On the heels of the success of its Discover Weekly feature, Spotify is adding another curated service so that users can find new music.
Called Fresh Finds, the new weekly Wednesday feature, available through to all Spotify users in its “Browse” tool, will uncover new artists for listeners.
These new “discoveries” from Spotify are culled from scouring blogs and music sites online and combining that with the hundreds of thousands of its users’ listening hours that the company has tracked.
Basically, the service is using information from the music gurus around the web and on its own service to determine what may be the hits of tomorrow.
The Fresh Finds featured musicians will come in a general category — for all genres — and five sub-genres ranging from electronic to experimental music.
- Fresh Finds (brand new breakout tracks spread across five genres)
- Fire Emoji (hip-hop)
- Basement (electronic)
- Hiptronix (vocal pop)
- Six Strings (guitar driven)
- Cyclone (experimental)
“Spotify has always focused on artists and listeners, and with Fresh Finds we’re specifically looking at new creators, digging deeper to understand how undiscovered artists can attract a huge fan base,” says Dr. Brian Whitman, Principal Scientist at Spotify, in a blog post. “By analyzing the listening behavior of our top tastemaker users, we’re able to predict new breakout artists and filter their hits-to-be into playlists with the most promising new music out there.”
It’s another way the company is looking to juice its growth by making the hundreds of thousands of musicians — and their catalogs — that are on the site more accessible to a more casual listener than the company’s core audience of power users and music aficionados.
Since Spotify acquired Echo Nest, the two companies have been pooling their collective brain power on ways to bring more music to the masses.
And the company is certainly drinking its own Kool Aid. Five of the musicians that are going to be at the Spotify showcase at its 2016 SXSW Spotify House in Austin were discovered through Fresh Finds.