Spotify's successor to Discover Weekly wants to help you find new music every Friday
The successor to Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist is here. It's called Release Radar, and it's just for newly released music.
Every Friday, Spotify will update the personalized playlist for each of its users. While algorithmically powered like Discover Weekly, Release Radar serves a different purpose: It's intended to surface "can't miss releases by the artists you love," the company says.
"With the huge amount of new music released every week, it can be difficult to keep up with the latest tracks," Spotify's Matt Ogle, who leads the development of Discover Weekly, said in a statement. "With Release Radar, we wanted to create the simplest way for you to find all the newly released music that matters the most to you, in one playlist."
He described Release Radar as a "mix" of new singles from the artists Spotify knows you listen to and from ones you might not have heard before. Spotify's audio research team in New York City is also using deep learning techniques to analyze the audio and determine which specific songs from a new album or EP you would like most.
You can save any song from Release Radar and Discover Weekly to your music collection, but you can't currently remove songs you don't like - but that's something Spotify is working on.
"We want to make it easier for you to tell us that you don't like an artist that's been featured," Newett said.
Spotify sees Release Radar as a complement to Discover Weekly, which is intended to be a "modern mixtape" of old and new music from artists you've never listened to before.
The format clearly works: People have streamed over 5 billion songs from Discover Weekly. "We're looking at it as the gold standard for these personalized playlists," Newett said.