Spotify’s personalized “Daylist” playlists becoming a viral trend
Spotify’s “Daylist” Playlists Take Over Social Media
Spotify’s new “Daylist” feature, which generates personalized playlists that update throughout the day to match users’ listening habits and moods, has recently gone viral on social media.
What is a Spotify Daylist?
A Daylist is an ever-changing daily playlist curated specifically for each Spotify user. It refreshes multiple times a day, adding new tracks and updating the playlist title to reflect the user’s music taste at different times of day.
For example, your Daylist in the morning could be titled “upbeat pop Monday morning” while your evening Daylist might be “chill R&B Wednesday night.” The algorithm looks at your recent listening activity on Spotify to determine the vibe of each update.
This hyper-personalized and dynamic approach aims to serve as a musical companion, capturing the niche genres and micro-genres you tend to stream at various points in your daily routine.
The Viral Instagram Trend
While Daylists launched back in September 2023, they only recently blew up thanks to an Instagram trend that took off in January 2024.
The trend involves posting your current Daylist title instead of your astrological sign. A popular Instagram story template reads “Don’t tell me your astrology sign; I want you to go into Spotify, search for your daylist and post the title it gave you.”
This prompted people to search for their Daylists for the first time and share the often hilarious, oddly specific titles with their followers. Some examples include:
- Moody alt pop Monday afternoon
- Hopeless romantic indie Sunday evening
- Dark euphoric house Friday morning
The shareable nature of the colorful, descriptive Daylist titles tapped perfectly into Gen Z and millennial internet humor. Spotify reported a 20,000% increase in Daylist searches in the past week as the trend went viral.
Why Daylists Have Resonated
There are a few key reasons why Spotify’s Daylist feature has connected so well:
Hyper-Personalization
Like Spotify’s popular yearly Wrapped, Daylists showcase just how much the platform knows about users’ listening habits. The specificity and accuracy make people feel seen and understood.
Shareability
The meme-like titles and built-in social sharing functions make Daylists primed for virality, especially on visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok. They offer a fun new way for users to express their musical identities.
Discovery
In addition to capturing users’ tastes, Daylists expose listeners to new niche genres and artists they may love but haven’t discovered yet. This keeps the experience feeling fresh.
Relatability
Most people have music taste fluctuations throughout the day. Seeing these changes reflected in a playlist title elicits a “me too” feeling of being understood.
The Creator Behind Daylists’ Taxonomy
While Daylists suddenly blew up this month, the foundations were laid years ago by Glenn McDonald, the former curator of Spotify’s EveryNoise project.
EveryNoise categorized Spotify’s massive music catalog into a detailed taxonomy of over 3,000 microgenres. This allowed the Daylists algorithm to accurately match users with hyper-specific genre blend titles.
However, in an unfortunate turn of events, McDonald was laid off from Spotify in December 2023 amid company-wide cuts. So while his legacy lives on through viral features like Daylists, he no longer works behind the scenes on further developing these creative taxonomies.
What’s Next for Daylists?
It remains to be seen whether the Daylists trend has any longevity or if it will be forgotten in the rapid pace of internet hype cycles.
However, Spotify has doubled down by announcing plans to continue expanding the feature. This includes introducing Daylists to more global markets in more languages in the coming months.
The company also plans to build out the algorithm powering Daylists to get even better at predicting users’ listening needs throughout their day. This could mean more personalized and timely updates.
While Daylists may fade from social feeds soon, they showcase the increasing role of music streaming services in understanding users through data. Hyper-personalized, ever-evolving playlists that adapt to our moods may soon be the norm. Spotify is betting that this humanized approach will continue resonating with listeners and shaping their relationships with music.
