> One of the very best recommendation engines I've encountered is the "Discover Weekly" playlist from Spotify.

The addition of Discover Weekly really confused me. Shouldn't the features that create a radio station from an artist or a playlist fill this need already? Why is it only updated weekly? I haven't tried other services much but it feels like Spotify isn't doing as much as they can with recommendations.

I think it's because people are used to listening to their Playlists. It feels more natural to check your "Discover Weekly" playlist then a whole new section within Spotify. And I think the decision to only update it ever Monday was pretty genius. Most people aren't particularly excited when Monday rolls around.. but when they think about the fact that it's Monday they are likely to remember they have a brand new Discover Weekly playlist to listen to. It's one of the good things about their Monday and becomes a habit over time.

I have Android Auto in my car, and my favorite part of the terrible, traffic-ridden commute from Redmond to Bellevue is listening to my Discover Weekly playlist. Even though I only really like about 10% of what it picks, usually in that 10% I find an artist I really enjoy and dig into that.

> I think it's because people are used to listening to their Playlists.

I wonder if there's any data on how common this is. I listen to large shared playlists or the radio feature the vast majority of the time to try to find new music.

I suspect that the reason Discover Weekly is so much better than radio, and is only available once per week, is that it's computationally costly.

Either way, radio-from-artist or radio-from-song can't utilize your listening history. It's quite possible you listen to an artist for different reasons than the reasons most people listen to that artist - in that case, you will get recommendations based on the majority's reasons.

You would expect personalized recommendations to have potential to do much better, and I'd argue that's exactly what we see with DW.

It's just you're not the target listener of the service.

This is one of my very favourite features of Spotify, because they consistently serve up songs that I like listening to. (Although I'm sure there's the psychological factor of me thinking "these songs were picked just for me, therefore they are good"...)

There's also a new personalised and auto-updated playlist called Release Radar. You should check it out!