SoundCloud Weekly is the audio service’s pitch for personalized discovery

SoundCloud is hopping on the bandwagon of weekly discovery playlists. The audio platform released a new feature called SoundCloud Weekly that offers recommended listening based on the other music each user has listened to, liked, reposted, and shared. The programming will be refreshed every Monday. SoundCloud Weekly will get primo real estate, appearing at the top of the home screen on the mobile apps and in the Discover tab on the web version. It’s also promoting the feature with a trio of scientifically inspired videos featuring rapper Desiigner.

Personalized recommendation playlists have become a standard feature for most streaming services after Spotify’s Discover Weekly service struck a chord with many listeners. SoundCloud is getting to the party late in terms of the weekly cycle, but it did experiment with a daily playlist called The Upload starting last year. Particularly given the open nature of SoundCloud and its 180 million available tracks, having several options for curated listening seems like a good choice. It will be interesting to see if these algorithmically generated lists are capable of boosting the platform’s breakout successes for artists.

Anna Washenko