Spotify wasn’t built for discovery. The Swedish music streaming company realizes this and instead of trying to natively bake a zillion features into its service, it launched a platform for third party developers about a year ago.
Spotify’s app directory now features almost 60 HTML5-based add-ons for the service’s desktop client. These apps perform a lot of different functions – some are social, while others sonically augment album reviews from big name publishers. The thing for which they’re probably most useful is discovering music you might like but may never have heard otherwise.
Spotify apps for music discovery separates Spotify from other services like Pandora and all. To listen to Spotify, you need an account that can be created by linking your Facebook account. Once you install the Spotify app on your desktop or smartphone, you would have access to millions of songs. Spotify discover actually uses what’s known as an ensemble method—a collection of models of which collaborative filtering is a member of. “A big problem for collaborative filtering is what’s called the ‘cold start problem,’ which is when you’re starting a new product and you have no user data,” Ramadan said. Spotify Codes offer a brand new way for users to share and discover the amazing content on Spotify. It’s as easy as taking a picture. Learn How Enter a Spotify URI Find a Spotify URI by clicking 'Share' on any song, album, playlist, or profile on Spotify, and then clicking 'URI'. Discover Quickly provides a fast and easy way for you to preview the tracks in your Spotify-generated Discover Weekly playlist. Instead of needing to click on and listen to individual in the.
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1. Moodagent
Since launching on Spotify last year, Moodagent has been one of the most interesting apps on the platform. That’s because it takes standard algorithmic music recommendations and beefs them up with emotional intelligence.
Spotify Discover Weekly Reset
There are at least a dozen apps that let you build a playlist based on related artists, but Moodagent factors in the mood of each song to build out something that feels more consistent. The options look broad, but are surprisingly powerful. A playlist can be sensual, angry, happy, tender or some combination of all four. You can even base them on tempo, playing back a series of similarly paced songs. Tie these characteristics to the same kind of artist-to-artist matching algorithm that fuels so many other music-discovery apps, and you have a uniquely intelligent system for finding new music.
2. Last.fm
Last.fm has been around for a decade now, but the Internet radio and music recommendation service is still a reliable tool for discovering new artists. It works by keeping track of everything you listen to and using a Pandora-style algorithm to recommend related artists and albums. It’s a simple concept, but one that apparently holds up quite well over time.
Existing users of Last.fm will feel right at home in its Spotify app, which more or less frames a slightly modified version of the service’s usual interface into Spotify’s desktop client. The results occasionally need to be tweaked, but on the whole the recommendations are pretty solid. A few albums in my own physical record collection landed there thanks to Last.fm’s ability to turn up hidden gems.
3. Swarm.fm
Update spotify mac. Oh great, another social music-discovery app. Ho-hum.
Actually, Swarm.fm is pretty useful. It uses data from Facebook to show you what music your friends are listening to, even if they’re not signed up for Swarm.fm. If they are, that data becomes much more detailed and easily explored. Swarm.fm will also let you know if any artists in your own collection have new releases, which is far more relevant than the new releases coughed up by Spotify itself.
That tag cloud on the home tab might look like just another collection of metadata, but it’s actually informed by your social music data. I listen to a number of artists who don the tag “space rock” – and when I click that tag, it shows me dozens of similar bands. I can then sort those artists by popularity and what’s trending on Swarm.fm, which is a good way to pinpoint worthwhile listens.
4. ShareMyPlaylists
When I first opened ShareMyPlaylists, I thought “Oh, this is looks fairly generic.” Alternative, Classical, Blues, Dance. One-size-fits-all playlists.
I was wrong.
When you scroll down, you see a wide variety of very specific playlists: Beatles covers, the songs sampled by Nas and music from Quentin Tarantino films, songs featuring Moog synthesizers. It’s a random conglomeration of curated listening experiences, but one that is well worth browsing.
