Spotify has joined forces with Ancestry.com to develop playlists based on customers' testing results, Quartz reports.
Users can feed the ethnic and regional results from their AncestryDNA test into a custom playlist generator that then selects songs based on that person's ancestral makeup. "It's so much more than the stats and the data and the records," Vineet Mehra, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Ancestry, tells Quartz. "How do we help people experience their culture and not just read about it? Music seemed like an obvious way to do that."
At The Atlantic, though, Sarah Zhang points out that DNA is not the same as cultural identity. For instance, she asks that if someone learns he or she, unexpectedly has some German ancestry, but knows nothing of the language, traditions, or people, "what connection is there, really?"
She adds that marketing approaches like this and one by 23andMe during the World Cup that encouraged people to root for a team based on their genetic ancestry, "[encourage] a way of thinking — that you can pick and choose which fractional parts of genetic identity to highlight when it makes for good cocktail-party conversation."