Spotify's New Personalized Features: Mid-Year Review & Blend Playlists

Spotify Enhances Personalization with 'Only You' and 'Blend' Features

Spotify is significantly expanding its commitment to personalized music experiences with the introduction of a new in-app feature called Only You. This dedicated space focuses on a user’s preferred music and listening habits.

The new experience shares similarities with Spotify’s highly popular annual recap, Spotify Wrapped, by showcasing key artists, songs, genres, and other elements of a user’s musical journey. Users can then easily share these insights across their social media platforms.

Introducing Blend: Collaborative Playlists

Alongside Only You, Spotify is also launching Blend, a novel way to create a shared, personalized playlist with a friend.

The Only You hub will initially appear separately within the Spotify app, residing alongside the existing Made for You hub on the Search page.

Within Made for You, users already find personalized playlists such as Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Daily Mixes, Your Time Capsule, and Summer Rewind. The recently added Spotify Mixes are also located here.

Currently, Only You is a distinct hub, but it will eventually be integrated into the Made for You hub.

Deeper Insights with 'Only You'

The Only You experience aims to reveal new musical trends beyond existing personalized playlists.

This includes features like “Your Audio Birth Chart,” which assigns astrological roles to your listening habits – your top artist as the sun, a recent discovery as the rising sign, and an emotionally resonant artist as the moon.

Another feature, “Your Dream Dinner Party,” allows you to select three favorite artists for a custom Spotify Mix, updated frequently with both familiar and new tracks.

“Your Artist Pairs” highlights unique combinations of artists you’ve been listening to, even across different genres.

The experience also provides insights into your musical timeline, listening habits throughout the day, and preferred genres and podcast topics.

For instance, “Song Year” illustrates your musical evolution, showcasing the years associated with the tracks you’ve streamed. The year with the most streams is highlighted, alongside the earliest release year you’ve enjoyed and the most recent.

To power these features, Only You analyzes your Spotify listening data from the past six months (December 2020 – May 2021).

Eligibility requires streaming at least 30 tracks by five different artists during that period. Spotify confirms this data will not be used for ad targeting, and the “Audio Birth Chart” does not require your birth year.

Blend: A Playlist for Two

Blend, currently in beta, is a central component of the Only You campaign.

Found within the “Made for Two” section of the Only You hub, Blend allows you to invite any Spotify user to co-create a playlist.

Leveraging the technology behind Family Mix and Duo Mix, Blend merges your musical tastes with another user’s – whether they have a free or premium Spotify account – to generate a curated playlist of shared favorites.

This playlist is updated daily and evolves with your changing listening preferences.

By working with free accounts, Blend could attract new users to Spotify, encouraging them to create playlists with friends and family.

Building on Existing Technology

Both Only You and Blend are built upon existing Spotify technology used in features like Wrapped and various blended mixes.

Spotify aims to demonstrate its leadership in personalization features, surpassing competitors in this area.

While some features, like Spotify Mixes, have parallels with those offered by Pandora, Spotify’s continuous innovation in personalization sets it apart.

This ongoing development increases user engagement and makes switching to rival services more difficult due to the accumulation of personalized playlists.

Spotify will actively promote the launch of Only You, collaborating with artists like Harry Styles, Selena Gomez, Lil Nas X, Doja Cat, Justin Bieber, and SZA to create personalized stats for their fanbases. The campaign will run until June 30.