The streaming giant Spotify truly has taken over the world, amassing over 87 million paid subscribers in the few years since launching, with that number estimating to surpass 100 million in the year ahead. Spotify dominates the music streaming market, surpassing Apple Music, Google Play, and Amazon Prime Music by a healthy margin.
With so many regular listeners, you’d think that this simple-to-use service would have already been fully discovered by its listeners. However, there are a number of nifty features that you can access which Spotify doesn’t tell you about. Here are the best secret Spotify features that you didn’t know existed.
Private Sessions
Sometimes our music is well and truly a guilty pleasure. While you might enjoy the social aspects of Spotify, which allow the whole world to see how awesome your taste in music is, sometimes you’d rather keep things private. If you’d rather keep your obsession with the La La Land soundtrack on the down low, then simply click the drop-down menu in the top right corner, select “private session” and you’re all good.
Recover Deleted Playlists
Maybe you’ve spent hours painstakingly putting together the most rocking playlist ever for a party, only to find out the next morning that it has been deleted. Rather than mourning the loss of the soundtrack to the greatest night of your life, simply go to your Account Settings and select the “recover playlists” feature to claw back every single composition you thought you’d lost forever.
Access Regional Music Anywhere in the World
One of the more frustrating elements of Spotify is that certain features and certain artists are only available from certain countries. While this isn’t necessarily a Spotify feature, there are ways to get around it. You can now enjoy Spotify and SoundCloud unblocked with a VPN such as VyprVPN or Ivacy from any country in the world, allowing full and unrestricted access to all of your favorite artists. Keep in mind that you will still be using your regular account to do this, so this is a good one to know when traveling.
Advanced Search
Whether you’re looking for new artists that are similar to your number one faves or are trying to find a song you heard once with very little information, Spotify has you covered. Their little-used “advanced search” feature allows you to use different keywords and cross-reference them by genre, style, time period, and album to find exactly the kind of music you’re looking for.
Set the Music Quality
If you’re trying to immerse yourself in the calming waters of your favorite album but are finding that the sound quality isn’t up to scratch, don’t worry. You can use Spotify’s “music quality” features to toggle the sound settings. Simply go to your settings and choose from a menu of options ranging from “normal quality” all the way up to “extreme quality”. Just remember that streaming music in extreme quality will use up a significant amount of data. Similarly, if you’re on the go and don’t mind a little lower sound quality, you can change back to normal quality in order to save your mobile data from going over the limit.
Learn a Language
Spotify is just starting to emerge as a serious educational tool and now you can get even more value for your subscription fee by listening to their free language lessons. The Language Superstar channel allows you to brush up on your German, Japanese, Russian, and Italian, to name just a few, via a series of simple and quick lessons.
As with any paid service, it’s important to get the maximum value for your money. Follow these tips to take your streaming experience to the next level.
