Tag: music discovery

4 Tips To Supercharge Your Discovery on Spotify in 2025

January 22, 2025

Personalized listening is key to unlocking your perfect soundtrack for 2025. It’s about more than just hearing your favorites, and at Spotify, we want to help you discover new artists and tracks we think you’ll love based on how you listen.

Every day we connect millions of listeners with their favorite artists, powering nearly 2 billion music discoveries every 24 hours. And we’re constantly innovating to make this experience even easier and more enjoyable.

Discovering new music can come in many forms depending on your familiarity with different artists and genres, or even how you use Spotify playlists and features. From algorithmically personalized to expertly curated by our editors—and even synergistic blends that unite the best of both—we have playlists for every mood, moment, or discovery need.

We’ve curated some essential Spotify tips to help you find your next favorite track or artist.

Find your daily dose of discovery.

If you’re looking to seamlessly blend your favorite tracks with new and exciting sounds, head to the Made for You hub and try out some personalized playlists like daylist or Mixes. daylist, which is available globally to both Free and Premium users, will perfectly soundtrack your day, updating frequently and evolving with your listening habits to offer more opportunities to discover new artists.

Get your weekly fix.

Ready to step outside your comfort zone? Try Discover Weekly. Every Monday, discover 30 new tracks tailored to your taste. This personalized playlist is filled with new music we think you’ll love—blending songs you might have missed over the years with recent releases. It’s an easy way to find artists and genres that are similar to what you’ve been listening to lately.

Stay ahead of the curve.

Spotify offers a variety of curated playlists from our team of global editorial experts—like New Music Friday or Fresh Finds—each providing a great way to discover emerging artists and different genres. These playlists help you stay in tune with the latest trends and find what’s next in music. And once you discover a new artist, check out Release Radar, a personalized playlist that keeps you updated on your favorite artists’ new releases.

Supercharge your recommendations.

Want even more personalized discovery? Engaging with Spotify helps fine-tune your recommendations. Liking songs, following artists, and saving tracks to your playlists all provide signals that help us understand your taste, leading to even better discoveries and more relevant recommendations. Explore genre hubs, artist pages, and our expert-curated playlists to further expand and refine your musical journey.

This year, make musical exploration a priority. Who knows? Your next favorite artist might be just a tap away.

AI Playlist Is Rolling Out in Beta in the US, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand—Get Started With These Pro Tips

September 24, 2024

In April, Spotify introduced AI Playlist in beta, providing our Premium subscribers in the U.K. and Australia with another tool to fuel discovery and music curation. Now we’re expanding the feature, giving more users another opportunity to express themselves through the music they love. Starting today, AI Playlist in English is rolling out in beta to Premium users on Android and iOS devices in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.

AI Playlist combines Spotify’s powerful personalization technology with generative AI so users can turn their most creative ideas into playlists. Whether you’re totally new to the game or a prolific playlist creator, this feature offers a fun, easy way to create and curate that perfect musical mix, just for you.

Playlists on Spotify are hotbeds for discovery, fostering deep relationships between artists and fans. In fact, there are over 22 billion new artist discoveries a month on Spotify, with two billion of these turning into more lasting connections between fans and artists.

It didn’t take long for AI Playlist to make its mark after launching in the U.K. and Australia—to date, users have created millions of playlists that they keep coming back to. With AI Playlist, you can flex your creative muscles, crafting the ideal vibe for any particular moment or mood.

The magic of AI Playlist

Creating a playlist with AI Playlist is as easy as entering a unique prompt into the chat, like “upbeat pop music for my European summer vacation” or “a romantic playlist for date night at home.” Spotify will then offer a personalized selection of songs that match the vibe you’re going for, which you can revise and refine by typing in additional prompts.

The more specific you can be, the better. The most successful playlists are generated with prompts that contain a mix of genres, moods, artists, or decades, so get creative! You can also reference places, animals, activities, movie characters, colors, and even emojis.

With AI Playlist hitting four new markets, For the Record asked a few of the Spotify bandmates behind the feature about the prompts they use to create the AI-powered soundtracks to their lives.

Frankie Shlain, On-Platform Marketing Lead

“I prompted AI Playlist to give me a playlist of rom-com soundtracks from the ’90s and ’00s, and it delivered! My playlist was made up of tracks from some of my favorite movies from back in the day, proving AI Playlist definitely understood the assignment.”

