read about it? Music seemed like an obvious way to do that.”
Mehra’s not wrong, but I’m still not sure what benefit this offers over just creating your own playlist.
There is a bit of a caveat, though. If you’re interested in sending off your DNA to be analyzed, you should know that you’re also agreeing to a “perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide license,” in which you give up some of the rights to your own DNA, in perpetuity, to Ancestry.com. So there’s that.
If you’d rather skip all the DNA-wrangling and legalese, you can generate a playlist without it here.
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