Spotify

Taste Rewind

Find out what someone with your taste would be listening to in every decade back to the 60s.

Taste Rewind is an experiment we built with Spotify to determine what music you might have listened to in the last few decades, based on your taste today. By tapping into Spotify’s vast database of music and artist profiles, we were able to make a compelling speculation on decade-specific tracks that would resonate with you. By selecting three artists from either your library or a collection of popular artists, you embark on your personal Rewind. Your taste in each decade is captured and displayed in a personalized festival poster, from which you can hear samples of the artist’s song in that decade.

Spotify’s recent acquisition of The Echo Nest opened a world of information for us to jump into and play around with. The greatest technical constraint was, without a doubt, efficiency in our usage of the Spotify / Echo Nest databases. We were expecting a considerable amount of traffic, so we had to design a lean formula to ascertain a user’s taste, and for matching those same key qualities in artists across decades. This was a personally important point for us to get right, as music is something we care so much about. We wanted it to succeed in broadening people’s musical horizons. We wanted the results to be special.

With audio being our natural ally, the pleasantness of the experience was paramount -- both visually and in usability. We wrapped the experience in a smooth, sleek interface that aligned to Spotify’s visual identity. Easy on the eyes and ears, the Taste Rewind experience focuses on discovery over profiling and analysis. Best yet -- you can use it over and over to get as many new and personalized playlists as you can handle.