(I'm refering to the mobile app here) When exploring new music I am the type of person to only really play an artist's top songs. I can't help but wonder how many amazing songs I've missed out on simply because they weren't shown on an artist's home page.
https://winesnew626.weebly.com/can-mooddy-app-steal-someones-spotify.html. Your beloved Discover Weekly playlist started out like many other innovations at Spotify—as a line of code. But thanks to Spotify’s annual Hack Week and various Hack Days, our engineers have plentiful opportunities to turn their wildest ideas into reality.
The music industry has a long history of hackathons, with Spotify as a consistent sponsor. “In fact,” says longtime music hackathon participant and now-Spotify data/backend engineer Jen Lamere, “a lot of people have their connection to Spotify through some sort of hackathon, since a lot of the flagship products were made through those events. Spotify is keeping the flame alive.” According to Lamere, even employees who are not software engineers can use Hack Week as an opportunity to learn coding basics throughout the week.
Most Spotify engineers from the Stockholm, New York, Boston, and Gothenburg offices participate in the week, using the time they might ordinarily allot to “normal work” to make something helpful or just plain fun. The week, which is usually in the fall, culminates in a presentation or science fair (depending on the office) in which teams demo their projects. Hack Days, meanwhile, are a little more sporadic. For the User Engagement team, they occur for two days every four weeks and include a Friday night pitch session. Then, Monday and Tuesday are reserved for hacking.
If a hack works, it might make its way into a test build of the app so that a small number of Spotify users can try it out and see if it works outside the music-nerd engineering bubble. Yet some Hack Week and Hack Days projects are focused behind-the-scenes, on ideas Spotify users will never see themselves, but still benefit from. For example, lessening the time it takes for Spotify engineers to make an app update build, or helping Spotify employees find weirdly named conference rooms more quickly. “It’s all about making our lives a little easier and helping us get our jobs done,” says Lamere. Other hacks, like Discover Weekly, become integrated in platform updates, or even a part of large-scale marketing campaigns.
“Spotify’s culture and strong support of Hack Week is a fun way to let our engineers, designers and other employees express their creativity for innovating on music technology,” says Senior Data Engineer and Hack Day Emcee Tim Chagnon. “Sometimes the best benefit from Hack Week is just the experience of banding together with a new group of colleagues and learning something new by working with people from a diverse set of backgrounds and experiences.”
Cast from spotify app. Check out the results of four of our recent hacks—from a site that lets you find the most dramatic part of a song, to helping immigrants better enjoy the sounds of their home country.
Where Is The Drama? (Paul Lamere)
Music Hack Day hall-of-famer Paul Lamere’s web app automatically finds the most dramatic part of any song on Spotify, and plays it for you with a single click. It works by analyzing the loudness profiles of the songs, to find the passage with the biggest build-up. To try it, simply click here while playing any song through Spotify.
NPR Podcasts Notification (Jake Lehroff)
Around 125K users searched for NPR podcasts before we had them (but now we do!) Jake Lehroff didn’t want to miss out, so when the podcasts launched, this hack sent an in-app notification to the users who had searched.
Milestone Printer (Skyler Johnson)
Skyler Johnson from Spotify’s NYC office made the handmade-looking printer pictured above that cranks out a not-so-steady stream of statistics – a new one every time an artist breaks one of our streaming records in a country with Spotify. Most hacks don’t make it to hardware status, but Skyler’s is a great visualization of what our work can do.
One Hit Wonderment (Glenn McDonald)
Glenn McDonald’s hack used Spotify data and stats to put the biggest one-hit wonders—from Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High” to Deep Blue Something’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”—in one place.
Weekly Discovery Spotify
It works by ranking major artists by the percentage of their popularity that comes from their top track. Glenn also took it a step further, and made a playlist for songs that are the opposite of one-hit wonders.
