Spotify launches Discover & Follow tabs for song recommendations, Collections for all of your music

Today at its event in NY, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has announced a new Discover Tab, which gives you recommendations alongside album reviews, concert listings, playlists & more – all personalized to your listening. In addition, Spotify also announced a new Collection tab, which brings together all of your music (instead of fussing with playlists), and a Follow tab, which allows you to follow influencers like Barack Obama, Shakira and Bruno Mars.
Ek explains that the new Follow Tab lets you connect with friends, artists and celebrities and for music recommendations.

For example, when Bruno Mars is writing a new record, he’ll share with his followers what he’s listening to during the process. Spotify has basically taken social elements of Facebook and encouraging music fans to connect with their favorite artists directly on Spotify, rather than driving them to connect elsewhere.

As part of its new Follower system, Spotify is introducing push notifications, which Artists can use to share new songs with fans.
Other new features include song previews and recommendations based on your age. As you listen, Spotify will continually recommend new music. This decision was made in order to help consumers discover new music, and to help artists be discovered. Ek explains that its goal was to make suggestions human and personal.
Spotify explains:

With our new Collection feature you can save music for later, discover what’s new, or listen back to music you loved from before

This news reiterates previous leaks which detailed Spotify’s plans to release enhancements to its existing, but limited following system.
Music streaming service Spotify has also shared that it now has over 5 million paying customers globally — 1 million in the US — 20 million total active users and 1 billion playlists. Funny enough, more than 4 million of its playlists are named “Love.”
Aside from integrating with Facebook’s social graph, Spotify had by no means done social well. As we’ve previously explained, one of Spotify’s greatest weaknesses lies in its inability to surface interesting and relevant artists and songs from its vast catalog of music. Hopefully this announcement will help to resolve this issue, and if it does, Spotify will likely see a strong uptick in usage as it veers into social network territory.
Today’s news follows Spotify’s beta launch of its browser-based music app, which is currently only available to a “small number of users.” Spotify confirmed its Web player with TNW, explaining that it’s “potentially…a great additional feature for times you can’t play music through the desktop app, like at work or at a friend’s house.” More details on the Web player will surface next year.
In addition, Spotify’s $3 billion funding round closed last month, and the company counts Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, and Coca-Cola as investors. Spotify also recently revealed a list of its most streamed songs of 2012, which included Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know and Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe.


from Cult of Mac by Cult of Android