SoundCloud Now Has Its Own ‘Discover Weekly’

Two things reign supreme in the music-streaming world right now: playlists and discovery. SoundCloud is the latest service to hop onboard with both ideas, launching a new, routinely-updated recommendation playlist called SoundCloud Weekly on Monday.

The algorithm-driven playlist, which users can access via SoundCloud’s home screen, homepage or mobile app, updates every Monday with user-specific artist and track recommendations. Its workings are similar to Spotify’s signature Discover Weekly playlist, which debuted in 2015 and quickly grew to not only captivate Spotify’s audience but also wield influence over the offerings of competing streaming services (although SoundCloud notes that its recommendations can pull from “millions of creators across the platform,” a size that is “multiple times more than other streaming services”).

Thanks to its history as a creator community in which artists can freely upload mixes and remixes, SoundCloud indeed has some 180 million tracks, which is four times Spotify’s 35 million and Apple Music’s 45 million. “SoundCloud has the largest, most diverse music catalog ever assembled,” SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor said in a statement accompanying the company’s press release. “SoundCloud Weekly draws from our global creator community to deliver a simple, personalized music experience that connects more creators with new listeners than ever before. Our commitment to giving more creators more ways to be discovered is why what’s next in music is first on SoundCloud.”

The service previously introduced a discovery playlist called The Upload in May 2017, and a SoundCloud representative tells Rolling Stone that the two playlists are entirely separate, with The Upload drawing from recently uploaded music content to surface new music on a daily basis. It’s not yet clear how the two features fit together — nor is how much clout SoundCloud’s new offering will have amongst music fans, released well after many other streaming services have come out with discovery engines of their own.