12 Hidden Spotify Tricks You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner

There’s a good chance you subscribe to Spotify. It’s the biggest music streaming service in the world, with more than double the market share of Apple Music. You may feel like you know the ins and outs but Spotify frequently adds new, advanced features. Here are a dozen to turn you into a Spotify power user.

1. Manage downloads

The best perks of being a Spotify Premium subscriber include being able to download tracks, albums and podcasts directly to your device so you can listen to them offline. This is ideal for people on a capped cellular plan or know they’re traveling to a place without service.

The problem is that keeping tabs on your downloads — especially if you download things across different categories, like albums, playlists and tracks — is the opposite of intuitive. Even though Spotify doesn’t make it easy, you can still delete all your downloaded music.

Open the app, go to “Your Library” and select the big “Music” tab at the top of your screen. Then select either Playlists or Albums, whichever you want to manage, and then you’ll have to swipe up so that a search bar appears.

Select the Filters button, then select Downloads from the drop-down menu. From here, you can see all your downloaded playlists and albums, and then remove them one by one.

2. Make a group playlist with your friends

Spotify has a feature called “Collaborative Playlists” that lets you and a bunch of your friends share playlists with one another, with each individual able to add or delete songs, as well as reorder songs on the Collaborative Playlist.

All you have to do is open one of your playlists, click the ellipses adjacent to the playlist, and select “Make collaborative.” Then tap the ellipses again and hit share.

3. Start a group listening session

Instead of contributing to a playlist, like with Collaborative Playlists, users can start what’s called a Group Session — a temporary listening session where anybody can take control of the music from their own smartphone.

A Group Session can only be done with people in the same location since it involves scanning a QR code to sync up, and the music will only play from one source.

If you want to create your own Group Session, simply play a song on Spotify, select the “Devices Available” logo and select “Start a group session.” You can also select “Scan to Join” if you want to join another person’s Group Session.

Spotify

If you’re looking for a way to listen to music with a bunch of people at the same time, but you’re all in different locations (because maybe you’re quarantining), check out JQBX. It’s a web player and mobile app that lets you create a listening session where you can take turns selecting tracks while listening in unison. (The catch is that everybody in the listening session has to be a Spotify Premium subscriber.)

4. Reorder (or delete) tracks from your favorite album

If you’re a Spotify Premium subscriber, you can actually reorder the tracks on any music album, or simply delete them if you don’t ever want to listen to them again.

For example, if you want “Snowchild” (track 5) and “Heartless” (track 7) to be track one and two on The Weeknd’s album After Hours, you can do that. Simply play an album, select the queue button in the bottom-right corner and from here you can actually delete tracks or reorder them.

5. Improve the audio quality

Spotify streams 96 kbp/s audio tracks by default. Premium subscribers can upgrade to 320 kbp/s, which is a very high-quality stream (even if it’s still not CD quality).

To adjust the audio quality, follow these steps:

• Go to Settings (located in the top right corner)
• Scroll down and select Audio Quality
• Select the Very High options for both WiFi streaming and Cellular streaming

5. See song lyrics in real time

Spotify launched one of its most requested features in 2021: Lyrics. On desktop, you can find them by clicking on the microphone icon while a song is playing. On mobile, follow these steps:

1. Play a sing and tap on the “Now Playing View”
2. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen until you see Lyrics
3. Jam out with your favorite artists

6. Remove songs your listening history

Long-time Spotify subscribers will know that the streaming service keeps track of what songs, albums and artists you listen to. This is why you see “similar” artists and albums suggested to you, even though you’ve never listened to them.

But maybe you’ve outgrown some things, or just want to start fresh. Unfortunately, Spotify still doesn’t let you delete your past listening history — even though it’s a highly requested feature — but there is a little workaround.

If you launch the Spotify app on your desktop, you can actually remove songs from your “Recently Played” section. Just right click on the song, artist, radio or podcast and select “Remove from Recently Play.”

7. Connect Shazam to your Spotify account

Maybe you haven’t used Shazam in years. The app first became immensely popular over a decade ago, circa 2008, as it was able to quickly listen to any song that was playing and identify it. Turns out, it’s still around and you can integrate it into Spotify.

Once downloaded and registered (it’s free), you link Shazam to your Spotify account and from then on. Every time you Shazam a song, you can directly add it to a Spotify playlist.

8. Keep your listening sessions private

Anybody new to Spotify will know that all your friends can see what you’re listening to because the app’s Friend Activity is turned on by default. Well, it’s easy to turn off if you don’t want people knowing you have a guilty listening pleasure.

Just go to Settings, then Social and make sure to switch-on “Private Session.” Then nobody can see what music you’re listening to.

9. Use Spotify like a radio to discover new music

When Pandora first came out, one of the things that made it different as a streaming service is that it created playlists for you depending on the song or artist you were listening to. Well, Spotify can do the same thing.

Just search for a song that you like, click the ellipses next to the song and select “Go to radio” from the drop-down menu. This effectively makes a radio station featuring other artists based around that one song.

In 2023, Spotify also launched DJ, it’s AI-powered disc jockey that uses your listening history to deliver both songs you love and things you might, with scarily realistic interstitials

10. Blend songs using Crossfade

If you’re hosting a party and preparing a Spotify playlist, one of the easiest-yet-most-important things to do is to turn on Crossfade. It’s a feature that lets you skip that dull silence at the beginning and end of each track, that way the songs just blend right into each other and the music seems like it never stops.

To turn Crossfade on, follow these steps.

• Select Settings
• Select Playback
• Adjust the Crossfade slider to the desired length (the higher the number, the more the songs will blend into each other)

11. Download songs to your Apple Watch for offline listening

In 2021, Apple and Spotify finally teamed up to allow you to download playlists, albums and podcasts onto your Apple Watch for offline listening. This is a big deal for anybody who runs with an Apple Watch without their iPhone on their person.

Spotify

Downloading music to your Apple Watch can be done either from your iPhone or your Apple Watch:

• Open the Spotify app on your Apple Watch
• Find the music and podcasts you want to download
• Select the playlist, album or podcast and press the three dots ( … ) and choose “Download to Apple Watch”
• Once playlists, albums, or podcasts in your library are downloaded, you’ll see a little green arrow next to their names
• Connect your headphones and start listening

12. Listen to audiobooks

If you thought Spotify was just for music, think again. In 2022, the company announced that users could purchase audiobooks through Spotify. It was a welcome a change to streamline the number of apps you needed to juggle on a road trip, for example, but audiobooks are expensive.

Well, in 2023, Spotify announced that Premium subscribers would have access to more than 150,000 audiobooks and could listen to up to 15 hours at no additional cost. While that’s not enough time to get through all of Harry Potter, it’ll get you pretty far — and you don’t need to spend more than $20 to find out if you like a title.

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