Spotify’s new ‘Only You’ feature brings in even more personalized playlists

Spotify wants to drive engagement by making the annual Wrapped a constant.

What you need to know

• Spotify today rolled out a new ‘Only You’ feature to its mobile and web apps.
• It’s a set of features that’s reminiscent of its end-of-year Wrapped Experience.
• Spotify will also add a new “Blend” feature that ‘blends’ the music tastes of two users into one playlist for a more social listening session.

Spotify is bringing Wrapped earlier this year, only that it’s called “Only You”, a new experience in Spotify that does what Wrapped does — but it’s going to be here all year round. It’ll be accessible on the web or in the iOS and Android phones.

Only You consists of a few experiences that’ll be available for you in the hub. There’s the “Your Audio Birth Chart” feature that appropriates the language of a horoscope but for your music taste. Your Sun sign will show the artist you’ve listened to most over the last 6 months, the Moon sign is for artists that’ll showcase your emotional side, and your Rising sign shows an artist you’ve recently connected with.

You’ll also find a “Dream Dinner Party”, allowing you to create a customized playlist of the artist whom you’d hypothetically invite to a dinner party. There’s “Artists Pairs”, a feature that links two diverse artists that you’ve listened to. Say, for instance, sampling Bon Jovi with AJ Tracy or some other seemingly random combination.

Spotify is also adding a new feature known as Blend alongside Only You. It’s aimed at letting two friends merge their music tastes so Spotify spins up — or blends — a playlist of their combined tastes. It’s accessible on iOS and Android only, not on the web as the other features are.

Spotify’s Wrapped is an event that typically drives engagement because it is a limited-time event. While Spotify may want to capitalize on that, it’s worth noting that its universal availability may limit the uniqueness, and paradoxically kill the specialness and popularity of ‘Wrapped’. On the other hand, Spotify does have more than 356 million users. You can go viral with less.