
According to a report from entertainment research firm MIDiA earlier this year, Spotify now has a 31% global market share in the music subscription market, ahead of Apple Music (15%), Amazon Music (13%) and others with smaller slices of the pie. The streamer’s personalized playlists are a big selling tool for its service, and one of the reasons why Spotify continues to lead the music streaming market despite not having the built-in advantage of rival music services - like Apple Music or Google’s YouTube Music, whose music apps ship with the tech giants’ own smartphones and mobile software. Spotify also offers another Blend-like playlist called the Duo Mix, but this, too, is limited to users on the same shared plan. But the feature was limited to those on Spotify’s Family plans - not to individual subscribers. Spotify Family subscribers already had access to an auto-updated Family Mix playlist composed of tracks everyone in the family agreed upon, based on similar technology. In addition to working with artists, Spotify has updated Blend to allow groups of family members or friends to create their own shared playlists. These cards are designed to be shared directly to social media sites, like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter. As with other Blend playlists, users will receive a card that displays their “taste match” score - a score that’s calculated based on how similar or different their listening preferences are when compared with the other Blend contributors. The company has partnered with artists including BTS, Charli XCX, Kacey Musgraves, Lauv, Megan Thee Stallion, Mimi Webb, Tai Verdes, Xamã and others to allow Spotify users to merge their musical tastes into a single Blend playlist where their own favorite tracks are matched with those from the artists. Today, Spotify says it will expand Blend to allow users to create playlists with up to 10 people, or even with some of their favorite artists. This Blend then updates daily with new songs based on everyone’s listening habits. The feature currently allows two Spotify users to see where their musical tastes overlap by mixing together their favorite songs to find those they have in common. Spotify’s popular playlist creation tool, Blend, is getting its biggest update since its offiical launch last year.
