Here's what's next for Discover Weekly, Spotify's most loved feature
It's safe to say that Spotify's Discover Weekly is a bonafide success.
Spotify users have streamed 5 billion songs from their Discover Weekly playlists to date, the company announced on Wednesday. And 40 million of Spotify's over 100 million users have tried Discover Weekly at least once since it was made available last July.
If you've never tried Discover Weekly, think of it as a modern day mixtape that's personalized for every single Spotify user. The algorithmically-powered playlist is updated once a week with songs Spotify thinks you'll want to hear based on your listening habits.
Here are some interesting stats on how people use Discover Weekly that Spotify shared with Tech Insider:
- Over half of Discover Weekly users listen each week, and over half of those people listen to at least 10 tracks.
- The most popular age demographic for Discover Weekly listeners is late 20s to early 30s.
- The most popular genres of music in Discover Weekly are electronic pop, indie pop, and "Indietronica."
- Peak streaming for Discover Weekly occurs between 8 and 9 a.m. in the United States and at 5 p.m. in Spotify's home country of Sweden.
- Over 8,000 artists on Spotify are getting more than half of their listening through Discover Weekly alone. That suggests Discover Weekly is surfacing many lesser-known artists people wouldn't have discovered otherwise.
What's next for Discover Weekly
Spotify
There are two common requests for Discover Weekly that Spotify has been hearing about from its users. The first is the ability to save an entire week's Discover Weekly playlist to one's Spotify library. The second feature request has been the ability to give feedback on tracks one doesn't like in his or her Discover Weekly playlist.
While lead Spotify engineer Ed Newett wouldn't confirm any new features coming to Discover Weekly, he did tell TI that "those are things that we're looking at in the very near future."
Newett said that his team has been working on scaling Spotify's infrastructure to allow for the possibility of updating Discover Weekly more than once a week and offering more personalized playlists based on the same technology. "Now we're at a position where that's possible," he said.
He suggested that the same model Discover Weekly uses to surface music you may like could be used to show you new music releases every week, like a personalized Billboard Hot 100 Chart.