Spotify has the best music discovery algorithms and the smoothest, most flexible user interface. It led me down rabbit holes to find new artists and old favorites, based on what I’ve liked and heard on the app.
The free tier, with ads, defaults to a low-quality 96-Kbps streaming bitrate, but you can increase this up to 160 Kbps. For $10 a month, the Premium tier removes ads completely and streams up to 320 Kbps, which is standard streaming quality these days. According to the company, if you’re looking for lossless, a Spotify HiFi tier is being rolled out, but there are still no launch date, not even a year and a half after it was announced.
There are now over 82 million tracks on Spotify. That is minus the categories of Neil Young, (some) Joni Mitchell, and other who requested that Spotify delete their songs in protest of Spotify podcaster Joe Rogan has been spreading misinformation about Covid chronically.
Spotify also allows you to add an unlimited number of songs to your personal library, and you can put up to 10,000 songs in each playlist. If social sharing is enabled, you can see what your friends are listening to and create sessions where a group streams a playlist simultaneously. There is an option on each Artist page to listen to only their songs that you already like, which is a very welcome change from previous years.
Since we last updated this story in February 2022, Spotify has combined albums, collections, and singles into one location, with the option to separate them. It’s smoother and more convenient than the old way of forcing you to watch them all separately, every time. Playlists and albums have their own mix buttons, which is a nice touch that lets you know when you’re shuffle and when you’re listening to everything in order.
Senior writer Lauren Goode has more tips to get the most out of Spotify.
