Spotify listeners don’t just listen, they discover — new sounds, new genres, and new voices. Every Monday, our Discover Weekly playlist helps them do just that, giving each individual user a weekly personalized playlist based on how they stream.

This month, the flagship playlist celebrates its five-year anniversary, and it’s clearly been a big part of what keeps our listeners so engaged. Spotify listeners have streamed over 2.3 billion hours of their personalized Discover Weekly playlist between July 2015, 2019 and June 25, 2020.

Plus, this personalized discovery leads to deeper engagement for our listeners. Discover Weekly users stream more than 2x as long as non-Discover Weekly users,¹ eager to keep exploring more music and podcasts with open ears.

We dug into our dataset from five years of Discover Weekly to uncover some of the biggest discoveries — top artists, tracks, and hits that the playlist has helped listeners find.

• The Moroccan-Dutch DJ R3HAB is the most “discovered” artist in the most markets — 16, to be exact — meaning users across those countries streamed him the most out of any other creator on their Discover Weekly playlist.
• Halsey takes the spot for most discovered female artist globally. Notably, she released her first album, Badlands, in 2015 — the same year Discover Weekly was created! Now, she’s included on the list of Top Streamed Female Artists on Spotify.
• U.S. listeners stream Discover Weekly the most, and have spent a lot of time “discovering” music from RAC and Khalid.
• In the U.K. listeners have found Detroit-born house producer MK, and German DJ Alle Farben racks up the streams in his home country. And they’re discovering artists across genres too — everything from EDM to grupera (a regional Mexican style) to indietronica and Lithuanian folk.

So what does all this discovery mean for brands? Here’s what marketers can learn from the playlist’s success:

• Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Discover Weekly is beloved because it’s tailored to the specific music taste of each individual listener. This has created a deeply engaging experience for our users, who trust that Spotify understands their tastes. It can even feel like magic — we constantly see tweets where listeners say their Discover Weekly playlist knows them better than their spouse, or even better than they know themselves!
• Trusted experiences fuel engagement. As we mentioned above, Discover Weekly users stream more than twice as long as non-Discover Weekly users. That’s because the more personalized the listening experience is, the more our fans engage. We’ve seen that this trusted engagement can boost your audience’s receptiveness to your message.