ShareMyPlaylists has something for absolutely everyone. Devotees of popular music from the charts can browse the “Top 50” tab while those with more under-the-radar tastes will find plenty of new stuff under the “Recommended” tab, which finds playlists based on the artists you listen to the most. If nothing in either section suits your mood, you can always run a search or use the app’s built-in playlist generator.
5. The Hype Machine
It’s been a wildly popular MP3 aggregator on the Web for years, so it only makes sense that The Hype Machine would find its way into Spotify’s app store. It’s right at home on top of the streaming service’s massive library of music.
Spotify Discover Daily
The Hype Machine eschews the complex algorithm in favor of human-curated playlists. Specifically, it aggregates tracks from popular music blogs across a wide range of genres, each of them very heavily populated. Dream Pop, for example, isn’t exactly a top 40 genre of music, but the Hype Machine pulls together no fewer than 100 different blogs classified as such. It’s loaded with music, all hand-selected by Internet tastemakers and guaranteed to introduce you to something you haven’t heard before.
A Growing Universe Of Music Discovery Apps
Narrowing this list to just five selections wasn’t easy. There are plenty of discovery apps on Spotify worth checking out – top charts from We Are Hunted and Billboard and social music from TweetVine, Soundrop and Sifter. Depending on your tastes, the critic-curated recommendations from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NME or KCRW can be invaluable.
It’s also worth mentioning that the new, supposedly Pandora-killing Spotify Radio feature is worth playing with. Its Echo Nest-powered recommendations are not quite as granular and effective as Pandora’s, but they’re quite good. Not only can you create a station based on any album or artist, but you can build one off of an entire playlist. This is pretty powerful. For instance, if you’ve starred a lot of music on Spotify, you can build a radio station based solely on those favorites.
Here’s another Spotify Radio trick: The Last.fm app will let you generate a Spotify a playlist based on your dozen or so most-played albums of all time. You can then start a Spotify radio station based on that playlist, which is sure to contain a few tracks you’ll love, but have never heard before. And isn’t that the point of music discovery?
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Every Monday morning, Spotify listeners are greeted—some might say gifted—with a new Discover Weekly playlist to help set their soundtrack for the next seven days. The weekly dose of recommended songs started as a project from one of Spotify’s Hack Weeks, and quickly caught on. Now, every Monday, listeners get a new, curated playlist of 30 songs from a variety of artists to explore.
Ever logged in to find a seemingly perfect Discover Weekly? While it might seem like wizardry, Discover Weekly becomes more personalized the more you use and engage with it. Here are five ways to keep the curation “magic” going:
1. Heart This
Love a new track you just heard? Click the “heart” icon next to the song on mobile or desktop, and there will be more where that came from down the road.
2. Follow Along
Make sure to “follow” your favorite artists—the curation magic will pull in songs from similar artists that we have a hunch you’ll like. As for your “followed” artists, head over to your Release Radar playlist, which updates every Friday, to hear all their new music right after it drops.
3. You Really Really Like It
If you’re totally obsessed with a new-to-you track, add it to your own personally curated playlists. This lets us know the song is more than just a momentary obsession, and we’ll be sure to serve up songs in the same vein.
4. Don’t Overthink It
Music App Spotify
We all have that friend who shares a ton of tracks from their favorite new artist. But what if they’re not really your taste? Not to worry: Listening to a song once without replaying or “hearting” won’t affect your Discover Weekly selections.
5. Keep It Private
If you’re listening to music you may not want to show up in your Discover Weekly (for example, if your friend with questionable music taste is DJing a party from your phone), put your Spotify onPrivate Mode. If you’re streaming from desktop, simply click the down arrow shaped like a “V” in the top right corner of the app and select “Private Session.” For mobile and tablet, navigate to Settings, then Social, and turn on “Private Session.”
There you have it! All the information you need for future playlists. Now that you’re more in control of your Discover Weekly destiny, prepare for a whole new world of soon-to-be-favorite songs and artists at your fingertips every Monday. Spotify gave me premium for free.
Open your Discover Weekly and get listening!