Reading & Leeds festival partners with Spotify on personalized playlists

Reading & Leeds has partnered with Spotify to help festivalgoers discover new artists on this year's bill through personalized playlists, launched August 11 ahead of the festival's August 27-30 run across Reading's Little John's Farm and Leeds's Bramham Park.

The in-app feature analyzes a user's listening history to surface the five artists on the lineup closest to their taste, along with a percentage score showing how closely their listening aligns with the wider bill, then builds a tailored playlist. Lucy Edwards, Spotify UK and Ireland's co-head of marketing, said the goal was to give fans "a new way to discover the artists they'll love" from such a huge and diverse lineup. "By putting their own listening habits at the centre of the experience, we're making the festival line-up feel more personal than ever."

This year's headliners include Florence + The Machine, Charli XCX, Fontaines D.C., Dave, RAYE and Chase & Status, and Leeds hosts music on the Thursday of the festival for the first time, headlined by Kasabian. The Main Stage has been renamed The Grid as part of what organizers call the biggest staging and arena overhaul in the festivals' history, alongside new stages The Gallery and The Warehouse; the BBC Introducing Stage has been retired after 18 years.

The rest of the bill includes Skepta, Sombr, Role Model, JADE, Kneecap, Geese, Violet Grohl, Holly Humberstone, Declan McKenna, Maisie Peters, Paris Paloma and Duke Dumont, along with 13 acts added in June including Villanelle. Loyle Carner, Viagra Boys, Men I Trust and Gunna play Reading only, while The K's and The Lathums are Leeds exclusives.

Festival boss Melvin Benn said the shift toward UK and Ireland-based headliners this year wasn't a deliberate strategy so much as a reflection of who wanted to play. "We happen to have found ourselves this year in a position where we have six-seven headliners that wanted to play Reading & Leeds," all UK and Ireland-based, he told NME, pointing to acts like Kneecap, who had just headlined a 25,000-capacity show at Crystal Palace two weeks earlier, as evidence of "the strength of UK and Irish music."