Spotify has announced a new kind of playlist, accessible to both free and paid subscribers, called the Daylist.
The concept is Spotify offers different “Daylists” throughout the day. You might think of it as a blend of the daily mixes Spotify already creates based on your tastes, and the more genre-specific playlists that litter the streamer’s catalogue.
For example, our very first Spotify Daylist was called “exciting swamp Tuesday early morning”. Apparently, “swamp” is one of Spotify’s content tags, but doesn’t seem to refer to the actual music genre swamp rock.
Our Daylist is two hours 45 minutes long and consists of 50 largely indie and pop songs. You can find your own daylist by searching for “daylist” in the Spotify app.
Other examples you might bump into, according to Spotify’s own marketing materials, include playlists like “bedroom pop banger early morning”, “Bollywood bop afternoon”, and “90s rave rainforest late night”.
It’s all based on your previous listening behaviour including, it seems, looking at what you typically listen to at specific times of the day.
Like any good forward-looking playlist, though, Spotify’s Daylists appear to mix tracks and artists you’ve listened to before with ones you have not.
Playlists technologies like Daylists have come to be defining elements of Spotify, compared to early years where these services used exclusive live sessions and content as a way to retain subscribers. Spotify was one of the original proponents of this content, with Spotify Sessions, which offered an opportunity for artists to release “live” versions of their tracks.
This was largely replaced by Spotify Singles, introduced in 2016 as a way for artists to record covers, or new versions of their own songs.
But you know what eclipsed all this original content? Spotify Wrapped, the end-of-year listening summaries also introduced in 2016. Wrapped sets social media alight each year.
Sure enough, Spotify Daylists can be shared as a “ready-made screenshot, a personalised sticker or a customisable sharecard,” according to the announcement.
The other most recent news from Spotify is a rumour about Spotify audiobooks, which launched fairly quietly in 2022. There are reports premium subscribers could get up to 20 hours of audiobook listening time a month, a pretty hefty benefit. However, at present, this is yet to be confirmed by Spotify.
