Spotify tips and tricks: Getting the most out of the streaming service

Spotify is now official in Bangladesh! We can all save our VPNs and stop worrying about getting unlimited, instantaneous music. Spotify has revolutionised listening habits of millions of people around the world and it offers to do the same with audiophiles in Bangladesh. The premium subscription comes packed with an array of cool features. It can be a little bit of a trick to find out all that Spotify offers to its users for a new convert. Let's take a look at some tips and tricks that will allow you to get the most out of the streaming service.

Discover weekly and daily mix

Spotify's algorithm constantly analyses what you play in order to recommend music that you might dig. And their robots are quite intuitive in finding tracks that will be right up your alley. The best way to milk the surprisingly wonderful Spotify recommendations is by checking out your Discover Weekly playlist. Every Monday, Spotify serves up 30 fresh tracks based on your listening of the week. Apart from Discover Weekly, Spotify offers up to 6 Daily Mix playlists which are a blend of jams that you've already liked and fresh music. Putting these aside, Spotify also offers a Release Radar playlist to keep track of new music from artists you follow. If you're still looking to find more fresh music, check out the Discover feature where you'll find a whole bunch of albums and playlists based on specific artists and music you've been listening to. With all these personalised recommendations, you'll never be out of new music for every mood and feeling.

Save music and offline downloads

If you use Spotify for a while, you'll find yourself wandering across a very wide spectrum of music. It can be difficult to keep track of the gems you discover and even harder to remember to come back to them. But your memory can rest because Spotify allows you to save all your favorite music in one place. By tapping the 'heart' icon beside a song, it's added to your Liked Songs playlist. Not only that, you can also save your favorite playlists, albums, podcast episodes, artists, radio stations to find them all in your library. When you like a particular track, a green icon will appear to indicate that it's been added to your Liked Songs.

One of the most attractive features for the premium subscribers is the Offline Downloads. You can download any song on your device and listen to them without an internet connection. On the top right of every album or playlist there is a download button that allows you to download every song on the list. A trick to download a specific song is by turning download on for your Liked Songs playlist. This way, whenever you tap the heart for a specific song it's added to the playlist and downloaded.

Radio stations

It happens so very often that we stumble across a song or an artist and wonder how much more similar music is out there that we have no idea about. Spotify can help you find out! If you want to find songs similar or related to the one you're listening to, go to the options and tap the 'Go to Song Radio'. This will essentially create a radio station full of music that's somehow related to the song. It will bring across songs from the same genre, artists, movements, decade and mood. Besides a particular song, you can also create radio stations based on an artist or an album. This is a great way to discover music that's similar to the one you're jamming out to.

Private listening and collaborative playlist

If you're using Spotify on the desktop app, you'll be able to see what your friends have been listening to on the right side of the screen. But if you feel like you wanna indulge in some guilty pleasure like, perhaps, having a Backstreet Boys throwback session and don't want your friends to find out, Spotify allows you to hide your listening sessions. When you start a private session, whatever you play won't factor into your recommendations. This is a great way to keep the algorithm straight if you listen to two hours of rainfall and ocean sounds before dozing off every night. You can also make any playlist you follow secret or public.

On the opposite end of hiding your listening is the collaborative playlist option. Here you can create and listen to a playlist with a bunch of your friends. Everyone will be able to add, remove or rearrange the order of the songs. This is a great way to constantly share music with similarly inclined enthusiasts.

Crossfade

One of the more obscure but interesting and useful features in Spotify is enabling the crossfade. This lets you cut out the silence and empty bits at the beginning and end of songs. So one song segues right into the next and creates a seamless listening experience. This feature is specially useful when you're using Spotify to party because who wants to wait for the next song to come on when you're dancing away. It's also a great device for concept albums that are meant to be an uninterrupted experience. If you're listening to The Dark Side of the Moon, even a split second of silence before Eclipse kicks in after Brain Damage can ruin the whole experience.

Spotify comes with many more amazing features that makes listening to music as comfortable, easy and enjoyable as it is supposed to be. As you keep using Spotify, it gets to know you better and tailors the experience according to your taste and interests. This is the age of streaming, this is how we consume content now. Sad as it is for admirers of authenticity, CDs and Vinyls are all but obsolete now. Thankfully, Spotify has managed to create a platform that makes up for not being able to hold a record in your hands and read the sleeve notes by bringing you music across periods and cultures.