‘Context is lacking from music-streaming’ is a truism that gets less true by the month, with a number of new features – particularly on Spotify – attempting to plug the context gap.
The latest example is ‘Playlist Notes’, which enable playlisters to add text notes to tracks (and podcast episodes or audiobooks) within those playlists.
“Capture a memory, share a recommendation, or explain why a pick made the cut,” as Spotify put it. While this feature will be used by Spotify’s own playlist editors, it’s also being rolled out to Spotify’s users.
(This isn’t entirely new news: Spotify announced ‘user notes’ as a feature last month.)
For now, the editor’s notes will be visible to over-16s in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand on flagship playlists including ‘Today’s Top Hits’, ‘RapCaviar’ and ‘Hot Country’. However, the user notes are rolling out in more than 100 countries within Spotify’s mobile app.
As we noted in last month’s story, this isn’t just a cosy digital scrapbook for listeners or a way for playlisters to inject some personality into their picks.
It’s a huge, free, human-annotated dataset of emotions, memories and opinions around music. All of which – under Spotify’s terms and conditions – can be used to train its recommendation algorithms and other AI models.
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