Spotify adds features to organize your chaotic library, but a vital one is missing
Despite some strong competition from Apple Music and YouTube Music, Spotify remains one of the top music-streaming options in the world. It’s been attracting some flack recently from those who’ve found other services offer better recommendation algorithms. Spotify is biting back with some big improvements that could rocket it back to being your bass blaster of choice.
Taking back control is the big theme of this package of seven new features, whether that’s telling the DJ what you want to listen to, or fine-tuning your Discover Weekly to a specific genre. However, Spotify still hasn’t added one feature that fans have been clamoring for.
Putting you back in control
Listen up, AI
For better or worse, there’s an AI revolution going on right now, and Spotify certainly hasn’t ignored it. It released the AI-powered DJ over two years ago and has been slowly improving it ever since. Open up the DJ and it’ll talk to you, and recommend some music to listen to, based arounda specific theme, genre, mood, or your historical listening habits. Before, you could only tap the DJ button to skip onto the next vibe if you didn’t like what it was playing, but with this new update, it’s no longer one-way traffic in terms of talking. Hold down the DJ and you’ll be able to tell the DJ exactly what you want to hear.
There are some new controls coming to your Spotify library too. A new Smart Filters button will let you filter down your library to just songs that match a specific activity, mood, or genre, so your library always matches your need. Fan favorite playlist Discover Weekly is also getting some new controls, with a genre selection tool that lets you decide pick which genre you want to explore today.
There are also more ways to control music as it’s playing too. The playing controls have been tweaked to make it easier to access Smart Shuffle and the Sleep Timer, and there are also new ways to control your playlists. You can snooze a song for 30 days if you’re getting a little sick of it, or just tell Spotify to skip a specific song on a playlist from now on with Hide In This Playlist. Finally, it’s also been made easier to edit your playlists’ names and pictures.
It’s a nice bundle of updates for Spotify users, but there’s one key feature which Spotify continues to ignore.
Why can’t I edit my listening history?
It’s killing my recommendations
Spotify’s recommendations are based on what you’ve listened to previously, so being able to prune your listening history should be an obvious addition, right? Wrong. Spotify still doesn’t have a way to tune your listening history.
It’s easy to say “just don’t listen to stuff you don’t want to hear”, but anyone who says that clearly does not share a house and a smart speaker with someone with drastically different music tastes. Or children. And doesn’t have parties. There are some tools to allow you to remove certain playlists or songs from your history, but it relies on them being in your Recently Played section, and it only works sometimes. Yes, you can use Private Sessions, but in houseshares it’s not really a great option.
I like being able to tell the DJ that I want to listen to disco metal, but honestly, I would much rather go into my listening history and remove all the kids songs and folk music that’s been embedded into it over the years — and I’m absolutely sure I’m not alone.
