Following up on the success of its marquee Discovery Weekly feature, Spotify has launched Release Radar, a new weekly playlist that curates tracks culled from new albums, EPs and singles.
Rolling out to the streaming platform’s more than 100-milllion monthly active users starting today, the Release Radar is set to be refreshed every Friday. Unlike Discover Weekly, which focuses on tracks that as much as six months old, and on artists users might have heard of before, Release Radar is all about new music from the artists users are already listening to.
“With the huge amount of new music released every week, it can be difficult to keep up with the latest tracks,” said Matt Ogle, senior product owner at Spotify, in a statement issued to MobileSyrup. “With Release Radar, we wanted to create the simplest way for you to find all the newly released music that matters the most to you, in one playlist.”
In an interview with The Verge, Edward Newett, the engineer at Spotify who lead the development of Release Radar, said it was challenging to create the new feature.
“When a new album drops, we don’t really have much information about it yet, so we don’t have any streaming data or playlisting data, and those are pretty much the two major components that make Discover Weekly work so well,” he said. “So some of the innovation happening now for the product is around audio research. We have an audio research team in New York that’s been experimenting with a lot of the newer deep learning techniques where we’re not looking at playlisting and collaborative filtering of users, but instead we’re looking at the actual audio itself.”
Like its other curated playlists, Spotify says users can expect Release Radar to get better with time.
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