Tips for Maximizing Your Spotify Account

It's true that Spotify has its downsides, as do many streaming services for music. The main issue is that artists are often paid less than they deserve, making fractions of a cent for each stream, leading to lessened royalties and causing less popular artists, who could have made do with CD sales in the past, to enjoy lesser income due to lesser reimbursement. That's why it's always helpful to support the smaller acts in your rotation when you can, be that purchasing merchandise or heading to live shows.

That being said, Spotify and services like it have provided a great deal of convenience to many casual consumers of music. From listening to the latest drops to hearing podcast episodes, you get to decide how much or how little you use it. If you're looking for a few ways to get the best out of this app, then we'd like to share a few methods and techniques you can use to enhance the convenience and get your money's worth.

Uncheck Ambient Playlists From Personalized Tastes

Spotify allows you to exclude artists/playlists from my taste profile. What this means is that if you listen to a long, ambient playlist, perhaps whale noises to get to sleep, or listen to movie soundtracks often but only when you're in the mood, you can detach saved playlists from your recommendations profile. This means that when Spotify recommends generated playlists, you can listen to new artists in genres you enjoy, but not constant drone, classical, jazz or other ambient playlists you don't pay attention to.

Make Use of User Playlists

One of the best features of Spotify is its social integrations. That's not to say you can talk to other people through the app, but you can listen to their pre-curated playlists if they've been made public. There are a wealth of these, from users putting together licensed music from different movies, to placing ambient reading playlists together for certain book series (such as Dune ambient movie music for those reading the books), and deeper cuts of artists you would rarely listen to. Moreover, you can port these collections using free music transfer services if you switch to other apps. User playlists, intentionally made, will always be superior to what an algorithm spits at you.

Make Use of Tour Dates and Ticket Notices

An underrated feature of Spotify is that they'll tell you when an artist you have saved or listen to regularly is touring in your area. This way, you can be notified well in advance to purchase tickets. Of course, this is usually implemented by the artist, and so it shouldn't be considered a 100% foolproof system. That being said, many of these integrations allow you the chance to get out there and experience something new. This is especially true if you hope to support smaller artists who might not be gaining too much money from streaming music. In some cases, you can also directly purchase CD/Vinyls and merchandise also.

With this advice, you'll be certain to get the best out of your Spotify account.