Spotify doesn’t just want to be your go-to source for music, it’s also looking to become your home for podcasts, and its new podcast discovery feature is taking a page from its personalized Your Daily Mix music playlists.
Slated to debut today in nine markets and on all platforms, Spotify’s new Your Daily Podcasts playlists work almost exactly like its popular Your Daily Mix playlists.
Open the playlist, and you’ll find a selection of podcasts that you’ve either listened or subscribed to via Spotify. Following the familiar episodes are some other shows that Spotify thinks you might like, prefaced by a short track announcing that you’re about to hear something new.
Spotify’s podcasts recommendations are based on a variety of factors, including (of course) your prior listening history and “signals” derived from shows you’ve either heard or followed.
Trying to predict what new podcasts you might like is a little trickier than recommending new music, according to Emily Rawitsch, Director of Product Design in Spotify’s personalization group.
Ben Patterson/IDG
Spotify’s new Your Daily Podcasts playlists serves up episodes based on shows you’ve listened to or followed, along with a mix of new episodes based on your listening history.
Rawitsch told me that while reliable music recommendations can be based on just a few factors, such as genre and tempo, making good podcast suggestions involve dealing with more and different variables, including the topic of the podcast, the personalities of its hosts, and the length of the episodes.
“We’re using what we’ve learned in music recommendations, and we’re applying that to podcasts,” Rawitsch said.
Wading into a podcast playlist of course demands more of a commitment than dipping into Your Daily Mix. Broadly speaking, most music tracks are about five minutes long, making it easy to sample Spotify’s latest recommendations. Podcast episodes, on the other hand, vary wildly in terms of length, with many of my own favorite shows stretching beyond the one-hour mark. So yes, Your Daily Podcasts may require a little more patience than Your Daily Mix; then again, there’s always the skip button.
Spotify has been doubling down on its podcast support over the past several months. Earlier this year, the streaming music giant rolled out the ability to create playlists of podcast episodes, an oft-requested feature that allows users to build playlists around themes such as meditation, relaxation, comedy, true crime, and “under 20 minutes” episodes.
The Your Daily Podcasts feature is set to arrive today in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and it’s available for both free and premium users.
Note: This story was updated to correct Emily Rawitsch’s title.