Spotify is today expanding its investment in personalization features with the start of dedicated in-app experience called Only You that focuses on your favorite music and listening habits. The experience is similar to Spotify’s popular annual review, Spotify Wrapped, in that it highlights the artists, songs, genres, and other aspects of your music listening experience that are important to you, which can then be shared on social media just like Wrapped. The company today also introduces Blend, a new way to create a personalized playlist with a friend.
The Only You hub will appear next to the existing Made for You hub on the search page in the Spotify app. In Made for You you’ll find your other personalized playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Daily Mixes and others like Your Time Capsule or Summer Rewind, as well as the recently added trio of playlist sets, Spotify Mixes.
From now until the end of the month, Only You will be a separate hub in the Spotify app, but ultimately it will be moved to the Made for You hub.
Credit: Spotify
The new Only You experience will help you discover new trends beyond what you might see in your personalized playlists. This includes “Your Audio Birth Chart” where the sun is the top artist you’ve heard over the past 6 months, Rising is your latest discovery, and the moon is an artist you hear showing your emotional side; Your Dream Dinner Party, where you pick 3 favorite artists for a custom, frequently updated Spotify mix of favorite songs and fresh tips; and “Your Artist Pairs,” which contains unique combinations you’ve heard recently, such as: B. cross-genre.
It also includes other personalized insights such as the different time periods of the music you have enjoyed, the music or podcasts you listen to what time of the day, as well as your favorite music genres and podcast topics.
For example, your “song year” shows how you’ve traveled through different time periods based on the tracks you’ve heard throughout the year. The first year that appears here is the year you streamed the most, while the second year that appears is the previous year of release that you heard. The third year is the last song year that was streamed.
To collect all of this data, Only You looks at your Spotify in-app listening experience over the past 6 months (Dec 2020 – May 2021). Users must have streamed 30 tracks from 5 different artists in the past 6 months to qualify for the new experience. Spotify says the data will not be used for advertising purposes. (And despite astrology’s association with months and years of birth, the Your Audio Birth Chart does not ask for the user’s year of birth to create this experience.)
Credit: Spotify
Another important part of the Only You campaign is the launch of Blend, which is currently in beta.
This feature is located on the “Made for Two” shelf in the Only You hub, so you can invite any other Spotify user to create a playlist with you. Using a similar mixing technology that powers Spotify’s Family Mix and Duo Mix in their respective plans, Blend lets you invite any other Spotify user (free user or paid subscriber) to blend their musical tastes with yours to create a curated playlist of songs create that you both like.
This playlist is updated daily and grows over time with users as their listening habits change, says Spotify.
Since Blend works with free accounts, Blend could encourage more users to try Spotify so that they can create a playlist with someone important other, best friend, family member, or other, even if they don’t have a common plan.
Credit: Spotify
Both the Only You experience and Blend build on the technology Spotify had already developed to support other features like wrapped and various mixed multi-user mixes rather than creating something entirely new. But the bigger message Spotify wants to get across here is that it is way ahead of the competition in terms of personalization features. Even if competitors fool their playlists, it wants to be a pioneer in terms of personalized music.
Of course that’s not always the case. The newer Spotify mixes, for example, looked a lot like a feature Pandora introduced years ago that created custom playlists for a range of attributes, including genre and mood. But where Spotify succeeds is in the continuous release of new personalization features as it works to tailor its app to the end user. This increases the cost of switching – that is, it makes it harder for users to switch to competing services because they have many custom playlists on hand.
Spotify will be heavily marketing the launch of Only You with a number of top artists by compiling stats for various fandoms including those for Harry Styles, Selena Gomez, Lil Nas X, Doja Cat, Justin Bieber, SZA, and others. The campaign runs until June 30th.