Spotify tools lifehacker

Spotify's pretty decent out of the box. It has 15 million songs—which I think is the most of any streaming service right now—and a wide userbase, so you have a higher chance of finding friends who are on it. But it's also missing a lot of things. Spotify doesn't let you see what your friends are listening to right now —instead, it offloads that capability onto Last. It doesn't alert you when your favorite artists put out new music, and it doesn't really have a good music discovery engine.

It also, surprisingly, has a puny section for new releases, when in fact it gets a ton of new releases in every week that they dump into a separate playlist. Not sure why this isn't more of a core feature, to be honest.

So here are a bunch of utilities to help you get more out of Spotify, whether you're a paying user or just a free one. Here are some sites that alert you of new releases, because Spotify's own new releases section is paltry, and doesn't distinguish between this week's releases and ones from a month ago. You could also subscribe to the playlists Spotify the user made to keep track of these new albums and new singles.

But these seem like they're not as comprehensive as the websites. Also useful are the playlist importers and Spotify link cleaner-uppers.

It's great that you have 15 million tracks to listen to, but how are you going to find them when the music discovery part of Spotify is so mediocre?

External websites! Put in stuff you like, out comes stuff you probably like. Spotify seems to be playlist oriented, meaning, you can only really see what people are listening to by their playlists—which takes effort on their part. One, it uses an endless scrolling interface, meaning you can swipe through video after video for as long as you can hold out.

Two, its algorithm is incredibly effective at figuring out your interests, so it mostly shows you videos you will want to see. The app, Anthem , was designed to help you discover new music based on your Spotify listening history. As a cherry on top, you can swipe through these songs as you would on TikTok, which makes browsing new tracks fun and familiar. When you first boot up the app, follow the on-screen instructions to link your Spotify account. Once your account is linked, create an Anthem username.

Anthem clubs are pages for users to share songs and discuss, and have different themes. To refine your feed, hit the Filter tab in the top right and choose from the available genres.