Right now, there are so many music services vying for my ears. I am completely tied to and happy with the Apple ecosystem (iPhone 6 Plus, iPad 2, Apple Watch, Apple TV 4th Generation). I have tried both the free and paid version of just about all of the big streaming music services (Apple Music, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal, etc). I have fallen in love with Spotify all over again because of one feature, Discover Weekly.

As a teen, when I first started discovering glam rock in the late 80s and grunge in the early 90s, I used to love making mixtapes for my brother (@AmishBabu) and myself. Spotify Discover Weekly is my mixtape engine/generator circa 2016. Discover Weekly is updated every Monday morning with 30 songs (about two hours) of personalized music recommendations delivered in a personal playlist. Every song in Discover Weekly is based both on my own listening as well as what others are playlisting and listening to around the songs I love – making the playlist completely unique and customized to me. Spotify is learning what I like and making my very own personal mixtape every single week. Moreover, as the system learns my tastes/preferences, Discover Weekly continually improves at recommending music it knows that I will like. Then, next Monday, that playlist disappears and I get another 30 songs.

Spotify Discover Weekly works so well because it does not require any effort. All I have to do is listen to music and Spotify’s algorithms handle the rest. Moreover, it does a great job of balancing familiar music with new tracks and artists that I have never heard before. No other service makes music discovery as personal and does it this well. It’s genius and perfectly fits what I want.

I actually created a “Best of Discover Weekly” playlist so I could save all the best tracks from each week.  Every week, I keep adding more track to that playlist. My “Best of” playlist is getting larger and getting so good that it is the only way I listen to music (aside from going through my Spotify Discover Weekly every morning during my walk to work to figure out what new tracks to add). An added surprise benefit is that this also means that I don’t have to pay for music anymore; my “Best of” playlist is so good that I am more than happy just turning it on and letting it shuffle.

Spotify Discover Weekly helps me curate a very highly personal music library without any effort and yet helps me discover new music. And it does all that for free. What more could I ask for?

You know what I will be doing every morning from now on during my walk to work. Click here to listen to my “Best of” playlist on Spotify.