Courtesy of Spotify
If the Discover Weekly playlist is your favorite part of Spotify, here’s something that’s bound to make your day: A new, Spotify-compatible tool called Discover Quickly takes everything you love about Discover Weekly and makes it easier, faster, and even more of an Experience-with-a-capital-E. A free-to-use, web-based tool, it's simple to access; all you need to do to get in on it is go to Discover Quickly’s website and login with your Spotify account. You’ll be surfing from tune to tune in no time — and you might just stumble upon your new favorite artist while you’re at it.
Spotify introduced the Discover Weekly feature way back in 2015. Each Monday, it presents a new, two-hour playlist (nostalgically referred to by the company as a mixtape) specific to each individual user based both on what they’ve been listening to lately and on other songs and artists that might be related to those habits. The tool was an immediate hit, although it hasn’t been without its complaints. It’s not always easy to navigate if you want to explore the artists that appear on it a little more thoroughly, for example; what's more, as some users observed, it can occasionally get “stale,” recommending the same tunes, albums, and artists over and over again.
That’s where Discover Quickly comes in. It's not an official Spotify tool, although its developers, Aliza Aufrichtig and Edward Clement Lee, do both work at Spotify. It uses Spotify’s public API to bring an exploratory quality to music discovery that’s a little more like a scavenger hunt that it is like pouring through pages and pages of lists. As Aufrichtig put to Gizmodo, “There’s very little in Discover Quickly that you can’t do on your regular Spotify app, but we chose to foreground the activity of traversing music quickly and visually.”
Discover Quickly provides a fast and easy way for you to preview the tracks in your Spotify-generated Discover Weekly playlist. Spotify links open in app store. Instead of needing to click on and listen to individual in the playlist — or listening the playlist itself straight through in its entirety — Discover Quickly displays the album covers of all those songs as a grid and allows you to hear a short clip of each track just by mousing over the album cover of your choice. If you like what you hear, you can click on the album cover both to bookmark the song and pull up more info about both it and the artist — and from there, you can begin clicking though and through and through, almost like you’re traveling through wormholes made of sound.
My own experience navigating the interface has been positively delightful so far. I’ve been listening to a lot of Studio Ghibli scores and covers lately (it is excellent writing music), so right now, my Discover Weekly playlist is full of contemporary classical, acoustic, and anime-related suggestions — for example, a cover of the theme from the 2002 Ghibli film The Cat Returns by the Kyoto Harp Ensemble, something from an album of Stravinsky, John Adams, and Pierre Boulez music performed by pianists Gerard Bouwhuis and Cees van Zeeland, and a single by Australian singer/songwriter Pekoe.
In Discover Quickly, it looks like this:
Clicking on the stuff I like pops it into the little bookmark tab up top:
The number in the tab indicates how many songs you’ve saved.
If you expand the tab, you can play entire songs by clicking on them, click “save all tracks” to add them all to your Spotify library, or add ‘em to either a new or existing playlist of your own creation by clicking “add all to playlist” and either selecting “new playlist” (to make a new one) or the name of a playlist you’ve already made (to add them to an existing one). Or, you decide you’re not as wild about one song as you originally thought, clicking the “x” next to it will remove it from the list.
Scrolling down, meanwhile, lets you explore the artist a bit more fully — you can click their name to see more from them, the name of the album the song on your Discover Weekly track is from to see the complete album, or either of the “Recommend songs” tags to get recommendations based either on the song itself or the artist more generally.
Gizmodo’s Adam Clark Estes described the exploration process as “[falling] into rabbit hole after rabbit hole of music, discovering all kinds of new stuff along the way”— an assessment with which I would agree. I don’t often use Discover Weekly because I’ve always found the tool a bit clunky to navigate within Spotify; with Discover Quickly, though, I might finally start utilizing it regularly.
Spotify Discover Weekly HistorySpotify Discover Weekly On Apple
There are lots of other ways to explore, too — and the best part is, it’s free. All you have to do is go to Discover Quickly’s homepage and login with your Spotify account; then you’re good to go. Spotify playlist party download.
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