Since signing up to Spotify Premium many moons ago, I’ve explored many of its music discovery and playback hacks through a process of trial and error – and I thought I had all the tricks down, from scouring editorial playlists to the ‘Fans Also Like’ section.
And then I got ChatGPT involved.
While Discover Weekly and Daylists are some of my go-tos for new music finds, I was itching to know if there were any tricks missing from my music streaming regime, because I simply have to know everything. I haven’t used ChatGPT much since it came on the scene, but in this case it seemed justified, and I was surprised with what it presented to me.
ChatGPT suggested dozens of hacks and tips, many of which I – and likely you – are familiar with. But in among them were five hidden gems I haven’t been taking advantage of, and I feel like a fool for not knowing about them – starting with private sessions.
Private session listening
This year I made it my mission to explore genres outside of my comfort zone, and it’s been a swimming success – but sometimes I find my guilty pleasures calling my name which can ruin your Spotify algorithm and stats. This is where private listening sessions come in handy.
Private listening sessions are for when you want to enjoy your guilty pleasures to the fullest without it interfering with your algorithm, while hiding your listening history from your followers. It’s easy to turn on, and when a private session is enabled, Spotify will temporarily hide your activity – the session will automatically end after six hours.
Go to Settings by tapping your profile image in the Home page. Tap ‘Privacy and social’ and then enable the ‘Private session’ toggle.
Search with qualifiers
Searching with qualifiers is a practice used to go through Netflix and other streaming services to narrow down titles by genre or decade, and you can do the same thing in the Spotify app.
If you’re looking for a specific genre or decade, you can use filters in the search field to narrow down results to find exactly what you’re looking for using the following format. To find electronic music released between 2015 and 2020, for example, you’d enter genre:electronic year:2015-2020.
Use Liked Songs to fine-tune your Discover Weekly
I’ve never been one to use my Liked Songs – I’m more of a playlist curator and listener – however ChatGPT suggests that using your Liked Songs strategically can help Spotify‘s algorithms finetune your Discover Weekly playlist.
To make your Discover Weekly playlist lean in a certain direction, the trick is to add up 10-20 songs in the genre you want to your Liked Songs. As per ChatGPT’s answer, the algorithm will detect this pattern and adjust your Discover Weekly accordingly.
Sleep timer
I’ve always been aware of the Sleep timer function in the mobile version of Spotify, but never experimented with it. This is an invaluable feature for those who rely on a soothing playlist or podcast to get a good night’s rest.
Sleep timer does what it says on the tin. When you play a playlist or a podcast episode, you can enable a custom timer that will stop playing content after the set time, ideal for falling asleep and saving battery life at the same time.
Tap the three dots on the playback page and scroll down to ‘Sleep timer’. From there you have a number of options to choose from, and can select to stop playback after 5, 10, 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. There’s also an ‘End of track option’.
For me, Spotify’s editorial playlists and Discover Weekly are some of my favorite new music discovery features in Spotify, but my interest in incredibly niche genres will never go away. Third party tools can help you dig into these genres deeper, as ChatGPT told me.
Sites like Stats.fm allow you to get access to more accurate analysis of your listening habits, but there are also sites out there that can help you broaden your exposure to the crazy world of subgenres – Every Noise at Once is one of those.
It’s quite a busy site, but presents every genre you can think of on one page in a cascading map of links. You can click on any link to explore that genre further, and there’s also a link that takes you to a designated introductory playlist in Spotify for each genre, which you can then save to your Library and revisit at any time.
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rowan.davies@futurenet.com (Rowan Davies)
