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Spotify Feature Update: Personal Friday Playlist Release Radar To Finally Beat Apple Music?

Michael Finn
First Posted: Aug 09, 2016 05:35 AM EDT

Spotify's new playlist is releasing a new feature to suit a user's personalized taste. While a weekly playlist called Discover Weekly is set to be released gathered from new albums, Release Radar is scheduled every Friday with a two-hour length playlist. 

Spotify's engineering manager Edward Newett who is  in-charge of Release Radar says that when a new album drops, they do not have much information about it yet, so they do not have any playlisting data. These are the two major components that make Discover Weekly function well. Discover Weekly tracks the last six months to suit your taste then provide suggestions.

Release Radar, on the other hand, has a different approach. The Release Radar feature will get a user's entire listening history, then provide suggestions of playlist that have been released in the previous two to three weeks. It is  trying to do more not just highlighting new songs but suggesting new bands. Although this is deemed difficult because new songs are not often categorized yet, with Spotify's deep learning algorithms, they are now capable of assessing songs quickly in a massive scale.

Newett said that Spotify has an audio research team in New York that has been experimenting a lot of newer deep learning techniques like looking at the actual audio itself. They do not just experiment by playlisting and collaborative filtering of users. Spotify's engineering manager Newett also said that it is a bit like what Pandora did. He thought that they are more able to be benefited on the new deep learning usage. He added that the new deep learning can automate some ways in learning more about a particular music that is similar to other musics by just simply looking at various audio signatures, the Verge reported.

Spotify is coming up with a strategy to beat Apple Music. It will be reflected at the top portion of a users' collection of playlists. The format is reprotedly more friendly. It can easily be turned on and allowd users continue the same playlist instead of selecting another when each song ends, Techcrunch reported.

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