Streaming music service Spotify AB has introduced a new music recommendation service that taps into social media to find new music.

Called “Fresh Finds,” the six new playlists deliver two hours of new music each week based on an analysis of music blogs, news sites, and the songs being listened to by “tastemakers” on Spotify itself.

Five of the new playlists are genre-specific: Fire Emoji for hip-hop; Basement for electronic; Hiptronix for vocal pop; Six Strings for guitar rock; Cyclone for experimental music; with the sixth, simply called Fresh Finds, spanning the other five lists.

Spotify claims that by combining early online buzz across blogs and music news sites with billions of listening hours on Spotify, the new service is able to identify anonymous listening patterns around fans who listen to “up and coming” music, specifically “tastemakers that are predicting what music trendsetters will soon be listening to.”

“Spotify has always focused on artists and listeners, and with Fresh Finds we’re specifically looking at new creators, digging deeper to understand how undiscovered artists can attract a huge fan base,” Spotify Principal Scientist Dr. Brian Whitman said in the announcement post. “By analyzing the listening behavior of our top tastemaker users, we’re able to predict new breakout artists and filter their hits-to-be into playlists with the most promising new music out there.”

Sounds great

If you’re already a Spotify user you may already be aware of their Discover Weekly service, a service that allows users to discover new music from within the genres they like to listen to, and it’s a good service at that, to discover new music and artists in an easy-to-use way.

This new Fresh Finds service sounds great on paper, particularly given its use of data mining as a way to discover music that may be available on Spotify, but hasn’t been listened to in any meaningful way among the company’s user base yet.

The new playlists will be updated every Wednesday, with listeners being encouraged to follow them on Spotify and harvest tracks they like to their own libraries and playlists.

Fresh Finds is accessible within Browse to all users in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, with users in other regions able to access them manually by search or links.

Image credit: Spotify OS X app/ screenshot.