Spotify launches new Release Radar feature as battle with Apple Music intensifies

Release Radar serves up fresh releases from your top artists as a companion to the popular Discover Weekly playlists

Spotify is debuting a new personalised weekly playlist for all users called Release Radar, following the incredible success of Discover Weekly. The new playlist launches today and will be updated once a week on Fridays.

Release Radar compiles all the best brand-new releases from artists that you already love and listen to regularly, keeping you up to date on music you’ll want to hear without having to actively keep track of who’s releasing what and when.

It uses the same ‘deep learning’ system as Discover Weekly, which debuted in 2014 and gets to know your music taste before recommending existing music that Spotify thinks you will like. Discover Weekly has become a favourite part of many people’s Monday mornings, with over 40 million people having used the feature.

Unlike Discover Weekly, which only bases its recommendations on your last six months or so of listening habits, Release Radar will look through your entire history to work out who your favourite artists are and serve up two hours of their newest tunes every Friday, with a few ‘new discoveries’ thrown in for good measure.

The release of the new playlist comes at a time of unprecedented competition in the music streaming industry. Apple is continuing to push Apple Music with fervour, constantly expanding into new territories and the Android version of the app has just left beta. At WWDC in June, Apple announced the incredibly successful new platform has more than 15 million paid subscribers, now half of Spotify’s paid subscriber base. Also announced was a complete re-design of the service coming later this year, hoping to tackle criticisms of the app being too complicated to use.

Spotify, is banking on the debut of Release Radar, then, to help hold its own against its quickly-growing rival. Following Discover Weekly’s huge popularity, the Swedish company has realised that curation is a key to success going forward in the streaming industry. Many users, when offered over 30 million tracks, don’t know where to start; personalised playlists are revolutionising music discovery within Spotify, and many other streaming services are following suit. Lead software engineer Edward Newett, speaking to WIRED, said: “We’ve now found that the playlist format is actually a super successful way to ship product. It’s a very lean-back experience.”