Erick Morales, Product Marketing Lead

“I went on holiday to Tulum, and as I was packing and preparing for my trip, I asked for chilled electronic music to manifest my dream life in the Caribbean. AI Playlist helped me create a Caribbean Dreams playlist with some pretty sweet music I had never listened to before, along with some personal favorites.”

Annabelle Rolland, Senior Data Scientist

“Prompt: ‘Give me some funky and upbeat songs to help me unpack my boxes in my new home.’ The resulting playlist was called Energized Unpacking Grooves, and I also created another playlist that day called Moving Day Melodies. We had just moved into our new home and I needed an upbeat playlist to give me some energy to unpack a mountain worth of boxes!”

Renato Gamboa, Senior iOS Engineer

“Driving through the desert roads of Joshua Tree National Park in California was an unforgettable experience. To relive those magical moments, I used the prompt, ‘Desert house music for driving through Joshua Tree.’ I knew AI Playlist nailed it when it suggested some of my favorite tracks. Wanting to hear some fresh desert house tracks, I refined my prompt to include only tracks released within the last month. Now I’m back on those desert drives with brand-new hits, making the journey feel even more special!”

Get started with AI Playlist

Head to the Spotify mobile app and search “AI Playlist” to bring up the feature. You can also select “Your Library” at the bottom-right corner of your screen, and from there, tap the “+” button at the top-right corner and select “AI Playlist.”

- Next, select one of the suggested prompts or type your own. Remember, get creative and be specific!
- Just like that, Spotify will curate a personalized playlist featuring the tracks, artists, and genres we think you’ll like.
- From there, you can easily manage the selection of songs by previewing and deleting tracks, or ask Spotify to refine the playlist with additional prompts.
- Tap “Create,” and your new playlist will be saved automatically in Your Library.

While AI Playlist is designed to be fun, this feature is still in beta and won’t produce results for non-music-related prompts, like current events or specific brands. We also have measures in place around prompts that are offensive, so please prompt responsibly.

With this expansion, we’re excited to bring AI Playlist to more users so they can express themselves in creative ways and explore new music. We’ll keep iterating and innovating on this experience to better serve our listeners, so stay tuned for so much more to come.

Spotify To Acquire Music Trivia Sensation Heardle

July 12, 2022

Listen to this story read aloud in 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

If you love that you can recognize hundreds of songs within a few opening bars, you’re not alone. Passion for music runs deep—and so does showing off those skills in musical trivia. Millions do just that with Heardle, a daily music game. And at Spotify, we love all things music—and all things music trivia—which is why we’re excited to announce that the beloved interactive music trivia game will be joining Spotify.

We see Heardle as more than a trivia game: It’s also a tool for musical discovery. Playing Heardle might just help you to rediscover old tracks you may have thought you’d forgotten, discover amazing new artists, or finally put a title to that wordless melody you’ve had caught in your head forever.

Heardle is a simple but endlessly challenging game. Players are tasked with guessing a song based on its opening notes. They get six guesses, with each hint giving a few more seconds of music to inform their next answer. Ultimately, they get a chance to discover the song in its entirety, whether or not they guessed it correctly.

“We are always looking for innovative and playful ways to enhance music discovery and help artists reach new fans,” commented Jeremy Erlich, Global Head of Music, Spotify. “Heardle has proven to be a really fun way to connect millions of fans with songs they know and love and with new songs . . . and a way to compete with their friends as to who has the best musical knowledge. Since its debut, the game has quickly built a loyal following, and it aligns with our plans to deepen interactivity across the Spotify ecosystem.”

For existing Heardle players, the look and feel of the game will stay the same, and it’ll remain free to play for everyone. And effective today, players can listen to the full song on Spotify at the end of the game.

Looking ahead, there are some exciting opportunities to come. Today, we’re starting with users in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And soon, hundreds of millions more people around the world will have the opportunity to play and enjoy the game in their native language. Further down the road, we are also planning to integrate Heardle and other interactive experiences more fully into Spotify to allow music lovers to connect more deeply with artists and challenge friends—and have some fun in the process.

Spotify Listeners are Discovering Music from Around the World

December 18, 2019

Every day, Spotify users discover a song, artist, or genre from outside their home countries. Whether that’s through their Discover Weekly, a friend’s recommendation, or another Spotify-curated playlist, folks are stepping outside of their comfort zones to get to know artists from a different place. These songs and artists can take listeners to another world—metaphorically. Music is a great connector that allows us to understand and experience a life or culture beyond our own.

