SoundCloud announced it is debuting a playlist called SoundCloud Weekly that will be a personalized playlist for each user curating music that they might like based on what they’ve previously listened to. The playlist will appear at the top of every user’s home screen and will update every Monday.
Now if this concept sounds familiar, you might know of Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist, one of the streaming service’s most popular features that does essentially the same thing.
Without knowing much about the actual algorithm that picks music (which both companies, for obvious reasons, keep a very tight lid on), both offerings basically do the same thing. Where SoundCloud really hopes people realize the differentiation is the type of catalogue each service has under its umbrella.
SoundCloud prides itself on being a community of not only users, listeners, and music lovers, but also a community of creators, collaborators, and artists. As you probably know, you can’t just create a Spotify account and start posting music to the platform, but you can on SoundCloud. SoundCloud is betting that having that vast library makes their music discovery playlist that much more robust.
“SoundCloud has the largest, most diverse music catalog ever assembled,” Kerry Trainor, SoundCloud’s CEO, said in a statement.
While many people do struggle with music discovery, the evidence is there that Spotify’s Discover Weekly does help people discover music and helps encourage them to expand their interests beyond the top 1% of music put out by major labels. With SoundCloud Weekly, SoundCloud is betting some of those people now want to go deeper than Spotify can offer.
This feature is also something their existing users were clamoring for, particularly the ones that eschew platforms like Spotify and Apple Music in favor of SoundCloud precisely because of that deeper library of offerings. While by market share, SoundCloud lags behind those other two offerings, it is also often the choice for artists, promoters, and other music industry insiders. SoundCloud likely hopes this new offering will help users see the same utility in the platform as the industry does and help make the market more primed for a wider scope of music discovery, which in turn can benefit music creators as a whole.
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