What is Spotify and how to make the most of it
If you’ve never used Spotify to listen to your favorite music, it might be time to give it a try. Though there are plenty of music streaming options on the market, Spotify remains one of the most popular services among music lovers worldwide with over 200 million active users on a monthly basis. Moreover, half of them choose to pay for the premium version of the service helping the company to hit the milestone of 100 million paid subscribers.
The Spotify phenomenon
Spotify is a Swedish company founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. The audio streaming platform was launched 2 years later offering users the opportunity to access over 40 million tracks.
One of the major points in the evolution of the company was the huge and controversial advertising campaign from 2017 entitled Thanks 2016, It’s been weird. Spotify used data on the musical choices of its users making fun of the most unusual ones. It was already public information that the streaming platform was storing all the input of the listeners in order to show recommendations and create tailored playlists. But nobody would expect the creative team would use this feature in such a twisted way! It was a bold decision, balancing on the edge between creepy stalking and a hilarious attempt to create a more personal connection.
Dear person who played „Sorry” 42 times on Valentine’s Day, What did you do? This is one of the texts used for the advertising banners which took its inspiration from the real choice of one Spotify user. And people thought it was fun, so the company continued to rise.
Now Spotify can be accessed from all the major platforms, including a browser version, but also apps for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. In the near future, it may also be available for Apple Watch, so stayed tuned!
Beyond music a great range of podcasts are also available on Spotify. And their number is meant to grow with the escalation of the interest in podcasts. Now this is one of the main directions in which the company is heading, after the acquisition of podcast firms Gimlet and Anchor at the beginning of 2019 and the plans to further invest in other similar moves. According to CEO and founder Daniel Ek, it is a safe to assume that at some point more than 20% of the activity on the platform will be related to non-music content.
Free or premium
Spotify is free to use and allows access to all its users to musical and non-musical tracks from the platform. Almost everything can be found, but in addition to music there will also be the occasional ads that will interrupt your experience.
Half of the people who use Spotify regularly prefer to pay the premium fee in order to skip the ads and the need to shuffle, but also to benefit from some premium features such as offline listening, radio or curated playlists.
The regular premium fee is 10 dollars per month while different payment plans apply for students, families or corporations.
Tips on how to improve your Spotify experience
You know already that this massive audio streamer allows you to listen to music or podcasts, search your favorite songs and store them in playlists to make them more easily accessible for the future. These features alone combined with high quality sound are good enough to justify the existence of the platform. Still, there are a bunch of other features or less intuitive actions you can make use of that can enhance your Spotify experience.
Here it is a list of tips to try when you open the app next time:
- The sound quality you choose influences the amount of data used. This sounds logical, but maybe you didn’t know that Spotify allows you to choose from 5 options regarding the quality of the sound, varying from low to very high. While with a low quality of sound you can listen to maybe 100 hours of music before hitting 1GB of data, the very high option will allow you only about 7 hours before you reach the same target;
- Spotify has the best reputation in terms of algorithms from the whole market of audio or even video streamers. You can safely explore the recommendations provided in the app while expanding your music realm every time. How can you do that? Access Daily Mixes, Discover Weekly and the artist and playlist based radio stations;
- Explore Genres and Moods and freely choose from the great selection of already made playlists according to your current needs. There is music for motivation, workout, for seasons or gaming and many more. If you still didn’t find what you are looking for, there is a huge chance some other user thought about it before. So, just write any word that cross your mind in the search engine and then tap the Playlists button;
- If you already created extensive playlists in other apps and you feel too lazy to reproduce them manually in Spotify, be aware that you can easily transfer them using an intermediary website, like for example Soundiiz;
- Use the social tools provided by Spotify to discover even more quality music that satisfies your tastes. You can follow like minded people and see what they are listening to and contribute by sharing music with others using Spotify Codes;
- Use collaborative playlists when you organize parties together with your friends. You can save a lot of time like this and create an atmosphere that will make everybody feel happy and included.
Spotify is for sure a user-friendly alternative when you are looking for a music listening app. The audio streaming platform provided by the Swedish company is in constant development and will remain popular on the market for the foreseeable future. If you haven’t tried it already, there is no reason why you would not start to play with its awesome features right now.
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A student of life and probably for life. She likes putting theory into practice and to challenge norms. Currently on a mission to understand human behavior and interaction. Always on the lookout for the next challenge.