July 30 is International Friendship Day, and Spotify is using the excuse to drop a brand new algorithmic playlist based on your friends’ listening. Available for most users (presumably if Spotify has enough data to confidently curate it), the Friends Mix uses popular listening amongst your friends on Spotify to spin up a regularly updated playlist that recommends new music similar to what you and your friends like.
This new playlist will follow a similar formula as other algorithmic offerings like the Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and Daily Mix playlists that listeners have loved for years. Now, instead of just curated music based on your listening habits, Spotify is aiming to factor in music and genres your friends love to further widen the net.
This approach to curated playlisting makes sense, as music is such a natural connection point for friendships. In fact, according to Spotify, 11 million user playlists on the platform to date have the word “friend” in the title — with Gen Z listeners hitting play on these friend-titled lists the most.
Collaborative playlists have been a very popular way for friends on the platform to merge their musical tastes, but it’s an inherently manual process, like creating a giant mixtape. It looks like Spotify is trying to make that process a lot easier with new, automatic playlists that are nonetheless personalized based on your friends’ activity.
Friends Mix comes on the heels of a recent product Spotify dropped called Blend, a playlist generator that prompts listeners to choose one single friend for Spotify to generate a one-off playlist based on your and their collective music tastes. Friends Mix aims to be more automatic, and will presumably be edited on a regular basis as your and your friends’ music tastes evolve.
The new Friends Mix will start rolling out on Spotify accounts starting July 30 for International Friendship Day. Spotify notes that it may not be available automatically, which we can assume is a product of listeners who aren’t connected to a lot of friends on the platform. If this is you, give Spotify Blend a try to get in on the fraternal listening.
