Terrestrial and satellite radio, be warned: Spotify sees your morning zoo shows and wants a piece of that action. The streaming music service has just launched a new playlist, expressly for U.S. listeners, called Your Daily Drive — a mix of music and news aimed at giving car-bound commuters another option for their long stints behind the wheel. The playlist will take short-form podcast news updates from The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and PRI and mix them with curated music that’s chosen from your existing musical interests, effectively creating a personalized radio station that will be different for every listener.
Spotify says Your Daily Drive will be updated throughout the day, and “combines music you love with relevant, timely world updates from reputable sources – all put together in a seamless and unified listening experience.” The company claims that “Americans log 70 billion hours behind the wheel each year, with a big chunk of that time spent commuting to and from work or school,” which not only explains the motivation behind the creation of Your Daily Drive, but also sheds some light on why the company is experimenting with its Car Thing — a voice-enabled in-car device that will give Spotify greater insights into its listeners’ habits while commuting.
Now that Spotify has its own radio station aimed at drivers and a device that’s designed to allow for voice interactions, it likely won’t be long before the company integrates these two products with the third piece of the driving puzzle: Interactive voice-based ads. Spotify hasn’t said whether or not premium subscribers will hear ads during Your Daily Drive, but it’s virtually guaranteed that its free accounts will get them.
Your Daily Drive is much more than a new playlist. It’s Spotify’s first real test to see if it can get a key audience — car-based commuters — to abandon their favorite radio stations in favor of a personalized listening experience. On the one hand, it’s going to be the musical equivalent of social media’s filter bubble, but then again, as Spotify points out, it’s also “an escape from toggling between multiple stations to avoid music that isn’t quite your speed.”
