What happened at the big Spotify event?

Rumors started surfacing earlier this month about a Spotify smart speaker and a Spotify gadget for your car. Today in New York, Spotify held an event and everybody thought that’s when we’d learn more about these new Spotify peripherals. Turns out, we were wrong. Instead, Spotify released some pretty interesting news about a brand new app that it’ll be offering its free users. Let’s have a look at this in more detail.

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Having already taken a swipe at traditional record stores, Spotify wants this new app to take on broadcast radio. The app will use machine learning and AI to automatically generate playlists for free users. Users will also have unlimited access to 750 tracks from 15 top playlists and will have unlimited skips so they’ll be able to pick songs directly. This number of tracks is obviously a hell of a lot less than what premium subscribers have access to but resembles something similar to the song lists radio DJs have to pick from when they’re broadcasting.

Spotify is calling the new automatic playlists “self-driving playlists,” which may explain why the Spotify car dongle rumor got started.

The new free Spotify app will start rolling out in the coming weeks so keep your eyes peeled for word on an exact date.

Apart from the new free app, Spotify’s big event brought no more big news. No changes were announced for the premium service and there was nothing mentioned about any hardware. Still, a more dynamic free Spotify experience will please a lot of people. And with Spotify having over 90 million free users, you can expect radio stations around the world will be thinking long and hard about what they’re going to do about this new threat.

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