By: Nick Gambino
Spotify has spent the last few years positioning itself as the king of music streaming, but recently they’ve taken it upon themselves to try and corner the podcast market as well, offering original podcasts and a whole new section for your favorite talk radio shows.
Now, the streaming giant has announced that their bringing their popular personalization feature to podcasts with the “Your Daily Podcast” playlist for both Free and Premium users.
Not unlike the Your Daily Mix playlists that gather up customized recommendations that are supposed to fit your tastes, Your Daily Podcast contains a combination of the shows you currently listen to and ones Spotify thinks you’d like.
“Spotify transformed music discovery with playlists like Discover Weekly and Daily Mix,” Spotify said in a press release. “Now we’ve created Your Daily Podcasts – our first daily personalized podcast playlist that gives users an easy way to discover new shows while also keeping up with old favorites.”
You’ll see the new playlist if you’ve listened to four or more podcasts on the platform in the last 3 months. It’ll be in both the “Your Top Podcasts” and “Made For You” sections.
The algorithm employed in the new feature analyzes the way you listen to podcasts and what you listen to, to come up with best-recommended episodes from your favorite shows and those similar to the ones you listen to. Per Spotify, they don’t recommend any out-of-sequence episodes from serialized shows so as to not spoil anything.
This is another smart step as they battle Apple to be your number one platform for long-form radio programs. Personally, I’ve started to gravitate toward Spotify for the majority of my podcast listening, thanks to Apple Podcasts’ increasingly non-user-friendly UI.
As with a lot of Apple’s software they’ve overcomplicated it over time to the point where it feels like a self-induced headache every time I launch the app. At least with Spotify, I’m using the app where I already listen to all of my music, an app that aims to keep it simple.
I guess that’s to be expected from a company that deals solely in streaming audio, as opposed to Apple who has their fingers in numerous software and hardware pies.
