For years, Spotify’s New Music Friday has been one of the app’s most influential playlists, helping millions of listeners discover new releases every week. But starting today, the platform is making subtle changes to one of its biggest products. This means putting the people who are actually responsible for curating the platform front and center.
Listeners in the US can find short videos created by Spotify’s editorial team embedded directly within New Music Friday. In these clips, our editors explain why they’re excited about a particular release, highlight up-and-coming artists, and share the stories behind songs they think listeners should know about.
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This new experience combines New Music Friday with The Drop Weekly, Spotify’s editor-led video series launched last year. The company says listeners responded strongly to these more personal recommendations, generating more than double the engagement through saves and likes.
The move comes at a moment when musical discovery is increasingly shaped by algorithms. While streaming services like Spotify can instantly generate playlists based on your listening habits, AI tools promise increasingly personalized recommendations. According to Spotify’s music editors, that’s exactly why the human perspective is more important than ever.
When asked if listeners still value hearing directly from human curators, Alecia Sierra, Spotify’s R&B editorial director, told Mashable, “I would argue that they want more of it and are demanding more of it.” “I don’t think there’s a better time than now to remind people that humans are here and still doing the work. Connection is something we all deeply crave, which is why humanizing recommendations and discoveries feel especially important.”
It may also be worth noting that AI-generated music is less likely to surface in human-curated playlists, as editors tend to prioritize artists and stories they think are meaningful and worth championing.
For Spotify’s editorial team, the goal is bigger than just recommending songs. It provides the context that turns casual hearings into lasting connections.
“We live in an era where anyone can listen to any song at any time,” says Global Hits Editor-in-Chief Cecilia Winter. “It’s not only the act of sifting through and actually finding something great, but it also creates a stronger connection by moving the context around it into a more shared space.”
This idea came up repeatedly in conversations with Mashable and Spotify editors. In their view, discovery is not just about bringing music to the surface. It’s about helping the listener understand why the song is important. It’s not about whose opinion you should listen to, but why you should listen to it. That is the role that music media has traditionally played. Publications like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork connect artists to the larger cultural conversation and provide viewers with a framework for understanding what’s noteworthy and why.
“Context is, in a sense, discovery,” said Carla Tulli, Spotify’s senior editor of folk and indie. “I think knowing that a song came from a specific moment, or that the artist is responding to something or someone in the lyrics, completely changes the way you experience music.”
For Sierra, their work is particularly important in R&B, a genre they describe as “cultural, rich and evolving,” but one that can still be ignored in broader musical conversations. The challenge, they say, is identifying artists before others catch on. While Spotify editors have access to listener data and trend signals, Sierra often relies on a simpler metric: whether she can’t stop playing a song herself.
“If I go back to that song over and over again and want to hear that song again, and that’s how I feel when I hear that song, then I think, or hope, other people will feel the same way,” they said.
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One of the biggest changes they are currently noting is the globalization of R&B. Sierra pointed to the growing wave of artists emerging from the UK, including Cleo Sol, Hermine, Sasha Keeble and Coun, as evidence that the genre continues to evolve beyond its traditional geographical boundaries.
“It just gives us a continuous marker that something is obviously going on,” they said. “All the artists in this space are loved, accepted, and growing.”
The new video also pulls back the curtain on a process that most listeners will never see. New Music Friday playlists are created through a highly collaborative editorial process. Throughout the week, genre experts and cultural experts from across Spotify will gather to discuss upcoming releases, share the songs they’re looking forward to, and discuss what to include in your playlists.
Spotify isn’t alone in taking this approach. Major streaming competitors like Apple Music and Amazon Music also employ editorial teams to curate playlists and shape music discovery. These videos give you a rare look at how the process works within the world’s largest music streaming service.
“When it comes to what goes on the list, there are a lot of factors that we balanced,” Winter said. “Of course, we want to reflect major news stories and moments that are of interest to a wide audience. But we also want to highlight artists across genres that we’re particularly excited about as editors and music experts.”
The effort goes far beyond listening sessions. Editors track audience behavior on Spotify, follow online communities, attend concerts, and maintain relationships with labels. We also regularly compare notes with colleagues around the world to identify emerging scenes before they become mainstream. This approach has more in common with traditional music journalism than the purely data-driven images often associated with streaming platforms.
Tulli cited conversations with Spotify’s international editorial team as an example. A few years ago, editors in the Nordic region began highlighting the growth of an underground dream pop and alternative pop scene emerging from Copenhagen. Over time, those sounds spread throughout the market and began to influence other artists, leading Spotify to launch its own dedicated playlist for the scene, Cph+.
This example highlights how Spotify’s editorial practices function as more than a reflection of listener behavior. The company’s biggest playlists, including New Music Friday, RapCaviar, mint, and Lorem, have become influential tastemakers in their own right, introducing up-and-coming artists to millions of listeners and helping shape what breaks into the mainstream.
Still, editors insist there are no shortcuts to discovering your next work.
“We listen to music almost all day long,” Winter said. “There’s no shortcut to listening to music all day and realizing that you’re now hearing a lot of the same tendencies, the same instrumentation, the same styles that you didn’t hear six months ago.”
The editorial department is also paying attention to the next wave of sound. Tulli highlighted the emerging post-hyperpop alternative scene led by artists such as 2hollis, MGNA Crrrta and Ninajirachi, and Sierra said he was excited about the growing role music videos can play in music discovery on Spotify.
What are they listening to now? Sierra recommends “Sweet Talk” by emerging artist nomi. Turi has Chanel Bees’ “Song for the Messenger” on repeat. And Winter chose New York duo Fcukers’ “LUCKY” as one of her songs of the summer.
“It’s a great song to walk around and feel like the main character,” Winter said.
Adding editorial videos to New Music Friday doesn’t fundamentally change how Spotify recommends music. But this feature speaks to something bigger.
Platforms are increasingly realizing that people don’t just follow recommendations. They follow people. That’s why creators are so important. That’s why newsletters have become more personal. That’s why publications are increasingly asking their reporters to go in front of the camera and build direct relationships with their audiences, rather than hiding behind bylines.
Spotify’s editor isn’t much different. While the recommendations themselves are still important, knowing who is making them is also becoming increasingly important. The person behind the playlist becomes part of the discovery experience. And in the age of AI overview and automated discovery, the value of a recommendation often depends on the person making it.
As Sierra says, it’s a reminder that there’s still a human on the other side of the headphones.
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