Hasta La Gadget!

Toss out your real radio–Spotify Radio will play music you actually like

Spotify has added a Pandora-like radio station to its music-streaming app. To be clear, Spotify always had Spotify Radio–it’s just that it was junk.

Previously with Spotify Radio, you’d click the little-used tab and be presented with a confusion of options. You had to pick a genre, and you could also choose set the decades you’d like the music to come from.

The trouble was, nobody but bad commercial radio stations chooses music like that, and the results were predictably awful.

The new Spotify Radio is more like Pandora or Last FM. You pick a track and hit play. Spotify will somehow come up with a playlist based on that song, and you can skip any tracks you don’t like, as often as you like.

And it works. I picked one of the pre-chosen “stations” based on my “Top Artists” (you can also choose “Top Tracks,” “Popular” or even–still here–Genre). Based on Nicholas Jaar (whose Space Is Only Noise If You Can See has been an obsession for the last two weeks), Spotify consistently returned equally downbeat, writer-friendly tracks. I even discovered some new artists.

The big advantage Spotify has is that it knows the listening habits of all ten million of its customers. That’s not a bad data pool to draw upon when making recommendations. Spotify doesn’t say just how it picks tracks for you, but I’d guess it has at least something to do with this data.

Who cares? After all, Spotify lets you pick any of its 15 million tracks directly. But what about those times when you have one track in your head? Now you can build a whole playlist around it, automatically. Yes, that’s something you can get from Pandora, too. If you live in the U.S.

To try out the new Spotify Radio, you’ll need to go grab the pre-release beta version of the app (Mac and Windows).

Discover the new Spotify Radio [Spotify Blog]