Spotify is one of the most popular music apps in the world. But is it taking full advantage of its potential? Here are some of the ways you can use Spotify features to improve your music streaming experience.
Fades and transitions
If you enjoy listening to songs without interruptions or sudden transitions, you should consider switching some Spotify playback settings. Go to Preferences and scroll down to On.
One option you might see is “Allow seamless transitions between songs in a playlist”. When you listen to some albums, you will notice that the artists have intentionally requested tracks to make the transition between them smooth. The setting replicates this effect in playlists and provides a more continuous listening experience.
sound customization
Spotify has some audio customization features that ensure that you have an optimal listening experience. Here are the things you should customize:
- Streaming and download quality: This allows you to customize the quality of the audio output. Higher quality songs tend to take up more storage space and data bandwidth, while lower quality music tends to be less clear, especially at higher volume.
- Sound normalization: This sets consistent output across all the audio you’re playing in Spotify, whether it’s music or podcasts. This setting helps give you a more consistent listening experience and ensures that you’re not constantly fiddling with your device’s volume.
- sound level: This adjusts the maximum volume across all of your tracks. You can set it to “Loud” if your environment is particularly noisy.
To access all of these settings, go to the Settings or Preferences menu, and you will find it under Sound Quality.
Related: How to get the best audio quality in Spotify
Collaborative and mixed playlists
Planning to take a road trip soon and want to make sure your car playlist has something for everyone? You can turn any playlist into a team effort by accessing the context menu and toggling ‘Collaborative Playlist’. You can then Send the link to your friends, and they can edit, add and rearrange the tracks there. You will also be able to see who added each track to it. However, collaborators will not be able to change the name or cover of the playlist.
Another recently introduced feature is mashup, which allows you to create a playlist with one of your friends. It uses an algorithm where you and your friend overlap in terms of musical taste and creates a playlist that you both enjoy. Getting started with built-in playlists is easy.
Related: How to “mix” Spotify playlists with your friends and family
Playlist folders
Spotify doesn’t have the best music organizing system. Playlists still can’t be tagged or sorted well, and the mobile apps need some work. However, one feature that will help you keep your itineraries organized is playlist folders.
It’s a desktop-only feature that allows you to place playlists under different custom folders, similar to how files work. You can organize your folders by genre, mood, and location, and then add each playlist to those folders. For example, you might want a folder full of workout music, but have different playlists for different types of workouts. That’s when playlist folders come in handy. You can also play the music of the entire folder using the Spotify desktop app.
Related: How to organize your Spotify library
Music Discovery
One of the biggest strengths of Spotify as a music streaming service is how easy it is to discover new songs. There are a lot of great music discovery features that you can use to augment your existing library. One such feature is Optimization, which allows you to discover new tracks that might fit into one of your existing playlists. You can learn more about the optimization feature here.
Another is Discover Weekly, which is a playlist automatically generated for each account by the Spotify algorithm each week, which you can find by going to the browsing page. This playlist was created based on your recent listening habits. If you’ve been listening to a lot of folk rock lately, you can expect to find more songs of this type.
Another is the radio system. It allows you to select any song, album, playlist or artist and automatically create a playlist with similar music. You can access this by clicking the three-dotted button next to the music item you want as the basis for the radio and selecting “Go to Radio” in the context menu. If you want to learn more about discovering new music on Spotify, you can find our guide here.
Related: How to discover new music on Spotify
Private listening and private playlists
If you have a lot of friends on Spotify, but you don’t want them to see the music you’re listening to, you might want to use two features: private listening and hiding playlists from your profile.
To start a private hearing, open Settings and go to the Social section. Here you will find “Start a private session”. Starting a session will hide their current listening habits from their activity feed. You can then turn this off if you want people to know what you’re playing. You can also permanently disable activity sharing by turning off the Share my listening activity on Spotify setting.
By default, the playlists you create are public and will be added to your profile. This means that if someone goes to your Spotify account, they will find all the playlists you’ve ever created. To hide these playlists, right-click or open the context menu and select “Remove from profile”. You can also disable public playlist sharing by turning off “Make new playlists public” in social settings.
Related: How to add your music to Spotify and sync with mobile
