Music lovers will likely know Spotify, a music streaming service that has become famous for curating tunes based on its users’ preferences. Back in 2013, Spotify had a personalized news feed called Discover that gathered together artists, album reviews, new releases, recommendations, and playlists in a tile display. But its software engineers noticed that users were spending more time browsing playlists and cherry picking their favorite tunes one at a time, rather than using Discover. In order to keep users streaming music, they knew they had to create a more engaging and value-adding product.

With help from a product expert, the engineers developed Discover Weekly. Combining the best of Discover with Spotify’s browsing functionality, the personalized playlist became a formal Spotify product. The algorithmically driven service identifies songs for its users based on their listening habits, including the musical attributes of what they already listen to, and serves up similar music. During the first 10 weeks, one billion tracks were streamed from Discover Weekly. Some users say Spotify knows them better than they know themselves.

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