Spotify is one of the most popular music streaming services out there, and there’s a good reason for that. Whether you’re using the web player or the app, the experience is smooth and seamless (at least if you’re using the premium version), made better by the vast selection of songs and tons of handy features that jazz up your jam sessions.
Many of these Spotify features are targeted toward helping you curate the perfect playlist for whatever you’re feeling. There’s Smart Shuffle that adds songs that Spotify thinks you might like, Mix sections that give you customized song playlists based on stuff you’ve been listening to, and even Spotify’s new Smart Reorder feature that makes your song transitions more seamless.
However, there are also a number of hidden Spotify curation features that most people don’t know about, but that can make your playlists better. These include even more ways to get customized playlists and song recommendations by Spotify, custom album art to make your playlists pop even more, and even a dedicated AI-assisted DJ with the sole purpose of curating your playlists.
1. Custom cover art
This specific feature won’t make your playlist sound any better than it already does, but it will make it look a lot more stylish (depending on your tastes, at least). Whenever you make a new playlist, Spotify builds the cover from a collage of the covers of the first few songs you add to the playlist. This isn’t bad, but if you’ve looked at your favorite albums from your most-listened-to artist and wanted to replicate just how beautiful the album’s cover art looked, you can do so on Spotify.
This feature was only available on the desktop version of Spotify for the longest time, but can now be used on the Spotify mobile app as well. Whether you’re on a computer or on your smartphone, navigate to the playlist that you want to add the custom album art to, then go to Edit details. Here, you can select the automatically generated cover art and then change it. You can then import any image and use it as the cover, or draw a cover yourself. You can even use stickers and other effects inside Spotify to tailor it specifically to your taste.
2. Spotify artist and song radio
Many of us have playlists for every niche occasion, but sometimes you still want to listen to something new. Spotify gives you a lot of options for this. There’s the Smart Shuffle that adds songs to your queue based on your listening trends, your Spotify Mix playlists that compile everything you’ve been listening to, and many other hidden Spotify features that give you better song recommendations.
One such feature that most people don’t know about is the Radio. If there’s a specific artist who really captures the vibes you’re aiming for or an album that resonates deeply with what you’re in the mood to hear, you can go to said artist or album, select the three dots, and click Go to Radio. This will give you a playlist that has songs from the artist and album, and also from other artists that listeners of your selection also listen to. This functions very similarly to the Fans Also Like section, but is a complete playlist that you can go to at any time.
3. DJ X, the AI music assistant
Every major company has incorporated AI into its app in one way or another. For Spotify, one of these ways is its integrated AI assistant that functions as your personal DJ, DJ X. To start DJ X, you can simply search for DJ on Spotify and select the DJ playlist by Spotify. This will prompt a voiced AI assistant that introduces itself to you and explains some of its features.
After this, the DJ essentially analyzes what you’ve been listening to and curates a playlist based on your likes. There’s no option to prompt it with specific commands — unlike in many other similar assistants — but you can choose to tap on a new button beside a song if you don’t like it. This will tell the DJ not to put that song or any similar ones in the queue. Overall, this doesn’t function much differently than any other playlist curation method, but it is a mostly hidden Spotify feature that you might want to try out.
4. Audio quality controls
As a music streaming service, Spotify ensures that its users get the highest quality audio to keep them from switching to any of the many Spotify music alternatives. However, this audio quality can be further enhanced. This is because of optimization within the app that limits the Wi-Fi and data usage, so your content loads smoothly and without consuming too much bandwidth. If you want better sound quality than you currently have, though, and don’t mind using more data or Wi-Fi bandwidth, you can turn this optimization off from the Spotify Settings.
To increase Spotify song quality on your phone, tap your profile icon and then Settings and privacy. From here, go to Media Quality. You can set the quality of both your audio and video there, with a higher quality meaning more data usage. You can also select different preferences for when you’re on Wi-Fi and when you’re on cellular data.
If you want to improve the sound of songs on your desktop Spotify app or web player, there’s unfortunately no way of manually adjusting the quality. However, the web version of Spotify should always try to play the highest quality by default, so long as your Wi-Fi connection can support it.
5. Track exclusions to fine-tune your taste profile
Spotify has a lot of features that help you curate your playlists and give you new song recommendations based on what you like. Whether you’re using the base Smart Shuffle, the Radio, or even Spotify’s AI DJ, there’s a way to ensure the recommendations you get are tailored even more to your specific tastes by telling Spotify which recommendations or songs you aren’t a fan of.
Doing this is very straightforward. Whenever you see a song that you don’t like — whether it’s one recommended by Spotify or not — you can click on the three dots beside it and select Remove from your taste profile. Then, the next time you use any Spotify recommendation feature, the algorithm will do a better job to ensure you don’t get similar songs presented to you. The more often you exclude songs this way, the more accurately Spotify will be able to figure out what songs fit your tastes best.
