Spotify's hidden music recommender

There's a cool little music recommender built into Spotify that you've probably never used.

One of the first projects that I worked on at Spotify was to solve the problem of user’s playlists getting stale after repeated used. You can only listen to a playlist so many times before it starts to feel worn out and you are ready for something else. To solve this problem we built something that we called internally, the Playlist Freshener. The playlist freshener takes your stale playlist and creates a brand new one that attempts to match the vibe of the original but with all different tracks and artists. It’s a great way to get a fresh but comfortable listening session.

So you may be asking yourself why you’ve never seen this masterpiece of music recommendations. That’s because we hid it from you! We only want insiders to know about this technology, and now you are an insider. To invoke the Playlist Freshener, you have to be on the desktop client (not mobile, nor the web client - I told you we really hid it). Find one of your own, preferably stale playlists - it has to be your own - not a Spotify playlist or another user’s playlist - (again, we are really trying to hide this jewel of a recommender). Once you are on your playlist find that kebab menu (aka the three dots menu) to bring up the playlist menu - and find the “create similar playlist” option.

When you click on that menu item, a brand new playlist will be created for you that matches the vibe but has all different songs (and mostly different artists too).

Even though we’ve done our best to hide this recommender, people do occasionally find it. Some reviews from Twitter:

john 🐍 śukra stan @astrolojohn

i thank the gods every day for the “create similar playlist” option on spotify

You’re welcome!

molly 🎧 @m_ollymac

bro i just learnt about this function on spotify where if u click 'create similar playlist' spotify makes u a brand new one all by itself w/ songs it thinks you'll like??? this is amazing???

My favorite review:

noob dog @noobdoggy

I tried pressing “Create Similar Playlist” on spotify and its like spotify made a twin of me except smoked a pack a day and drank 4lokos while pregnant with it

Or maybe this one is my favorite:

cowboy like jo @secretIanguage

spotify has always been great for discovering new music but they’re literally coming for everyone’s throats with the “create a similar playlist” feature wtf how did they make a better playlist than the one i made for myself 😭😭😭

This one made me very happy. I knew that we finally got the algorithm just right:

Paul Lang @rudemrlang

Just tried the "Create Similar Playlist" feature on my playlist that's just Something In Your Eyes, 9 times, and this is what Spotify came back with.

So now you know about our super secret recommender. Give it a go!, Impress your friends, show them who has the best playlist-fu!