Spotify Community ShareMyPlaylists Introduces Moods To Give Songza The Blues

Spotify community and playlist sharing site ShareMyPlaylists is rolling out a new feature today: Moods will let users select playlists based on, er, mood.

Feeling happy? The site has you covered. Feeling cool? There are playlists for hipsters, too. Feeling intimate? Okay, you get the idea.

In total there are 12 moods on offer, all generated off the back of the 136,000 Spotify playlists that have been published on the site since its launch in 2009. It builds on existing playlist features that include the ability to browse by genre and to generate a playlist based on artist or track, which is powered by The Echo Nest.

The idea behind Moods is to make it even simpler to discover music that suits a user’s “frame of mind,” says ShareMyPlaylists founder Kieron Donoghue. “I guess this puts us closer to Songza’s model of playlists for all occasions. The big difference between them and us is that we have tens of thousands of more playlists than they do and our playlists are curated by the community at large.”

In contrast to Songza, ShareMyPlaylists doesn’t rely on a small pool of taste makers to create playlists internally, notes Donoghue. “After all, the best music nerds out there are the passionate music fans who don’t necessarily have any other platform to demonstrate their musical knowledge,” he says.

The UK startup wants to be that platform. It’s currently seeing over 1.5 million monthly unique visitors to its site and mobile apps, and earlier this year released an API to let developers access its treasure trove of playlist data.

Digging deeper into how the Moods feature works under the hood, Donoghue says that filters are applied to all playlists so that only the best playlists are eligible based on number of plays, subscribers and social interactions. “From there we apply our own algorithm that cross references with our internal analytics and API search stats to come up with a shortlist of playlists allocated to each mood,” he says. Finally, ShareMyPlaylist staff do a human “sense check” to be double sure that all the playlists for each mood are appropriate.

The new Moods feature is available on the site as of today and will be coming to ShareMyPlaylists’ iOS and Android apps “very soon,” says the company.