Apple Music has been on a roll lately, expanding the number of devices it’s available on to include everything from Alexa speakers and set-top boxes to flashy sports cars, and it’s been making just as many cool changes on the back-end, adding new curated playlists and even karaoke-style lyrics.
So it’s pretty clear that Apple really wants to make sure that Apple Music is your “go to” music service, regardless of how invested you are in Apple’s own product ecosystem, and it’s been improving the experience with even more curated playlists, the latest of which will now be refreshed every single day with hot new tracks, and it’s keeping its focus on human curation in the hopes of distinguishing itself from the algorithmic selections made by rivals like Spotify.
According to 9to5Mac, the New Music Daily playlist replaces the longtime “Best of the Week” offering, which was previously updated with the week’s top tracks every Friday. Now, the new list will be updated every day with “new music you simply can’t miss from across the world and across genres.”
With the debut of the list, the lead single is Taylor Swift’s “The Man” from her newest album, and it’s a safe bet that Apple will be featuring new lead artists in the overall playlist artwork on a continuing basis. Other artists in the first cut of the new playlist include Missy Elliott, Sturgill Simpson, Lana Del Ray and Summer Walker.
Apple clearly wants to continue focusing Apple Music on helping users discover and explore new music, and this latest playlist means that users will get a more dynamic mix of new music that changes up at least a little bit every day. Some tracks will likely stay in the playlist for more than a day, but at least the overall experience is going to be changing up daily.
While the playlist can easily be found among Apple’s other top playlists, you can add it to your own library for quick and easy access, and it will still automatically update as the song list changes.
The “New Music Daily” playlist joins another big new playlist that arrived earlier this week, “Shazam Discovery”, which takes data from the Shazam music discovery platform that Apple acquired two years ago, providing weekly updates of new tracks based on what Shazam users around the world are searching for. The result of that one, Apple hopes, will be to highlight up-and-coming songs from breaking artists, getting ahead of what will likely eventually be topping the charts.
By contrast, “New Music Daily” is a human-curated list that seems to be designed to highlight what’s already popular, particularly considering its a replacement for “Best of the Week.” Since the picks are made by humans, rather than algorithms, however, it’s unclear exactly how the selections will be made, but the key point seems to be that it’s going to appeal to music fans who are looking for something new every day, with Apple describing it as “the playlist that never sleeps.”