The music-streaming service Spotify gives users a great way to share playlists with friends and to listen to all the music they want from its premium service for a small monthly fee. If you’re ready to take your Spotify experience to the next level, though, take a look at these 14 handy tips on how to track your favorite artists, save entire albums into a playlist, search by genre, and even find a few playlists assembled by celebrities.
If you already use Spotify, you can take advantage of these tips right away. If you aren’t using Spotify yet, the tips may convince you to give it a try. Be forewarned, however, that you can’t open any of the Spotify links in this slideshow unless you’re a member of the service.
Here’s an overview of Spotify’s offerings.
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Suppose that you have a rivalry going on with a friend, and you want to talk some trash by sending him a link to the chorus of Queen’s song ” We Will Rock You.” Right-click the track name in Spotify and select Copy Spotify URI. Then add “#[Time]” to the end of the URI, where #[Time] is the starting point of the audio that you want your friend to hear.
For “We Will Rock You” you could use this URI: spotify:track:54flyrjcdnQdco7300avMJ#1:12. Next, instruct the recipient to paste the URI into the search bar of Spotify’s desktop app and press Enter. The song will immediately begin playing at the point you specified.
Tip: If you have trouble seeing the bare Spotify URI, and you get a link that contains the song name instead (which would ruin the surprise), paste it into a plain-text editor or into your browser’s address bar first and then recopy it.
Several websites specialize in shortening Spotify links, but few do it as well as Spo.tl beta. To use this site, right-click the name of a track or album and choose Copy HTTP Link. Place the link in the box on the Spo.tl page to generate a shorter version of the link. Not only does Spo.tl shorten links for you, but it also gives you a better-looking Spotify song or album page online–and it won’t automatically redirect you to the Spotify desktop app.
Pictured is Spo.tl’s version of the album Torches by Foster the People. Check out the standard Spotify site for the same album. Spo.tl is much nicer to look at, and you don’t have to leave the Web if you just want to view a track list. (If you click one of the tracks, your system will automatically open Spotify to play the album.)
Spotify provides an easy way to see what you’ve listened to most often on the streaming service. Under ‘Apps’, click Top Lists to see a listing of the most popular tracks and albums. These lists default to ‘everywhere’, meaning all Spotify users.
If you want to see what you’ve listened to most often, click the drop-down menu to the right of either Tracks or Albums and select for me (shown here).
You can also see what’s popular among Spotify users in the United States or in any other country where Spotify is available.
Are you stumped for a quick way to get Spotify to turn an entire album into a new playlist? It’s actually pretty easy. Let’s say that you want to turn Bruce Springsteen’s new album, Wrecking Ball, into a separate playlist.
All you have to do is visit the album page, right-click the album art (or anywhere else, as long as you don’t select a specific track) and select Add to and then New Playlist.
Under the album title, Spotify will automatically create a new playlist containing all of the album’s tracks.
Use Ctrl-F to search and filter your playlists and subfolders in Spotify. Imagine, for example, that you have a starred subfolder containing 17 albums, but all you want to listen to is the album Brothers by the Black Keys.
Bring up the subfolder, press Ctrl-F to search for “Black Keys,” and Spotify will display all of the starred tracks in the subfolder by that duo. If the album songs aren’t in the proper order, click the Album sort tab at the top of the track list.
If you want to get around in Spotify quickly without using a mouse, you’ll be glad to know that Spotify supports a host of keyboard shortcuts. Of the nearly 30 keyboard shortcuts you can use, many are familiar standards such as Ctrl-N to create a new playlist, spacebar to Play/Pause, and Ctrl-L to type in the search bar.
You’ll find the complete list of keyboard shortcuts on Spotify’s help pages.
Annoyingly, Spotify doesn’t provide an obvious way to filter results by genre–but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. If you want to see all available Celtic tunes from Enya, for instance, just type Enya genre:Celtic into the search bar, and you’ll be lulled to sleep in no time. You can find a complete list of Spotify’s supported genres on Spotify Gateway.
Other search modifiers you can use are ‘year:’ (to search by a year or a range of years), ‘artist:’, ‘track:’, and ‘label:’. You can also use operators such as OR, AND, and NOT. If you type the search command artist:Johnny Cash AND June Carter, for example, Spotify will return all the tracks it has that feature Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash together.
Last year, Spotify improved its Radio feature, transforming the previously lame service (think iTunes Radio) into a Pandora-like service that creates themed radio stations based on certain songs or artists.
The new feature automatically creates new stations for you based on the artists and tracks you listen to the most. You can also see popular radio stations that other Spotify users listen to.
And unlike Pandora, which imposes a 12-skips-per-day limit, Spotify lets you jump through as many tracks as you like when using the radio feature.
Check out what other people are listening to on Spotify with ShareMyPlayLists.com. This website holds nearly 80,000 playlists that Spotify users have elected to share, including playlists categorized by genre, most played, and latest playlists. ShareMyPlaylists also has a Spotify playlist generator that will create a list of up to 25 tracks based on band or artist names.
As an example, here’s a playlist that the site generated for me based on the music of Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros. You can add the ShareMyPlaylists app to the desktop version of Spotify, if you like.
Get easy access to your favorite artists on Spotify by creating a “Favorite Artists” playlist filled with tracks from bands and singers you like. Then, when you want to get to the Spotify pages of a specific artist quickly, you can click from your Favorite Artists playlist instead of running a search.
This tip comes from the Pansentient League, a Spotify-focused blog featuring new app and resource recommendations and other Spotify-related news.
Another way to enhance your Spotify experience is by adding extensions called Apps, which are accessible from inside Spotify’s desktop program. Examples include Rolling Stone Recommends, which features music suggested by the magazine’s editors; The Guardian, which lets you listen to new albums as you read the newspaper’s reviews, and Billboard Top Charts from Billboard magazine.
For more information about Spotify Apps, check out PCWorld’s ” A First Look at Spotify’s New Music Apps.”
A blog worth checking out for new playlists is Spotify Celebrity Playlists.
As its name suggests, this site scours the Web to collect published Spotify playlists from celebrities such as the members of the band OK Go, Ashton Kutcher, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and U2’s Bono (one of Bono’s is shown here). There are even a few playlists from such tech celebs as Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker.
If you want to spice up the look of your playlists inside Spotify’s desktop app, press Ctrl-G to view individual album art for every song in your playlist.
(If the playlist includes tracks from a single album, you’ll see the album art only once in the track list.)
If you subscribe to Spotify Premium, make sure that you get the most out of your subscription. Nonpremium users’ songs come encoded at a maximum bitrate of 160 kilobits per second; but if you pay $10 a month for a premium membership, Spotify offers you songs encoded at up to 320 kbps on most tracks.
To activate this feature, type spotify:config into your Spotify search bar or press Ctrl-P to bring up your Spotify preferences. Next, scroll down to the Playback setting and make sure that ‘High-quality streaming’ is selected, as shown in this slide.