Get a personalized playlist of new songs with Spotify’s Release Radar

Spotify’s Discover Weekly is a useful playlist for discovering new and old music alike that suits your taste. The music streaming service is taking it a step further with Release Radar, a new customized playlist for new music. Unlike Discover Weekly that updates every Monday, Release Radar comes out on Fridays. It’ll have around two hours’ worth of releases from your favorite artists as well as some new discoveries based on your listening habits. According to Spotify, Release Radar works as a “perfect complement” to New Music Friday, which could show you new artists you don’t know about yet.

But there’s a challenge with unveiling Release Radar and Edward Newett, the engineering manager at Spotify in charge of this playlist, talked to The Verge about how they were able to overcome the lack of good data available for new music. "When a new album drops, we don’t really have much information about it yet, so we don’t have any streaming data or playlisting data, and those are pretty much the two major components that make Discover Weekly work so well.”

Newett adds, "So some of the innovation happening now for the product is around audio research. We have an audio research team in New York that’s been experimenting with a lot of the newer deep learning techniques where we’re not looking at playlisting and collaborative filtering of users, but instead we’re looking at the actual audio itself."

The playlist takes notice of your entire listening history to help narrow down possible suggestions for you from the new music that’s come out in the last two or three weeks. We’re all for finding ways to get new music so we welcome this new playlist.