UNVEILING MUSICAL GEMS: HOW TO DISCOVER YOUR NEXT FAVORITE ARTIST AT GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL

One of the pleasures of finding a new band, particularly at an upbeat festival such as Glastonbury, is the thrill of being led away from the aromas of street food by the sound of what might be the next band you absolutely love playing live. But the volume of acts performing at a large festival can be daunting and, as anyone who’s ever been to a big music festival knows, it’s not always easy to seek the diamonds among the rough. How can you make sure you don’t miss a band you’d love, if what you prefer is buried within the mountain of options?

DISCOVER NEW ARTISTS WITHOUT LEAVING IT TO CHANCE

Unless you’re the sort of person to leave your musical discovery to the dice of serendipity or the frequency list of the scrupulous rule-keeper in your squad, there’s a piece of good news. As part of its ongoing partnership with the Glastonbury Festival, Spotify is hopeful that the power of the algorithm will help guide you towards performers you’re most likely to like. If so, that could spell momentous changes for festivalgoers – and for remote fans.

DISCOVER AND CONNECT WITH PERSONALIZED LINEUP RECOMMENDATIONS

Just announced, this feature will soon be available integrated into the official Glastonbury app for iOS and Android, allowing you to link a Spotify account and receive an algorithmically generated personalised top 10 lineup, compiled based on the artists you regularly listen to on Spotify. This kind of localised, algorithmic music-discovery is great news for music festival-goers and those who just want to stream from home, helping to ensure everyone’s experience is surrounded by the music most relevant to them.

NAVIGATE THE DISCOVER TAB FOR A TAILORED MUSICAL JOURNEY

These recommendations and more are all available within the ‘Discover’ tab of the Glastonbury app, which makes adding these artists to your festival schedule as simple as a click and also allows you to view their profile pages, complete with Spotify embeds of their greatest hits. Such integration is a sign that the advances in festival technology are driven by an overall desire to improve everyone’s musical discovery experience.

A PEEK INTO THE GLASTONBURY AND SPOTIFY SYNERGY

The collaboration goes right to Spotify too, which hosts an officially branded Glastonbury Festival hub, showing the entire line-up arranged by stages – including the iconic Pyramid Stage – and within that many Glastonbury-themed audiobooks, podcasts and, of course, the official festival playlist. This kind of partnership only goes to show the ways in which music streaming services and festivals complement one another, using each other’s strengths to boost the profile of artists and ultimately improve the listening experience.

DISCOVER THE IMPACT: MUSIC STREAMING TRENDS AND FESTIVAL BUZZ

If we take Spotify’s data on the relationship between festival lineups and streams at face value, it suggests that streams relating to the Glastonbury lineups jumped every year around the time of the festival, peaking around the release of its lineup and throughout the duration of the May festival itself. Spotify is not merely a platform for music discovery; it becomes part of the hype machine – feeding our anticipation of the festival experience.

WHY ROLLING THE DICE ON NEW ARTISTS IS WORTH IT

Though Spotify’s personalised lineup recommendations are a useful tool for navigating the huge musical spaces of festivals such as Glastonbury, there is still something to be said for the unexpected pleasure of discovering new music serendipitously. Festival-going is about the power of discovery, the moment when something previously unknown the music of a sideshow, an ignored band on a chancer’s stage, catches your ear. So, while you might check your personalised lineup to make sure you haven’t missed your favourites, don’t shy away from branching out beyond the recommendations. You might just discover something completely different.

ABOUT DISCOVER

It’s the kind of journey that feels meaningful and packed with discovery – both for the individual and the collective. With Spotify’s intuitive, sophisticated tools making it possible to follow this path in ways that haven’t been possible before, music discovery is set to remain as rich in pleasure as ever. The relationship between Spotify and Glastonbury Festival is a perfect illustration of how technology can help bring us closer to the artists, and to each other, and how the discover process can be made more dynamic, more diverse and more amenable to individual tastes. Bring on the future!