I don’t think it’s possible to really understand how great Spotify’s algorithm is until you’ve experienced it recommending a fantastic song, and you go check the artist out, notice they have less than ten thousand plays and have only released two songs

Idk how that’s even possible but it happens once a month for me

They use human curation for many of the pre-built playlists, but those humans are also assisted by some interesting algorithm work on the backend.

For instance, the Fresh Finds playlists - music that's good but very new or undiscovered - are made by curators who sift through songs and artists listened to each week by "tastemaker users". Spotify combs through their listener data and identifies users who have a habit of listening to music that later blows up and becomes much more popular. They tag those users anonymously and use their taste to inform the Fresh Finds playlists, which also feed the rest of the editorial department.

Really cool stuff.

https://news.spotify.com/us/2016/03/02/introducing-fresh-fin...

I read it's based on human curation - this is the clever part.

If you have songs in your playlist that someone else has in their playlist it'll find a song in that other playlist that you don't have. Offload the complexity of matching to humans already doing it.

Sounds kind of like pagerank for songs.

Yeah I could see that - if you think of being in a playlist like a citation.