The Spotify Discover Weekly and Release Radar Algorithm Explained

In a world full of Apple Musics, Pandoras, and Soundclouds, one app arguably reigns far above the rest: Spotify. Any true music guru knows that Spotify is the best streaming platform for finding new music. A large part of the company’s success can be attributed to their incredible algorithmic playlists Discover Weekly and Release Radar. Both features are automatically created for each user by Spotify’s own software, providing you new music every week that is perfectly tailored to your listening style. But how exactly does this algorithm know just the right tune to play? Well, we’re here to explain the way Discover Weekly and Release Radar filter music so that you can get the most out of your next Spotify listening experience.

WHAT IS AN ALGORITHMIC PLAYLIST?

To briefly summarize, algorithmic playlists are music devices that track a wide range of listening habits to compile the songs that are best fit for you. These habits can include artists/albums/tracks a user likes, shares, saves to their playlists, and even skips.

Spotify’s algorithm is an AI system known as BART. Basically, BART’s job is to keep listeners listening. And it does so by playing and suggesting songs it knows the user is familiar with while dropping in some fresh tracks it thinks they might like, but most importantly, haven’t heard before. This method keeps listeners connected to the platform, listening to music they like but not getting annoyed.

The BART algorithm also looks at the listening habits of other similar users to provide song recommendations. For example, let’s assume User A has similar listening habits (artists, songs, times of listening, etc) to User B. If User A starts listening to a new song, that User B hasn’t yet, the Algorithm will add this new song to one of Spotify User B’s algorithmic playlists.

Here is some other data that Spotify analyzes:

• Raw audio analysis: It detects the vibration or the mood of the audio of a song, deciding if it is happy, heavy, relaxed, instrumental, or minimal, among others.
• Natural language processing: It analyzes the language, lyrics, and content of the song.
• Collaborative filtering: When you compare new songs with the listeners’ current tastes, decide if that new song adapts to the listener’s habits.
• The listening time: When the listener exceeds 30 seconds in musical audio, it transforms this habit into further data of what you may like.
• Skip rate: Less skips on a song = more recommendations to other users.
• Playlist Features: Performs inclusion in all personal, official, and independent playlists.

So yes, Spotify is always listening and learning. But it’s alright, because we wouldn’t have these incredible playlists if it didn’t!

DISCOVER WEEKLY

While Spotify has a handful of different algorithmic playlists, the most useful for finding music is arguably Discover Weekly. Discover Weekly is a weekly playlist that features both new music and older music, updating for each user every Monday. The main ingredient, it turns out, is other people. Spotify begins by looking at the 2 billion or so playlists created by its users — each one a reflection of some music fan’s tastes and styles. Those human selections and groupings of songs form the core of Discover Weekly’s recommendations.

But the recipe for your Discover Weekly playlist is even more complicated than that! Spotify also creates a profile of each user’s individualized taste in music, grouped into clusters of artists and micro-genres — not just “rock” and “rap” but even further detailed distinctions like “synthpop” and “southern soul.” These are derived using technology from Echo Nest, a music analytics firm that Spotify acquired in 2014, which learns about emerging genres by having machines read music sites and analyze how various artists are described.

RELEASE RADAR

Release Radar is another weekly playlist that’s updated every Friday and unique for every Spotify user. However, this playlist in particular features only music that has recently been released. But how does Spotify know if you’ll like a track that no one else has heard yet?

Well, since Release Radar is focused on music that hasn’t existed before now, the information used with playlist-building is of limited use. To make up for this blind spot, the science behind Release Radar makes greater use of acoustic analysis. And in recent years, these machines have gotten even better at hearing and understanding audio. In particular, this helps when determining if a newly release track will jibe with the taste of a given user. Also, it becomes especially helpful when the system is trying to select individual songs from an entire album that few people have heard before.

Now you may be thinking that the only difference between Discover weekly and Release radar is that one features only new music. And while yes, this is true, Release Radar never fails to do one thing better than Discover Weekly: offer practicality. For example, few of us have time to browse the list of new releases each week and pick out the names we recognize (let alone the artists with which we’re not yet familiar with).

It’s not as though I couldn’t have found each of these releases on my own, with only a tiny bit of effort. But Release Radar allows the work to be done for us, and all we are left to do is sit back, listen, and enjoy.

WHY THESE PLAYLISTS WORK

Clearly, there’s a never-ending list of reasons why Spotify’s Discover Weekly and Release radars are so great at finding us new tracks, but what is the one thing that keeps us coming back every week? Well, the answer consists of three words: power of habit.

Both playlists create what’s called a habit loop. The loop features three crucial parts: the routine, the cue, and the reward. In this case, the routine is listening to your refreshed playlist. The reward is the release of good hormones due to interesting new finds, and perhaps the social currency of sharing. Lastly, the cue, or trigger, is simply the day of the week that the playlist releases, providing the opportunity for new finds.

The day before the playlist recycles, another habit loop is triggered. To prevent losing newly discovered gems, users log on to save tracks from their playlists. Loss prevention is one of the strongest motivators. For Release Radar, in particular, Friday could not be a more perfect day. This is because your drive to listen is enhanced for two reasons: people have the weekend on their minds, and it’s the global release day for new music. In recent years, the hashtag #newmusicFriday has flooded social media and spurred people to listen only that much more.

TIPS FOR USING THESE PLAYLISTS

So while Spotify’s picks are definitely top tier, they still aren’t always perfect. If you’re looking to further shape your playlists, here are some ways you can use the algorithm to your advantage:

• Add songs you like to a playlist or your Spotify library. If you save a song to a playlist or your library and then start jamming on it on a regular basis, it will really influence what we understand about you.
• Skip the songs you don’t like. If users fast-forward within the first 30 seconds of a song, the Discover Weekly algorithm interprets that as a “thumbs-down” for that particular song and artist.
• Go down the rabbit hole on new artists and genres. If Spotify recommends you something and you click through to the artist and start exploring their discography, it will pick up on that as well. The more exploration and streams you do outside the playlists, the more likely you are to influence what is picked for you.
• Be patient. The algorithm is designed to ignore sharp, temporary spikes in new listening activity because many people share their Spotify logins, so any new listening activity may not result in an immediate change to your playlist.
• Use “private mode” if you don’t want Spotify to pay attention. If you’re doing a bit of unusual listening that you don’t want Spotify to take into account, hit the “private listening session” in settings.
• Some genres are mostly filtered out. Spotify does make some editorial decisions about what users are likely to want, so parents with young kids won’t get a million songs from The Wiggles, Christmas songs will mostly disappear after Dec. 25, and people who listen to rain forest soundtracks while they sleep don’t have their playlists swamped with “Afternoon Thunderstorms Vol. 2.
• Experiment with musical telepathy. Perhaps the best tip for getting more out of Spotify’s recommendations is to listen to other people’s Discovery Weekly playlists. Got a friend with great taste? Ask her to share a link to her playlist. They are private by default but can be shared by the user.
• Save your weekly playlists with IFTTT. One downside to Discover Weekly or Release Radar is that the playlist is wiped clean every Monday or Friday. You could save the songs into another playlist manually, or you can use the free IFTTT service to automatically save your weekly list into a separate archive playlist.
• Use Spotify’s “Radio” feature. If you want to hear some new sounds and absolutely can’t wait until Monday, right-click on Discovery Weekly and select “Start Playlist Radio.” The service will do its best to serve up an infinite list of songs in a similar vein to your weekly playlist.

Contributor: Sarah Kloboves