We’ve found that over 60% of Spotify users discovered an artist from a country outside their own within the last 28 days. So just imagine what they’ve uncovered over the course of a few months, or even the year. That’s a world of travel and learning—sans passport.

On For the Record this year, we’ve also explored artists and genres from around the world, taking note of the songs and styles that have crossed borders. Hear from some of the artists, musicians, and experts we spoke to below.

The Viral Mexican Artist Making Music Worth Crying Over

Ed Maverick, who comes from the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico, didn’t grow up in a musical family but learned to play guitar by watching videos and playing in norteño groups—(norteño is a genre of music popular in the region he comes from)—throughout middle school. His style evolved through playing covers of songs by his favorite bands, such as those by Mexican indie rockers Little Jesus. But neither style of music suited what he wanted to do, so he decided to strike out on his own; he eventually started composing his own songs. “I felt the need to release what was going on in my mind,” he said.

Indigenous Australian Rapper Briggs Shares Message of Triumph through Music

“Shepparton has the largest indigenous population in Victoria outside of Melbourne. It also has the largest indigenous population in Victoria per capita. So there was always a presence, and it was always just a part of us and what we did and still do. We just operated as artists and rappers. You don’t really realize how different you are until it’s presented to you.” – Briggs

Santiago, Chile: Spotify’s Streaming Capital of Reggaetón

“What we are seeing with reggaetón in Chile is a great testimony to the absolute powerhouse that is Latin America when it comes to building and delivering audiences for Latin artists,” said Mia Nygren, Managing Director for Spotify in Latin America.

Meet Rich Brian, the Indonesian Rapper Performing at Spotify On Stage Jakarta

“A lot of things influence my sound, from listening to traditional Indonesian music to the stuff I listened to while spending full days on the internet making videos. Living internationally definitely influenced my attitude towards everything positively. I’m very grateful for everything that I have now, and things just never get old for me—each new experience feels like a blessing.” – Rich Brian

Charting the Meteoric Rise of South Africa’s AmaPiano

“I was fortunate to see the impact of kwaito music and what it meant for the then-young democracy that South Africa was. It became the voice of local youth to push for systematic change and fight the exclusion of the marginalized. I can’t help but think that AmaPiano is doing just that so far for this generation of young South Africans, and I can’t wait to see how many more boundaries it’ll break.” – Da Kruk

How Americana Troubadour Garrett T. Capps Went Worldwide

The European market has been turned on to Capps’s quirky brand of country too. “According to my statistics on Spotify, it seems like a lot of people in the Netherlands and Spain are discovering my music through the program,” he says. “And I’m excited to keep writing and finding ways to reach audiences.” – Garrett T. Capps

Lukas Graham Becomes First Danish Artist to Hit 1 Billion Streams for a Single Song

“I’m not sure if it’s too much to call ourselves the Arctic Monkeys of Spotify. I feel like our international breakthrough came about because of Spotify—the way streams in the Nordics and Germany pushed an unknown act into the global top 50 with a song that wasn’t available outside of the Nordics and GSA. It was a trippy ride, and luckily we’ve landed on the other side without losing our minds.” – Lukas Graham

Meet Tones and I, the Australian Ex-Busker Who Achieved a Global Hit Thanks to Streaming

In the span of just a year, Toni Watson has leapfrogged from working retail to busking full time to topping the charts in almost a dozen countries—including her native Australia. That’s all thanks to “Dance Monkey,” the viral smash that was the second-ever single for the artist best known as Tones And I.

Colter Wall Honors His Western Roots on Songs of the Plains

Nobody ever needed to explain western wear to Wall, who was raised in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada. “It’s predominantly cattle country,” he shares. “My last full-time gig I had before I started playing music for a living was working cows with my cousin on a thousand-head cattle ranch.”

How Spotify Helped Cigarettes After Sex Amass an International Audience

Since the release of Cry, Cigarettes After Sex’s momentum has continued to snowball; the band is now closing in on 4.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. They’re also continuing to find success in new territories. Within a month of Spotify’s February 2019 launch in India, the country leapt into Cigarettes After Sex’s top ten markets. This popularity translated offline: In May, when the band announced two late-July Mumbai shows via a local promoter’s mailing list, they drew 30,000 sign-ups within just a few hours, causing the list to shut down.

Take a listen to Spotify’s Global Top 50 for the songs rocking the international charts.