Apple Music Introduces ‘My New Music Mix’ and ‘My Favorites Mix’ Playlists for iOS 10 Beta Users

Apple seems to be putting a fair amount of work into its Apple Music streaming service, likely in an effort to unseat the reigning king of streaming music, Spotify. At Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference this past June, Apple Music underwent a pretty serious overhaul, with major visual design changes and added functionality, including daily curated playlists in the “For You” section. Just today, however, beta users of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra who are also Apple Music subscribers may have noticed some additional new features in the For You tab – a pair of new playlists called “My New Music Mix” and “My Favorites Mix”.

The “My New Music Mix” is a weekly curated playlist, appearing every Friday with 25 new tracks selected based on your past listening habits. With the goal of helping users discover brand-new music that they may be interested in listening to, every track in the “My New Music Mix” has been released within the last thirty days. The mix is mostly made up of new tracks by artists that each user already listens to, or by artists that make similar music. For users familiar with Spotify, the “My New Music Mix” is very similar to the popular “Discover Weekly” playlists that Spotify introduced in 2015. Discover Weekly has been a great success for Spotify, with a reported 40 million users streaming some 5 billion songs from the playlist since it was introduced. Apple is likely hoping for similar success with its “My New Music Mix”.

The “My Favorites Mix”, by contrast, offers functionality not currently found in Spotify’s service. “My Favorites Mix” is a playlist that includes many of the user’s most frequently listened-to tracks, as well as a number of tracks that are similar to music the user listens to most. The “My Favorites Mix” is updated every Wednesday, and is great for users who are set in their musical tastes, but would like to hear some new music in the mix every once in awhile.

The two new playlists are available immediately for Apple Music subscribers who are using the beta pre-releases of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra. For the rest of us, the new playlists will likely be revealed tomorrow with the official release date of iOS 10 at an Apple event, alongside the highly-anticipated iPhone 7 and possibly a new Apple Watch.