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How to create a Spotify Blend playlist
This new Spotify feature lets you blend music tastes with a friend automatically.
If you’re looking to find Spotify’s new Blend playlist feature and build a perfect playlist for you and a friend but aren’t sure where to look, you aren’t alone. You likely got a pop-up for the feature when launching the app recently, but it can be hard to find. Here’s everything you need to know about Blend playlists and how to create them on Spotify.
What are Blend playlists?
Blend is a new feature from Spotify that allows two users to create a shared playlist that merges their recent music tastes and changes daily. Your Blend playlist is accessible on both accounts and Spotify’s personalization algorithm will switch-up the collection of songs daily based on what each listener is streaming.
While building out a playlist with someone song-by-song is fun, having one that changes automatically does save you a lot of effort.
Each time you and a friend create a Blend playlist, you’ll be given a taste match score that lets you know how similar your music tastes are and a couple sleek infographics, similar to Spotify’s year-in-review Wrapped playlist, that you can share on social media.
How to create a Spotify Blend playlist
These custom playlist options on Spotify move around from time to time and can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look. Once you’ve got a few steps down though, making a Blend playlist is simple.
The Blend playlist feature isn’t front-and-center on the Spotify app, but you can find it by following these instructions
- Launch the Spotify app on mobile (this feature is not available on desktop right now) and tap on the “Search” tab on the bottom of the screen.
- Find and tap on the “Made for you” button. Where this option lives might shift from time to time depending on what Spotify is promoting, but you can generally find it near the top of the “Browse all” header.
- Tap the “Blend” album cover to open up an empty playlist. This option lives front-and-center under “Made for You” right now, but you might have to scroll down to find it later on.
- Spotify will prompt you to invite another user to the playlist. There’s no messaging framework within the Spotify app, so once you tap “Invite” you’ll be asked to send the invite in a text message, through Facebook Messenger, in an email, etc.
- Your friend needs to click the link in that message, which will open their Spotify app and ask if they’d like to join your Blend playlist. Once they tap join, the rest is automatic — a 50-song playlist featuring a mix of both users' recently streamed songs will generate immediately.
Once you create a Blend playlist with a friend, it will show up with any other playlists you have saved in your library. You can also view all of your Blend playlists by navigating to the “Made for you” section by following the steps above.
I created a few Blend playlists with my partner and a couple friends with some really interesting results.
My partner and I have lived together for about seven years and regularly play music on each other’s devices when we’re in our apartment or in the card, so I expected to know just about everything on this playlist — but there were definitely a few surprise songs that I had never heard her play before, which was cool.
I also made a Blend playlist with my friend and college roommate Casey — we used to listen to all the same artists when we lived together, but obviously our tastes have changed and separated a bit since then. It’s really cool to see artists like Drake and Jay-Z that we used to blast in the dorm still in rotation, alongside softer country and folk tunes that we now listen to separately.
Then I made a playlist with Sokvonny, a friend and old coworker. We were just texting about Kanye West’s Donda release yesterday and have always connected over Frank Ocean and office grind lo-fi electronic playlists, but never really listen to music together. On our Blend playlist, I got to see a different side of her music taste — dancey, upbeat electronic music from artists I’ve never heard of. And she got to learn that I’ve been sitting around listening to sad-ass Phoebe Bridgers hits lately with a dash of outlaw country.
Spotify doesn’t exactly spell out how it's pulling these Blend playlists together, but it’s definitely not as straightforward as taking each user's top played tracks and throwing them together. Not a single song from my side of the aisle made it on to all three playlists on the first go (although there are days when they look more similar) and it definitely feels like there’s an effort to merge two users’ tastes instead of alternating song picks from two lists.
Hopefully Spotify pulls this feature out of the back menus so it's easier for everyone to find. Until then, you’ll have to be the one sending out the Blend invites.