#27: Spotify Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and the Habit Loop + Bots + Trendwatching + Links: TheWaveVR, Facebook VR, Music & Beer
Hey everybody! 👋
This week’s lead is about Spotify’s latest feature. I also have 2 bonus articles, including one about how I stay up to date on the latest in music & tech. Be sure to check them out as I’ve been giving the MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE site some extra love and am curious to hear what you think.
Love,
Bas
Spotify Release Radar, Discover Weekly, and the Habit Loop
Last Friday, Spotify unveiled its newest feature: Release Radar – a personalized playlist of newly released music, updated every Friday. It’s reminiscent of Discover Weekly, but Release Radar’s recommendations are always newer tracks. My first impression is that it’s much more likely to recommend music from artists you’re already familiar with.
As Spotify keeps rolling out features like this, and competitors no doubt follow suit, the implications for the music business will be significant. Matt Ogle, who’s behind both of these playlists, revealed last March:
“There are 2,000 artists for whom Discover Weekly is currently 80% of their streams, and something like five or six thousand for whom Discover Weekly is half of their streams.”
But I’d like to zero in on Spotify’s product strategy and why features like Discover Weekly and Release Radar are so important for the service. It has everything to do with the power of habit.
Discover Weekly creates a perfect habit loop. The routine is listening to your refreshed playlist. The reward is the release of good hormones due to interesting new finds, and perhaps the social currency of sharing. The cue, or trigger, is simply the fact that it’s Monday and the start of a new week.
On Sunday, another habit loop is triggered. To prevent losing newly discovered gems, users log on to save tracks from Discover Weekly to their playlists. Loss prevention is one of the strongest motivators.
Spotify’s bet is that they can create another habit, focused on different days of the week, by releasing a new feature in the style of Discover Weekly. Being able to consistently drive traffic back to your product is great if you’re ad-supported, might help to convince free users to upgrade to premium, and helps premium users justify the recurring cost of their subscription.
Now, instead of 2, there will be 4 cues.
Friday is a great day for Release Radar for two reasons:
Easy to remember: it’s the last day of the week and people have the weekend on their minds.
Since last year, Friday is the global release day for new music.
Here are two hacks I made that bring some cool additional automation to the new Release Radar playlist:
Curious how Release Radar works? The wonderful folks at Hydric Media, who are behind the hit music app Wonder, created a free tool called Playground, which opens up all the different parameters of Spotify’s Echo Nest API powering the Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists.
How has your Release Radar experience been? I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours. Send me a tweet: @basgras.
More from MUSIC x TECH x FUTURE
Click for article on the MxTxF blog.
Click for article on the MxTxF blog.
Must-reads
🎶 TheWaveVR raises $2.5M to bring the concert experience into VR
A VR service for hosting DJ gigs in VR… It’s Turntable.fm meets VR. Very excited to see this team get funding. Looking forward to attending my first VR rave.
👀 Facebook’s really big plans for virtual reality
Good read on Facebook’s plans for Oculus and why VR is so important to a company everyone knows as a social network.
💰 How an indie band sold $66,000 in tickets in less than 2 hours
Article makes a good case for using phone numbers and text messaging. A text might seem costly, but it can perform better than most ads.
📺 See the music: the evolution of visual albums
Exploring the history of longform music videos. Set some time aside and prepare for an evening of musical journeys.
📈 Digital globalization: the new era of global flows (McKinsey)
Soaring flows of data and information now generate more economic value than the global goods trade.
🤖 Rise of bots: a timeline of major VC-backed bot startups
15 VC-backed bot startups have raised their first VC rounds so far this year. This is one of the most important trends in tech & venture capital right now.
🆓 How a music label used free music and YouTube to mint stars
An interview with Visionary Music Group CEO Chris Zarou about how he leveraged free music and YouTube to start a record label. Smart use of ‘free’ is key to success in the digital age.
🍺 A new study says the right music can make your beer taste better
A team of Belgian researchers says there’s a correlation between the music you listen to, how much you enjoy your beer, and how drunk you feel. Time to try and reproduce their results by experimenting on ourselves, hm? 🍻
Closing thoughts
A little something extra… meet my new favourite bot: Murphy. Ask it a “What if…” question on Skype, Telegram or Facebook Messenger and it uses its imagination to create an image for you.
I feel MxTxF is now in a place where I can start carefully curating guest contributions. I know there are more than a few bright visionaries on this list - if you also have a knack for writing, drop me a line. Let’s collab.
Love,
Bas
@basgras - linkedin - musicxtechxfuture.com
Regular insights about the future of music, media & tech. Written & composed by @basgras.
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