ExtraTorrent | Spotify Will Tailor Music to Your Mood

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Famous music service Spotify is considering the idea of using sensors on the listener’s body or in their smartphone which would measure their heart rate and select the appropriate music.
 

The more data Spotify manages to collect on listeners’ habits, the better advice on music its algorithms can give. Apart from music, motion, heart rate, and temperature, the service could also start monitoring sleep patterns. Spotify explained that information provided by sensors can be used to automatically create playlists based on listener’s activities like workouts, driving, sleeping or late-night working, without human interaction.

Spotify could automatically start playing pumping music if you are going for a run, or peaceful ambient tracks if you are ready to go to bed. Its developers admit that the more they know about listeners, the better their recommendations can be. It seems that overloading listeners with choice provided a poor user experience, so a balance must be found between quantity and quality of recommendations.

At the moment, Spotify’s recommendation engine is powered by a combination of human editors, algorithms, social information and previous listening records. The engine provides personal recommendations about artists, albums and tracks. These also inform the shuffle play feature which Spotify unveiled last December and now continues to improve. At least 50% of mobile listening is people listening to their own playlists, and shuffle play allows them to play any of their playlists.

Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming services. Last month, Led Zeppelin made its streaming debut on the service after it made ad-supported streaming available on mobile devices.