Friday, December 12, 2014

How to find new music on Spotify

Recently I made the switch from Pandora to Spotify. A lot of my friends were using the Swedish music streaming service so I signed up for the 30 day trial to see what the fuss is about. I'm three weeks into my trial and one thing I noticed is that Spotify can be a bit overwhelming at first. Coming from the simple interface of Pandora (pick a song, listen to the station, rinse, repeat), I wasn't sure where to start with Spotify. With Spotify you have the option of listening to radio stations, entire albums, curated playlists, even your friends' music. So here are a few features that I have found useful to help discover new music and get the most out of my paid Spotify subscription...


  • The curated playlists on Spotify are excellent... If you go to the menu, select Browse, and then scroll down you will find a selection of playlists by genre. These playlists have songs hand selected by music aficionados employed by Spotify. It's a great way to find new songs that mainstream radio stations just don't play.
  • The "Discover" feature has really good recommendations... Go to the menu, select Browse, then select Discover (it's at the top just under New Releases). Based on your listening history Spotify will recommend songs or albums that you might like. So far I have found the recommendations to be on point about 70% of time.
  • Find songs by artist... Whenever I find a new artist I like the first thing I do is find other songs by that artist. A quick and easy way to do this is when you're listening to a song select "Go to artist". That will take you to the artist page where you can quickly see the top five songs by that artist. I usually add any songs that have over 1 million hits.
  • Find out what your friends are listening to... If you have Facebook friends using Spotify you should leverage the power of social media. Go to "Browse", "Top Lists", and select "Top tracks in your network". You will have a list of the songs that your friends are listening to. Next to each song you can even see which of your friends are listening to the track.
Let me know if you have any other tips or tricks on how discover new music on Spotify.