Reflection 1: Spotify’s Discover Weekly Playlist

The innovation I find really creative is Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist. It serves to fill a need that many music lovers complain about: it’s hard to discover “new” music. Without listening to the radio or having conversations with other music-loving friends, the discovery process is lost. To explain how it works in its simplest terms, the Discovery playlist uses an algorithm that finds users who have built playlists featuring the songs and artists that you have already “liked” in your personal library. It then goes through and finds songs on those same playlists that you haven’t already heard, but trusts that you’ll like, and serves it up to the user every Monday in a pre-formatted playlist.

What I find creative about this particular innovation is not the idea itself — although that alone is creative — but the improvements the designers have made since inception, since they are based on user behavior and feedback. For example, the first version of the playlist was formatted more like a website, with tiles for different songs. This would force the user to pick individual songs, versus pressing “play” on a playlist and having a more passive listening experience. The other is the addition of “familiar” versus only “fresh” music to the playlist. Listeners preferred to have new music experiences served up alongside already loved music. The designers didn’t have a fixed mindset about an already successful product; rather, they were willing to adapt and create.