Spotify's 'Only You' feature explains how you really do have weird taste
A new playlist feature called Blend mixes your musical taste with a friend's.
Spotify regularly produces "experiences" that offer insight into your streaming habit, usually leaving you with new playlists to fit your audio preferences. Whether its a road trip mix or your most-streamed tunes of the year, the company is constantly coming up with new ways to put your behavior to work on something new. Today, Spotify revealed its latest iteration called Only You. Where the end-of-year Wrapped feature can tell you your top artists and songs, the company explains that Only You offers details on how you listen — and what makes your combinations different from anyone else.
Like the 2020 installment of Wrapped, Only You is a shareable story-driven setup that allows you to watch the various aspects of your streaming behavior like you would daily updates at the top of your Instagram feed. Only You begins with a unique artist pairing, so for me it highlighted how I might jump from Eric Church to Pet Shop Boys.
The feature also offers insight into music from specific years you stream often, the music or podcast you listen to frequently at a specific time of day, your unique mix of genres/topics and more. There's "Your Audio Birth Chart" that covers the artist you listened to most over the last six months, the artist that "best shows your emotional or vulnerable side" and an artist you've only recently discovered. "Your Dream Dinner Party" allows you to select three artists you'd like to share a meal with, offering a rather interesting mix of styles (and probably personalities). One you've picked your trio, Spotify will create new playlists for each one that include their music and some tunes from similar acts.
There's a second playlist building option in Only You that Spotify is calling Blend. Currently in beta, Blend allows you to select one friend for the app to build a custom mix based on your combined musical tastes. Like a lot of the company's automatically generated playlists, Blend is updated daily so you can track how each other's listening habit changes over time. Blend is available to both Premium and free users, and the feature resides in the Made for Two section of the Only You hub.
Only You is currently available inside the Spotify app.
