December is a big month for Spotify users. For the past few years, during the first week of December, the app drops “Spotify Wrapped,” a yearly summary of your listening activity on the app. While many listeners look forward to its release date eagerly as we near the end of November, others feel an impending sense of doom. For many, music taste is strongly connected to their personality and identity, and they do not want to feel judged by their peers if their Spotify Wrapped is deemed “not cool enough.”
Sadly, there’s no time left to game the system this year. Spotify generally stops tracking listening data in mid-November (despite spooky allegations that tracking stops on October 31st), giving their systems ample time to analyze everyone’s data and generate the classic Spotify Wrapped graphics. For anyone who has been planning who their Top Five artists and songs will be since January, good luck.
While we wait, Spotify has dropped new features for users, even those who do not pay for Premium. Similar to the feature that allots regular users six uses of the skip button, Spotify added a feature that allows regular users to play whichever song they would like from their playlists instead of shuffling, although it is still limited to a certain number of plays.
Additionally, the music streaming service introduced Spotify DMs, which seems as functional as Netflix DMs would be. If you need yet another way to communicate with your friends and family, send them a playlist through Spotify directly and then strike a conversation.
Some of Spotify’s most recent additions have been weekly summaries of users’ listening activity, including information similar to Spotify Wrapped like your top artist, listening hours, or your amount of activity in comparison to listeners of the same artist. This feature may be helpful for anyone waiting in anticipation of their Spotify Wrapped, trying to determine who their top artist will be this year.
More recently, Spotify introduced a feature called “Eat this Playlist,” which is similar to the Google game “Snake” in which you use the arrow keys to navigate a snake through a garden, eating apples and avoiding the outer walls. In the Spotify version, the same constraints apply where users cannot run into the four walls. However, on the mobile version, users swipe on the screen to move a play button to “eat” the album covers of the different songs on the playlist. When a song is eaten, a sample from the song starts playing and the album cover is added to the tail of the play button. If you play with a shorter playlist, songs are repeated until you lose the game. Similar to Google Snake, Spotify will track your high score, encouraging users to spend more time directly interfacing with the app.
Premium subscribers have even more new features available to them, including one called “Song DNA,” which provides listeners with more information behind the producers, engineers, background vocalists, and more individuals that help create a song. This feature will be released in 2026 for Premium users only. Similarly, a new feature exclusive to Premium users is “About the Song,” which will include swipeable cards that offer information about track’s backstories and information, sourcing from the lyrics site Genius. Of course, if you are a regular user, you can just manually check Genius’ database for information about your favorite songs and albums even if it is not built into your Spotify account.
Spotify also introduced Spotify DJ for Premium users, an AI guide that analyzes your music taste to provide personalized recommendations to help expand your music taste. Spotify uses Open AI’s generative AI technology, meaning the more users interact with Spotify DJ, the better its recommendations become.
The most anticipated feature for music buffs may be Lossless Listening, a feature that improves the sound quality and listening experience of songs. When artists originally record music files, they are extremely large, so they must be compressed significantly to be downloaded and used on streaming services. Thus, the songs don’t always sound exactly as the artist intended as they lose nuance and detail during the compression process. Spotify’s Lossless Audio feature preserves as much of the original song as possible while compressing it to a streamable size. This feature has already been rolled out to select Premium users.
As Spotify introduces even more Premium features, it makes Premium a more enticing option for music lovers. For those interested in making the switch, Spotify is currently running a four month free trial, a unique opportunity in comparison to their usual three month or two month promotions.
In the upcoming first week of December, unwrap an early holiday present (or a lump of coal) from Spotify, and enjoy their new features for Premium and regular users. Maybe these new features will convince you to add a Premium subscription to your holiday wishlist.
Learn More About these Features:
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-02-22/spotify-debuts-a-new-ai-dj-right-in-your-pocket/
