Spotify remains the reigning king of music streaming services, but with increased pressure from Apple Music, the company is rapidly adding new features in order to keep its lead. The streaming service is known for its music discovery features like Discover Weekly and Release Radar, but it’s latest feature, Daily Mix, takes a different approach, building playlists based on songs you already know and love.
“With Daily Mix, we wanted to find a way to take the work out of playing and organizing daily listening,” the Spotify team wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “By offering consistently refreshed playlists of your favorite music with near-endless playback, you can hopefully spend less time maintaining playlists and more time enjoying the music that you love.”
Like many of Spotify’s playlist features, Daily Mix will get better as users listen to more music, as it learns based on your listening habits. The algorithm behind the Daily Mix playlists is similar to what’s behind Discover Weekly, only here the goal is to act as a radio station built just for you, playing songs you’re nearly guaranteed to love.
The new feature also takes a hint from the radio-style playback found in both Spotify and other services. If you don’t want to hear a particular song, you can “ban” the song and it won’t ever make its way to future playlists. On the other hand, if you hear a new song and fall in love, you can “heart” the song to add it to your collection.
Daily Mix is available for all Spotify users, whether you’re a subscriber or on the free plan, but there is a slight catch: in order for Daily Mix to work, users need to have built up a listening history. If you’re a new user, the Spotify team says that Daily Mix will become available after roughly two weeks of listening.
For the time being, Daily Mix is available in the Your Library section on the iOS and Android Spotify apps. The company says that the feature will come to other platforms soon.
