Some people enjoy scouring streaming services every week in search of new music, but others find the seemingly endless library overwhelming. If you fall into the latter camp, then you need to try out Smores — a music discovery app for iPhone and iPad that mashes up Spotify with TikTok to make finding new music less painful and more dynamic.
In order to use Smores effectively, you will need a Spotify Premium subscription (which starts at $10.99 a month after the recent price hike). If you do pay for Spotify Premium, just download the app, connect Smores to your account, and hit the “Start Listening” button.
“Smores predicts, learns and delivers the sweetest 5-60 second snippet of a song to you in an easy to consume TikTok like interface,” says developer Alex Ruber. You can pick the genre you want to hear, change the length of the snippets, and even decide how mainstream the choices are by only showing artists with a certain number of followers.
If you find a song you like, tap the heart icon, and Smores will like the song on Spotify and add it to a playlist called Smores Finds🔥. You can also share the snippet with your friends or add it to one of your personal playlists, which appear at the bottom of the app.
While the free version is fun to toy around with, you’re going to need to pay for Smores Premium to get full access to all of the app’s other features. Smores Premium allows users to filter on over 5,000 genres, filter by BPM, key, and year, tap to skip songs, and create unlimited radio stations based on the app’s selections. There’s a 7-day free trial, but after that, you have to pay $2.99 a month if you want to retain access to everything the app has to offer.
If you’re too busy (or too lazy) to find new music on your own, the price might be worth it. If not, the algorithm of Smores seems to be just as good, if not better, than Spotify’s when it comes to recommendations, so you can stick with the free version instead.
