Do you remember when you first signed up for Spotify? New users have to select at least three artists they like. Spotify then compliments you on your excellent taste in music and populates the home tab not with charting songs or new releases but songs tailored to your preferences. They recommend playlists featuring and albums by artists similar to those you first chose and then create your personal Daily Mix and Station using the same criteria. And then, after a few hours of taking note of what you listen to, you’ll find they’ve created your daylist under Made For You. The daylist is the latest iteration of Spotify’s highly praised music recommendation and curation offerings.

The daylist automatically generates up to 12 playlists a day based on your listening habits and mood. Each playlist comes with a title that reflects its genre, mood, day of the week, and time of day. Some real examples include “sad girl power ballad saturday afternoon,” “dopamine futuristic monday,” and “cosmic k-pop sunday night.” These are one-time-use playlists that disappear if not saved and feature a mix of your personal favorites, similar-sounding recommendations, and new releases.

It seems like the daylist takes all the best parts of Spotify’s existing personalized playlists and wraps them all together into one. For instance, there’s Discover Weekly to introduce you to new music based on your existing tastes, Release Radar with a focus on new releases from your favorite artists and highlighting your preferred genres, and Daily Mix, which gives you up to six playlists based on genre or style. Meanwhile, the English- and Spanish-exclusive DJ levels up the personalization by fully embracing the power of AI. Your personal DJ provides brief commentary as it plays an endless mix spanning various genres, moods, and eras, though it has its drawbacks, like how it drastically changes themes every four or five songs and lacks the option to see playlists in advance.

The appeal of the daylist comes from the way it addresses the overwhelming abundance of curation services by eliminating the tyranny of choice, as well as its emphasis on personalization. About a year after launching a pilot program in September 2023 in places like North America, the UK, and Australia, the daylist feature expanded its reach this September to a global audience and is now available in multiple languages—and it’s already a fan favorite. According to Spotify, 70% of daylist users listen at least once a week, while millions are discovering the joy of a personalized playlist every single day.

Today, the ideas of curation and personalization seem inseparable—Apple Music also offers five personalized mixes, including New Music and Heavy—but if you think back to the early days of streaming, curation was a static service where one editor showcased their tastes and specific picks. The approach of classifying music by mood, activity, and genre is already an old idea, with older playlists given themes like “upbeat dinner pop” or “relaxing poolside jazz.” The approach eventually became outdated, though, because it treated streaming as a mere extension of traditional media like CDs and radio. For digital natives, streaming is the only medium they’ve ever known, and every single song is right there. It doesn’t matter what other people are listening to—what matters is what you listen to, and it’s important you can believe that it fully reflects who you are. It’s only natural to seek out music and playlists that line up with your emotional state and where you find yourself in life at any given moment.

We didn’t get some algorithm or AI that popped up overnight to magically meet our new wishes. Spotify’s been refining its music recommendation services, with a philosophy on curation that sets it apart from other streaming services, for over a decade now. When Apple Music launched in 2015, Jimmy Iovine—the creator of the service’s predecessor, Beats Music—made his views on curation clear. He promised “a revolutionary music service curated by the leading music experts who we helped handpick” and emphasized how “algorithms alone can’t do that emotional task. You need a human touch.” What about Pandora, the original trailblazer in music streaming and recommendation services? Around the same time, Eric Bieschke, who took the lead on Pandora’s playlists, remarked, “If we give you two songs you like and one you don't, we've failed,” once again underscoring the risks of relying solely on algorithms for music recommendations.
 
But Spotify took a different approach. In 2015, the company introduced the entirely algorithm-driven personalized playlist Discover Weekly, one automatically populated using data from the over 30 million tracks they had by that time. After that, the streaming service carefully noted what you listen to and love, compared it against other people, perfected the tools to analyze sound and lyrics for indicators of mood, and sorted thousands of different microgenres—all in an effort to prepare for a future driven by algorithm-based curation. The belief that You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, as “former Spotify data alchemist” Glenn McDonald’s book exclaims, extends to the daylist.
 
In the past, discovering new music meant defining your tastes by genre and style as a starting point and expanding outward from there. When streaming services looked beyond the concept of a personal music library and instead put the world’s entire catalog of music in your pocket, playlists and curation became more important than ever. So, did Spotify’s decision from 10 years ago pay off? They’re now the dominant player in the global streaming market, with a 30% share. The endless evolution of their curation offerings is exactly what gives streaming services, themselves a type of social media, their competitive edge. All social media platforms aim to keep their users in their app and engaged for as long as possible. What Swedish service Spotify has managed to do is eliminate all other competition globally to make sure the play button feels like it starts an experience tailored exclusively for you.