One perceived weakness of Spotify is its music recommendation features. Let’s just say it’s no Last.fm, appearing to make very little use of users’ listening data to help other users discover new music. That’s about to change, to some degree at least, as the European music streaming service rolls out an improved artist discovery feature.
Until now, Spotify has relied on editorially-driven data provided by AllMusic, who will continue to provide artist biographies for the service. In contrast, the new artist recommendations are powered by an algorithm that cross-references data collected over millions of user listening hours, not dissimilar it seems to Last.fm’s ‘scrobbling’ of tracks. The new feature, which connects the entire catalogue of artists, is the product of Spotify’s R&D team who have been working on it over the past few months.
Users will experience the result via a new ‘Related Artists’ tab as part of the artist overview page, “letting them seek out similar sounds much more easily by clicking on the artist icons.”
