When Spotify launched Discover Weekly – personalised playlists to help paying subscribers find new music – in July 2015, it seemed like pure witchcraft. How did it seem to know my tastes so well?
Listening to my bespoke mixtape on a Monday morning soon became part of my weekly routine in the same way that I put the bins out every Sunday night – and judging by the stats recently released by Spotify, I’m not the only one.
The numbers are massive. More than 100 billion tracks have been streamed from Discover Weekly playlists since it launched, with Spotify claiming that there are more than 56 million new artist discoveries every week. That seems very hard to quantify – what counts as a 'discovery?' – but other stats do seem more instructive.
More than 556 million tracks a year are saved to playlists from Discover Weekly, and two million times a week someone streams the same new artist twice. Of course, a couple of listens doesn’t make a super-fan, but it at least suggests there’s something there that they liked the sound of.
Archives of gain
I have my own data to back up Discover Weekly’s impact on my listening. I’ve been using it pretty much since day one, and from those 520-odd playlists I’ve saved 904 tracks to my own ‘Discover Weekly Archive’.
Some weeks I’ll save nothing at all; others three or four tracks will make it into this holding pen of tracks I want to investigate further. And while a lot of them don’t make it past a second listen, some stick around much longer.
Without Discover Weekly I might never have stumbled across Toronto-based punk band Pup (pictured above), whose track Guilt Trip found its way onto my playlist back in August 2015; I may never have been stopped in my tracks by the disarming simplicity of Joanna Sternberg’s For You, whose album Then I Try Some More is a real hidden gem; and Boston’s constantly evolving Pile might have remained completely unknown to me rather than becoming one of my favourite bands of the past decade.
Making these discoveries has led me to go out and see these bands and many others live when they tour – an increasingly essential way of supporting them in a world where streaming has decimated artists’ earnings from their recorded output. And don’t worry, the irony of that cause and effect is not lost on me.
Spotify says that 77 per cent of artists found through Discover Weekly are emerging acts at the start of their careers, so it’s also a great way of getting in on the ground floor and putting yourself in a position to see bands playing small venues on their way up.
I’ve seen hardcore-punk trailblazers Turnstile play London’s tiny ULU thanks to Blue by You from their first album appearing on my Discover Weekly playlist way back in May 2016, while their next gig in the city will be to over 10,000 people (including me) at Alexandra Palace.
Having heard the twangy, Twin Peaks-esque Smoke Signals by Phoebe Bridgers one Monday morning in March 2017, I spent the next 12 months waiting for her to come to the UK, and was rewarded by two small gigs in the space of just three months – first at Islington’s Assembly Hall, and then at the Scala in King’s Cross.
When she returned in 2022, it was for four consecutive nights at the much larger Brixton Academy. I still went along.
A kind of magic
Even after a decade of using it, Discover Weekly still feels a bit like magic to me – and that’s despite knowing exactly how it works.
A few months after it launched, I interviewed the man at Spotify responsible for its conception, Matthew Ogle. He explained how the algorithm essentially cross-references your tastes with those of other people who like the same kind of stuff, before populating your playlist with similar songs it thinks you haven't heard.
Any you add to your 'Liked' songs or save to another playlist will be noted and used to build up a picture of your musical preferences.
As somebody who doesn’t listen to the radio, Discover Weekly quickly became my main way of hearing new music, and the science behind it was backed up by real successes; I had new favourite bands to prove it worked.
As well as the new bands mentioned above it has also led me to a whole bunch of tracks I love by bands that I don’t – Meanwhile... by Gorillaz (above), Feeling Like I Do by Superdrag, Who Knew? by Disclosure – and unearthed deep cuts by bands that I do, including Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel’s cover of I Love How You Love Me, My Kung Fu by an early Mos Def project called Urban Thermo Dynamics, and a few songs Biffy Clyro did for the soundtrack to a 2019 film called Balance, Not Symmetry.
It feels like an increasingly rare example of ‘The Algorithm’ being a force for good. So much of what we consume online now is dictated by these mysterious behind-the-scenes forces that pick and choose what we see without us knowing how or why.
So often it’s angry and divisive because that’s what creates clicks, but Discover Weekly has brought nothing but good things into my life, even if it has also cost me a fortune in gig tickets.
How much is too much?
To mark its 10th birthday, Spotify has added a new feature to its mobile app that essentially gives you multiple different Discover Weekly playlists each week: a main one and five others sorted by genre. I get pop, hip-hop, rock, dance and indie, but these will be different for each person.
I haven’t had much chance to explore it yet, but my initial reaction to the change is lukewarm. I liked the simplicity of Discover Weekly’s set menu of 30 songs, which Ogle told me was a number they had settled on originally because it felt “human and approachable”.
Having 150 more to choose from now just seems overwhelming and intimidating, but as the majority of my listening is via the desktop app I can pretend the rest don’t exist (at least for now).
My other concern is that all this extra choice will dilute how effective it is at making recommendations. Throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will eventually stick, but this just feels like a lazy way of trying to get people to use the app more. Given the numbers quoted at the top of this piece, that doesn’t seem necessary at all.
I still love Discover Weekly. Hopefully I’ll still be able to say that in another 10 years.
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