Spotify Is Improving Music Discovery With A Handful Of New Features For Free And Paid Users

Discovering new music is a big part of the Spotify experience; it’s what all those playlists, like Discover Weekly, are about. But there’s always room for improvement, which is why Spotify’s newly released suite of features for free and paid users is good news for every Spotify user looking to discover even more noteworthy bands. That’s especially true when the user base is still growing. More control over the media we consume is always welcome, especially when this entails further refining our tastes for better recommendations.

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Spotify’s upping its discovery game

This new suite of features will gradually roll out

Spotify has announced in a fresh blog post that it’s rolling out new features for its free and paid users that will help with discovery (via 91mobiles). Premium users can expect to see an upgrade to the Queue button (in the bottom right, the three lines), which will contain new shortcuts to things like Shuffle, Repeat, and Timer, a small quality-of-life upgrade. For Premium users, the Queue will also start showing recommendations to choose from for the active queue’s end, allowing you to shape what you’ll hear next.

A Snooze feature is also in the mix. It will be paired with the Hide button, and when you hide a song from a playlist, you can snooze it for 30 days across your account. While this functionality is set to roll out to Premium users initially, Snooze is expected to make its way to free users at some point.

New Queue shortcuts and recommendations

Management tools are coming for playlists, with options like Edit, Add, and Sort, giving users control over their playlists, ensuring you can choose the song order while dropping in new tracks. You’ll even be able to add custom cover art to your playlists. Even better, the Liked Songs list will finally support easier creation of playlists, something that has been needed for quite a while. Users in the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. should already be able to sort Liked Songs by genre to create new playlists.

Liked Songs sorted by genre with new playlist creation option

Spotify is also looking to expand its social tools, with a shortcut to Blend playlist creation for free and paid users and Jam’s real-time listening for paid users, direct from the + button to the right of the current track name. This way it’s easier than ever to start a Blend or Jam with friends and family, or simply create a new playlist.

While these are all small additions to Spotify, they are welcome ones that should improve the experience. We’ve needed better tools to get Liked Songs out of their list and into playlists for some time, and now that everyone will be able to sort and edit their playlists how they deem fit, there’s a real incentive to create some killer mixes, which in turn will help Spotify further refine its recommendations. The only thing missing is HD audio, so here’s hoping Spotify finally gets around to offering better quality as its new discovery options gradually roll out.