Spotify AG has soft-launched a new product called Spotify Taste Rewind, that suggests songs from the past you might like based on musicians you currently like.

Announced by Spotify Engineer Juan Manuel Serruya on Facebook, the new service is pitched with the lines:

“Ever wondered which artists you would be listening to if you were born in another time?
Spotify can help you turn your music back in time :) try it out!”

How it works

As the service appears to be a soft-launch, or even a test at this stage, it’s not, as best as we can see, currently integrated into the desktop client, although Venture Beat claims it is.

Instead, users visit the site spotify-tasterewind.com to try the service.

After logging into the service with your Spotify credentials (Spotify username and password, or login with Facebook) you are presented with a list of artists you have listened to on Spotify, and are expected to select three artists to proceed.

If the artists on the first page aren’t the ones you particularly want, you can hit a refresh button on site to have more to pick from; for simple ease of use three were selected from the first page.

After this, the site takes a short time in processing your choices then providing you with playlists based on your selection and sorted by decade (two examples as follow.)

You can either play the playlists from the site or export the playlist to the Spotify web player, the browser-based version of Spotify.

You can’t directly export the created playlists to the desktop client or the mobile app, however once they are exported to the Spotify web player, closing then reopening the desktop client (and presumably the mobile app) makes the playlist appear and accessible.

It’s alright

Soft-launch or test, the best you can say for the Spotify Taste-Rewind is that it’s alright, but you’re not going to go wow when you use it.

If you are looking for new (as in new to you) music to listen to, it may come in handy as part of Spotify’s broader music recommendations service, although naturally it would become more appealing to use if it was included as part of the Spotify native ecosystem versus a separate site.