We've heard from many of you that it can take a lot of time and effort to organize your music collection and easily find what to play next out of the sea of options in your collection in Groove Music. For example, you've asked for an easy way to quickly find and play music based on common usage such as recently played/added, or metadata such as mood/genre. Additionally, when it comes to recommendations, people have expressed a desire for not only re-discovery of the songs you already love, but also discovery of new songs you'll probably love too.
Today, we are pleased to introduce Your Groove, the place for music that is centered around you. This is where you can not only quickly get back to things you've played recently, but also find recommendations for what to play next. Playlists for you are automatically generated playlists curated to your taste, based on a variety of factors such as your use of Groove (e.g. top plays, recent adds), musical metadata (e.g. mood, genre, era), information about the world of music around you (e.g. recent releases, who is on tour, critical reception), and common music-related activities (e.g. focusing at work, getting a party started) They update often to give you fresh recommendations, so save the ones you love to your own playlists so you can listen to them again and again. Saving a copy also gives you the ability to edit the content and download them for offline playback. The more music you add to your collection, the higher quality and variety of Playlists for you we will be able to generate. For those with a Music Pass, we mix in some recommendations of new songs you may like based on what you already have in your collection.
While building this feature, we learned that there are many interesting combinations of factors that can be used to build playlists, and each person values a different set. For example, some prefer to focus on their basic recent usage and plays, others listen to music based on activities, and others want multiple factors combined in interesting ways. We also found varied expectations on how many Playlists for you people want at a time and how often they want them to be refreshed. These are all things that we've iterated on internally, and now we would love to have your help in further tuning the experience to get things just right.
We can’t wait to hear what you think about this new feature. We have a few tweaks planned already for the next update, including making the playlist tiles brighter and more fun and adding tooltips when you hover over the play and "save a copy" buttons. What else? Play around with Your Groove and then jump in the Feedback Hub and let us know how you’d make it even better!
We’ve been testing this feature internally. Here’s the FAQ from those early adopters to get you started:
Which tracks are used to make Playlists for you?
In order to be used, tracks must either be from Groove Music Pass, or your own personal files uploaded to OneDrive. Playlists for you do not incorporate local tracks on your device, so if you want us to use those, you'll need to upload them to OneDrive.
Are Playlists for you made with tracks from my collection, or recommendations of tracks I might like?
For non-subscribers, we just use your OneDrive tracks. For Groove Music Pass users, we not only use the music you already know you love in your collection, but also incorporate some similar recommendations of tracks that you might like based on your collection. Let us know if you'd like to see more or less of either, or an even measure of both.
How do I get some/more of them?
Add music to your Groove Music Pass or OneDrive collection and the new tracks will be incorporated into Playlists for you on the next automatic update.
How often do they automatically update?
You should see an update every few days as long as you are an "active" user (meaning you've played some tracks in Groove Music recently). Otherwise they update when you add new music to your collection via Groove Music Pass or uploading to OneDrive.
Can I add track recommendations I like in Playlists for you to my music?
Yes, you can easily select the track, "Add to" and then choose "My music" or one of your playlists to save the newly recommended track to listen to later.
How many tracks do I need in my Groove Music Pass or OneDrive collection to get Playlists for you?
This varies based on how varied your tracks are and how many we recognize. But in general we recommend having 500 or so tracks to get a healthy number of Playlists for you generated.
How do these Playlists for you relate to my own user playlists?
These are recommended Playlists built by Groove for you, and so they are read-only since we'll be updating them often. However, if you like one, you can always "Save a copy" to your collection of playlists in order to edit, rename, download, etc. before there is an update giving you a fresh set of Playlists for you.
Thank you, Insiders, for your continued support. We couldn’t do this without you.
The Groove Music Team