Spotify launches viral "daylist" feature globally
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Spotify expanded its viral daylist feature Wednesday, launching it in all of its global markets and in 14 new languages, Axios is first to report.
Why it matters: The music streaming giant is leaning into a feature that's gotten a lot of attention — reactions ranging from impressed to amused — in a bid to get more paying customers in the long term.
Catch up fast: Daylist is a "hyper-personalized" playlist of new and familiar tracks that changes multiple times a day based in part on someone's listening patterns.
- Which songs are played is based on "musical descriptors" for a song's genre, tempo, mood and other traits, which are assigned by the company's data scientists, music experts and engineers.
- Algorithms then generate titles for each playlist based on those descriptors — a process not to be confused with generative AI.
Zoom in: "We hope to find the sweet spot between human curation and algorithmic, machine-led curation and programming," Gustav Gyllenhammar, Spotify vice president, markets & subscriptions, tells Axios exclusively.
Between the lines: Gyllenhammar also says "there's a very strong connection" between users who are engaged with the platform and those who end up paying.
- "The more we can increase engagement for free users, the likelier they are to convert to premium, which is the higher revenue products in our portfolio."
- Spotify reported 626 million monthly active users (MAU) in Q2 this year, missing projections of 631 million.
State of play: Daylist, previously accessible in about 70 markets and only in English, is now in all 180-plus markets where Spotify is available.
- The 14 additional languages are Arabic, Catalan, French (Canada), French (France), German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico), and Turkish.
My thought bubble: At a time when social platforms like TikTok have emerged as competitors in both music creation and discovery, Spotify may have an opportunity to hit back at those apps with mass cultural moments centered on its own specialty — the way "Spotify Wrapped" has at the end of every year.
