Spotify launches new playlist generation feature

Jun 15, 2015 08:59 GMT  ·  By

Spotify soft-launched a new feature called Taste Rewind which can tell users what music they would have liked in other decades, based on what they're listening right now.

Even if very cool, this audacious feature wasn't promoted at all by the company, and the first ones to find out about it were the guys at VentureBeat after stumbling upon a Spotify engineer's Facebook post.

Spotify is in dire need of a better recommendation engine for its users after it decided back in February to cut-off access to its API for third-party apps.

The move proved to be very detrimental since most of the music recommendation engines were working via third-party apps, and users were left only with their friend connections and sharable playlists.

Now, the company has Taste Rewind, which we can't tell yet if it's a knee-jerk reaction to the recent announcement of Apple Music or was a feature they were working on all this time.

Can Spotify really tell you what kind of 70s music you like?

Taste Rewind works by letting users sign into their Spotify account, prompting them to select three favorite artists from a list of recently played musicians, and then, after some fancy schmancy CSS3 animations, it compiles a series of playlists for recent decades.

Users can then go and have a look at the songs, save the playlist to their account if they like it, or generate a new one if they don't.

Playlist generation goes from the '60s up to the '00s and covers everything from the incomparable Johnny Cash to mouseketeers like Britney Spears.

Spotify's collection of older songs is quite limited, so the problem right now with Taste Rewind is the service's redundancy when generating playlists, some artists coming up over and over again in every newly-generated playlist.

Spotify Taste Rewind Screenshots (10 Images)

Spotify launches new Taste Rewind service
Choose what you like now to see what you would have liked in the pastTaste Rewind comes with fancy animations included
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