Today Spotify has launched two new personalized playlists that are designed to quickly serve up your favorite tunes, based on how often you’ve listened to them.
On Repeat takes a look at what you’ve been streaming over the last 30 days and auto-refreshes itself to be an up-to-the-minute, personalized top songs mixtape. Repeat Rewind is based on the same idea, but it digs deeper, looking for songs that you used to listen to a lot more than 30 days ago, but that have now dropped out of your regular rotation. It’s like having a music time machine that updates every five days. Spotify claims there will never be any duplication between these two new playlists, so each should offer a pretty distinct listening experience. The only thing we don’t know is the maximum number of tracks (if any) each list will contain.
Both new playlists focus exclusively on your most-listened-to songs and don’t take things like genre or artist into consideration. This makes them somewhat different than the rest of Spotify’s massive collection of playlists in that the emphasis isn’t on new music discovery, but rather a reminder of the music you’ve already discovered and fallen in love with.
Spotify knows that people love playlists. It also knows that some of its most popular playlist ideas, like Discovery Weekly, are proving relatively easy for competitors to copy. By creating new playlists that are personalized and auto-updated based on its subscribers’ listening habits, it’s making it that much harder for other music services to steal those subscribers away. Even if Apple Music or YouTube Music created their own versions of On Repeat and Repeat Rewind tomorrow, those playlists would effectively be empty for new subscribers until enough time (and listening) had passed for their algorithms to catch up. If you’ve been a Spotify member for a year or more, these playlists are now one of the easiest ways to get to the tunes you love the most — and that kind of convenience can’t be easily dismissed.
Spotify offers several paid subscription options, as well as a free, ad-supported tier. It recently changed its free trial period to three months for all new subscribers.
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