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.

The year is about to end, and as usual Spotify has launched a Year in Music microsite for global and personal trends.

The global stats are cool, but largely unsurprising. What I really like is the breakdown of your personal listening habits by genre, artist, day of the week, season, and more. You can even see the split between desktop and mobile device streaming, and, if you’re a Premium subscriber, the location of your favorite artists on a chart.

I’m a big fan of Spotify’s use of data to improve algorithms, and this is another nice experiment. If you’re into this kind of visualizations, I also recommend the excellent Exist.io service, which supports Spotify (and many other wearable devices/apps).

As for my top songs:

Death Cab for Cutie and Tegan and Sara? Looks about right.

Spotify knows what time of day users listen to certain songs, and in many cases their location, so programmers can infer what they are probably doing—studying, exercising, driving to work. Brian Whitman, an Echo Nest co-founder, told me that programmers also hope to learn more about listeners by factoring in data such as “what the weather is like, what your relationship status is now on Facebook.” (In 2011, Facebook entered into a partnership with Spotify.) He added, “We’ve cracked the nut as far as knowing as much about the music as we possibly can automatically, and we see the next frontier as knowing as much as we possibly can about the listener.”

John Seabrook’s article on Spotify for The New Yorker is a good one. A lot of interesting details about the company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, and the way they make deals with labels.

I remember trying Spotify many years ago with a fake UK account and telling my girlfriend that it was incredible and the future of music was going to be streaming. In the years I’ve spent jumping between music streaming services, I’ve kept an eye on Spotify and their marketing efforts, which the article doesn’t mention (all my friends in Italy know what Spotify is; my mom uses it).

I’ve recently started using Spotify again as my main streaming service because of its solid iPad app and new Family accounts. I am, however, excited to see what Apple does with Beats Music. I don’t know if the entire music industry will embrace streaming eventually, but the future is definitely interesting.

From the Spotify blog:

Are you currently sharing your Spotify account with the entire family? Want to keep your 60s soul classics playlist separate from your kids’ Frozen soundtrack and save money in the process?

Well, great news! With Spotify Family you can now invite up to four family members and share one billing account whilst keeping your listening history, recommendations and playlists completely separate.

Family subscriptions were one of the main reasons my girlfriend and I used Rdio with a family account. Now, we’ll be able to give Spotify a try and see if it works better for her (understandably, she doesn’t care about trying every single streaming service like I do) – and plans will also be cheaper for two users (Rdio starts at $17.99 for two members, Spotify Family will be $14.99).

Spotify Family subscriptions will be available soon.