Spotify Teams Up With Ancestry to Create DNA-Curated Playlists

Spotify and Ancestry are joining forces to create playlists based on your DNA.

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spotify ancestry

Ancestry is teaming up with Spotify to create playlists based on their user's DNA. Anyone who has ever submitted one of Ancestry's at-home DNA tests can  input their Ancestry results and be met with a playlist that layers Spotify's own notions of your taste on top of music that is popular or culturally significant from your ancestral homelands. 

"It’s so much more than the stats and the data and the records,”  Ancestry Executive Vice president and Chief Marketing Officer Vineet Mehra told Quartz following the launch of the new Spotify promotion. “How do we help people experience their culture and not just read about it? Music seemed like an obvious way to do that.”

The folks over at Spotify echoed those words. The company's Global Head of Partner Solutions Danielle Lee told Quartz that the idea of the Ancestry X Spotify playlists was to “encourage [Ancestry’s] audience to explore the soundtrack of their heritage." 

For folks who haven't used Ancestry before, who perhaps aren't comfortable with giving Ancestry a "perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide, transferable license to use [thier] DNA," there is a neat, new feature that will break down your listening habits in Ancestry's piecemeal style. However, if you've already handed over your DNA to Ancestry and would like to know what sort of playlists to expect, just take a look at this Jezebel writer's experience with the service. 


While her picks were fairly conventional, Spotify has been doing a lot to break up routine listening lately. They've made it easier than ever for independent artists to upload their work to the platform and allowed the same artists to submit their work for consideration in career-making playlists.   

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