EP/01: DISCOVER WEEKLY
Spotify’s Discover Weekly with Music Hacker Paul Lamere
We speak with Music Hacker Hall of Fame inductee Paul Lamere, part of the team that created Spotify’s Discover Weekly service. Discovery Weekly automatically creates a playlist of 30 new songs for you to discover each week. We learn about its early roots in the Echo Nest platform, how it works today and some tips for listeners to optimize their own weekly discoveries.
We talk through the upsides and the downsides of computer-generated playlists. While it’s almost as is if we all have our own personal music guru telling us what we should listen to next, how does a fresh new artist get a share of our attention and break onto the scene? How are biases introduced that skew playlists towards, say, male artists? Paul has a language for understanding our musical listening habits, like: ‘tilt’ (how much we lean into new vs. old familiar tracks) and ‘functional music’ (what we listen to passively while perhaps working, driving or cooking).
We discuss some of Paul’s music hacks including Boil the Frog, which lets you create a playlist of tracks that gradually takes you from one music style to another. You can try it yourself at: http://boilthefrog.playlistmachinery.com/. More of his musings and legendary music hacks can be found on his blog, Music Machinery https://musicmachinery.com/
About PAUL LAMERE
Paul Lamere works at Spotify, where he spends his time building machines that try to figure out what song you really want to listen to next. He's been building music recommenders since the iPod era, and he started writing software professionally when the 8-track was a thing. He's been active in the ACM Recommender Systems conference (serving twice as the Industrial Chair) and the International Society for Music Information Retrieval. When not at work, Paul spends much of his spare time hacking on music. Paul is a four-time nominee and twice winner of the MTV O Music Award for Best Music Hack and is the first inductee into the Music Hacker's Hall of Fame. Paul also authors a popular blog about music technology called 'Music Machinery'. He tweets occasionally at @plamere.
