7 hidden Spotify tricks you need to know

Spotify is the best way to listen to music, these days. You’ve got literal hundreds of thousands of songs at your fingertips, ready to download and listen to wherever you are in the world. But did you know you can change Spotify to suit your listening habits?

These settings aren’t always in the most obvious of places, so here at Screen Streams we’ve rounded up the 7 hidden Spotify tricks you need to know. Get listening, streamers.

You can improve the music quality

Perhaps one of the more surprising features of Spotify is that you can adjust the quality of your tunes. Say goodbye to tinny music quality, and hello to glorious, fuller, richer sounding tunes. Well, that’s if you’re a premium user, that is. There are five settings you can pick from: Automatic, Low, Normal, High and Very High. Note that if you’re using your cellular data, the higher the quality of music the more data Spotify will gobble up.

To access your music quality, simply go to Settings, scroll down and pick your streaming quality. It’s as easy as that to change the quality of your music on Spotify.

Get that singing voice ready

Ever wanted to know more about a song? You’ve fallen in love with it that much that you wanna know who wrote it, why they wrote it and what the lyrics are? We’ve got your back. On mobile, you can scroll down on your fave songs and find out all sorts of juicy tidbits of info. Spotify has launched a new ‘storyline’ aspect on their tunes, meaning that you can get a behind the scenes look at what went into writing a specific song. Pretty neat!

Better yet, if you keep on scrolling, you can find the lyrics, too! (Apologise to your neighbours in advance, it’s hard not to sing along to ‘bad guy’).

Discover new tunes

Spotify has a whopping 35 million tracks available on its service, meaning that hours upon hours of listening are at your fingertips. But how do you find new songs to bop to? Sure, listening to Taylor Swift every day for a week is fun and all, but sometimes you wanna spice it up a bit.

Thankfully, Spotify encourages you to delve out of your comfort zone to discover new tracks. If your settings are switched on for it, Spotify will automatically play new songs at the end of an album, based on an algorithm of your listening habits. They also offer a release radar, mixing in artists you follow, plus new singles from artists Spotify thinks you’ll like. It’s updated every Friday, and features a hand-picked selection of 30 new tunes to sing along to.

In the mood for something more specific? Spotify’s got that covered, too. Click on ‘Browse’, and you’ve got a variety of genres to explore. From ‘Pop’ to the oddly specific ‘The Perfect Italian Dinner’ selection, there’s a playlist for every occasion you could possibly imagine. There’s also the ‘Radio’ selection, featuring your most played Spotify artists for you to feast your ears on. Delicious.

Deleted that playlist? Don’t sweat it

We’ve all been there. We’ve all deleted a Spotify playlist (like our unused ‘Gym Bops’ one, am I right?) and then had the pang of regret immediately afterwards. Don’t sweat it! They haven’t disappeared into the boundless void of the internet forever – Spotify keeps a backup!

Hit up this link, and scroll down to the ‘recover playlists’ tab. There you can restore playlists from many moons ago. So your ‘2000s cheesy pop tunes’ playlist isn’t gone forever, really.

Merge those songs

Don’t like the way that there’s a gap after each song? That’s cool, in your Spotify settings you can change that, too. Go to your settings (click on your username at the top), scroll all the way down and click on advanced settings. Under playback, click the slider that says ‘crossfade’ songs. Now, they’ll all merge into one another, like a wild song that never truly finishes. You can even choose how long the crossfade lasts! There are truly no ends to the Spotify settings.

Track your tunes

Long gone are the days of iTunes and its marvellous play count system. On Spotify, there’s no way to access your data in regards to your most played songs or artists (aside from their yearly round-up), despite the fact that they store this information. If you’re like me and are obsessed with your musical statistics, rejoice! There’s a way to track your most played songs, artists and albums by linking your Spotify account to last.fm. Make a free account and you can see all sorts of juicy data about your listening habits. Pretty cool.

Make a group playlist

Hitting the road for a sick road-trip? You can create a collaborative playlist so that your Spotify friends can all jump in and add to it as they please. That should stop the fighting over who gets control of the aux cable, but we can’t promise anything. To make a group playlist, simply click on the three little dots next to the playlist’s name and click the option.

And there we have it! There’s 7 hidden tricks that you didn’t know about Spotify, 7 glorious ways to enrich your listening experience. While Spotify is constantly mixing up the way they deliver their music through updates, the very core of it remains the same. Although they’ve recently moved your saved songs into the same tab as playlists, it’s pretty easy to improve the way you experience the service.

For more on music, check out everything we know about Lady Gaga’s upcoming album right here.