Spotify Discover Weekly turns 10 with new controls for fine-tuning your music finds

Spotify has announced that its Discover Weekly playlist feature is now 10 years old and to celebrate, it's rolling out genre-based controls for Premium members. The Swedish company said that Discover Weekly has led to the streaming of a massive 100 billion tracks since launch. It has helped people find new artists 56 million times, and 77% of those times it was the discovery of an emerging artist.

Discover Weekly is a personalized playlist generated for users every Monday consisting of around 30 songs tailored to your music taste. It takes your own listening habits and the listening habits of others with similar tastes to pull together a list of songs for you to play that week. It has inspired Spotify to launch similar personalized playlists including Release Radar, Blend, daylist, DJ, and AI Playlist.

To celebrate 10 years since launch, Spotify has upgraded Discover Weekly with a refreshed look, choosing to go with a vibrant new design that reflects its “ever-evolving nature and the dynamic energy of weekly discovery”. Not only that, but Premium members on mobile will notice new controls at the top of their playlist to “guide the vibe”.

This feature will let you pick from up to five genre options chosen based on your listening history. Once you pick, you’ll get a new 30-track playlist inspired by your selection. While this feature will only be for Premium members at first, the company is planning to expand it to more listeners soon.

Spotify shared some data related to Discover Weekly, it said that the artists reaching the most users were BL3SS, Djo, Goldford, Lola Young, and Mark Ambor. The cities with the most discoveries were New York, London, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin, Chicago, Sydney, Paris, Warsaw, and Istanbul.

The streaming platform also said that Discover Weekly was helping relatively unknown genres increase in popularity such as: Amapiano, Corridos, Brooklyn drill, Piseiro, Folk Pop, Hyperpop, Jazz House, and V-pop.

With more and more people opting for services like Spotify over radio, automatic playlists like Discover Weekly play an important role in discovering new music as they give users more options than just searching for artists and songs they’re already familiar with. Unlike radio, Spotify can better find music people might like through the power of algorithms.