App Review: Spotify

Shayla Isada

If you listen to music at all, you might be using Apple Music, Pandora,  or Google Play, but there’s a good chance you use Spotify. There’s also a good chance you aren’t using the app to its fullest.

Sure, you probably make your own playlists and listen to music but it’s likely there are loads of other features on the app that you’re ignoring. You already know that Spotify has tons of pre-made playlists for any mood, be it ‘Focus,’ ‘Sleep,’ or ‘Travel’ but there are also Daily Mixes. These are new playlists generated every day for you and, depending on how many different types of genres you listen to, Spotify will curate separate playlists for each type. So if your music range is all over the place and you listen to rap, pop punk, and soundtracks for musicals, Spotify will make three different playlists for you. There are also playlists, Release Radar and Discover Weekly, that gets updated every week with new music that Spotify thinks you’ll enjoy based on other music you listen to.

If you want an even more personalized playlist, tweet @SpotifyCares and they just might make you a playlist both full of songs that you might like and have a secret message in the song titles. It shows some great customer service from the company, which is important to a lot of people.

Aside from that, there’s also a Running feature that you can use when you go out for a jog. You simply set your pace and Spotify will create a playlist of songs you like that match your tempo.

If you’re more of a podcasts/videos person, not to worry, those are available, too. There’s a whole selection of podcasts to listen to, from news to comedy to sports; you’re bound to find something to listen to.

Some enjoy the fact that there are so many features, “I love it, I feel like it’s better than any other music app because it gives students an opportunity to get an account and listen to music for a lower price,” Jennifer Leon ‘18 claimed.

For $10/mo, you can listen with Premium, which allows you to listen to any song you want at any time, unlimited skips for tracks, and the ability queue songs. Unfortunately, without Premium, you cannot pick which song you want to listen to (only on shuffle), cannot queue songs, and are limited to only five skips per hour.

Other customers find the app to be a little limiting; Joselyn Chavez ‘19 said “I think it’s really interesting and allows you to have so many playlists and music without having to buy the music and commit to it, like with iTunes. The only thing is that you can’t play specific songs and have to be on shuffle.”

Even internationally, there are words to be said about the app: “It’s nice but I think there should be more songs that are from less popular artists,” Dan Atanasiu, a high school student from Norway, said.

With all of these features and nearly 100 million users in 60 countries, half of which are paid subscribers (find more statistics about Spotify here), it’s clear that Spotify is a high quality app.