Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists have been an incredible success and one of Spotify’s distinguishing features against competitors, and now it’s informing future products from Spotify.

Discover Weekly is a playlist, updated every monday, that brings together 30 songs Spotify thinks you’ll like based on a number of things, primarily what people like you are listening to. It sounds simple but it’s something Spotify have managed to do so well that no other streamers have matched it, no matter their technique of personalising your listening.

Spotify have revealed that since launching Discover Weekly last July it’s been used by 40 million individual users and has resulted in 5 billion tracks streamed. The statistics for Discover Weekly also revealed that over half of the playlist’s users listen to at least 10 of the tracks every week and save one or more songs. Thanks to its unrivalled success Spotify have made some changes to their infrastructure so they can use the same approach easily in future innovations.

Lead developer of music discovery and personalisation at Spotify, Matt Ogle said: “Discover Weekly started as a hack project, and if ten other people had hack ideas we didn’t have the resources to push them out. The update to the infrastructure will allow us to experiment a lot more. We can now do this kind of deep personalisation at scale across a number of different products.”

Discover Weekly works by analysing your listening history and comparing it with people who have listened to similar music, aligning your recommendations with the tastes of users with similar tastes. Whilst this has been brilliant for discovering new music people like it has also been a great boost for indie artists. As it’s unbiased it could recommend you someone completely unknown because someone with similar tastes listens to them. Reportedly over 8,000 artists have had over half their listeners come from Discover Weekly in the past month.

Spotify haven’t gone in depth about what they will be introducing based on Discover Weekly but according to TechCrunch there will be more personalised playlists. A playlist for new releases and one for oldies is rumoured – personally I think a personalised playlist of music you’d like that’s just been released would be incredible.