Apple Music has launched a new ‘Discovery Station’ aimed at helping its listeners discover new music. Here’s how it works.
The station appears under the ‘Listen Now‘ section in the Top Picks of the app. It’s a customized radio station that will play songs of a similar style to music in your personal library. The new station chooses songs that you don’t already have in playlists in your library. It’s unclear how well the algorithm driving this playlist will serve individuals, though, since there seems to be an equal amount of praise and complaints among online comments.
“I am pretty eclectic and it is giving me songs I am interesting in exploring,” writes one commenter. “Not all interesting but better than my prior experience.”
“Been listening for about 25 minutes and every song has been a new ‘Add to Library’ and ‘Love’ for me,” writes another. “It’s spot on! Loving it so far!”
“Skipped around 40 songs. What the f*** is that algorithm?” and “Found my own station in the app. No surprise, Apple Music’s algorithm is the same, terrible system it’s always been. No other app plays music I’ve disliked or suggests similar songs to my disliked music the way Apple does. There’s so much wrong with Apple Music, they need to fire current leadership and start over with someone that better understand how ‘discovering’ and curating music should work.”
So a mixed bag of feedback from the internet at large so far. The feature appears to mimic YouTube Music’s Discover Mix, which highlights tracks from artists you’ve listened to before along with new artists that feature a similar sound. The Discover Mix for YouTube Music rolled out in 2019—so Apple Music is again playing catch-up here.
“Discover and its odd number of songs (49) is mostly focused on evergreen tunes and artists that you might not have heard before,” YouTube says of the feature.