Spotify Just Breathed New Life Into One of Its Most Popular Features

Spotify is continuing its hot streak.

In the past two months, the music streaming giant has introduced a number of new features to its app, with some standouts including an overhaul of its Podcasts section and a new Snooze feature for songs you’re tired of hearing.

And now, for the first time in a decade, it’s introducing some new abilities to arguably its most popular playlist: Discover Weekly.

Discover Weekly, upgraded

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

New genre controls

Discover Weekly is a personalized playlist that Spotify generates for you each week — specifically, each Monday. It uses your listening history and creates a 30-song playlist of new songs that it thinks you’ll like. The idea is to help you discover new music and artists.

First introduced in 2016, Spotify claims that more than 100 billion tracks have been streamed via the Discover Weekly playlist — it’s one of the service’s most popular features. And now, to mark the 10-year anniversary, Spotify is giving its Discover Weekly playlist a refreshed look and, more importantly, introducing new controls to provide you with greater control over the curated playlist.

Specifically, the Discover Weekly playlist is adding buttons at the top that let you filter between five different genres (like Pop, Rock or Country). This way, if you listen to a lot of different kinds of music, but are in the mood for something specific, you can ask Discover Weekly to focus its track list toward certain genres.

These “genre filter” buttons will appear different for different people because, again, Spotify will use your listening algorithm to determine which different genres you prefer. When your app is updated, a simple tap of one of these buttons will automatically update the Discovery Weekly playlist.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

Where’s Discover Weekly?

If you’ve never listened to the Discover Weekly playlist and want to check it out, you can … but it can be a little bit difficult to find.

1. Open the Spotify app on your smartphone.
2. Select the Search tab (at the bottom)
3. Tap the “Made For You” icon.
4. Scroll down to the “Discover New Music” section.
5. Select Discover Weekly.

If you want an easier way, just use Spotify’s search bar and type “Discover Weekly.” It’ll pop right up.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

When’s it coming?

Spotify says these new genre controls (and the refreshed look) are rolling out to Spotify Premium subscribers now. (Yes, you need to be paying subscriber to access them.

If you’re not seeing the changes, you can manually update the Spotify app by opening the App Store app > select your profile icon > tap Apps > tap My Apps > scroll down to the Spotify app and select “Update.”

To learn more about the Discovery Weekly playlist and its new features, check out Spotify’s blog post.

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