- Spotify, with more than 345 million users, is easily the most popular music-streaming service on the planet.
- Aside from being incredibly intuitive, Spotify also boasts a number of hidden features that can drastically improve the overall user experience.
Spotify over the last few years has cemented itself as a must-have for any serious music-lover. And sure, while similar services like Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited are solid in their own right, the overall user experience on Spotify remains, in my opinion, a cut above the rest. Hardly a surprise, Spotify’s user base has exploded in recent years. Per an October filing, Spotify now boasts 345 million users across the globe and 155 million subscribers.
One of the great things about the Spotify app is that it has several hidden features capable of taking your listening experience to the next level. So even if you happen to be a seasoned Spotify user, there’s a good chance you’ll learn something new from the list of tips and tricks below.
If you spend a lot of time sharing songs with friends, there’s actually a Spotify feature that lets you to create a unified listening experience with up to five friends. It’s essentially Hulu’s Watch Party feature but for music.
To take advantage of it, all you have to do is start playing a song and then tap the icon that somewhat resembles a speaker on the bottom left. Following that, you’ll see an option to start a Group Session where you can listen to music with friends in real-time. If you tap the Start Session button, you can invite friends via a copied link or by sending them an invite via text or WhatsApp.
The TikTok video below provides a quick and easy walkthrough:
@themaskedmortal Back at it with another one!👀 #spotify #spotifyhacks #spotifyplaylist
Another clever tip you might not be aware of is that you can easily connect Shazam to your Spotify account. Instead of having to hop back and forth between the two, connecting your accounts will automatically populate a playlist of your Shazam’d songs to your Spotify library. To do this, simply go to Shazam, go to settings, and then tap the “connect” button next to the Spotify logo. Following that, you can toggle on the “Sync Shazams to Spotify” setting and your Shazam tracks will magically appear in Spotify.
A final tip worth mentioning is that you can look for specific songs by year. Say, for example, you want to listen to a commonly covered song like Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. Instead of browsing through an endless number of covers to find the version you’re looking for, you can add a search modifier like so: “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door year:1991” and you can go directly to the Guns N’ Roses rendition and bypass a slew of covers in the process. You can also use a range of years as a search modifier, like so: “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door year:1970-1990.“
