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With more than 15 million songs on Spotify, deciding what to listen to can be overwhelming. This list highlights the best Spotify apps for discovering new music, reading album reviews and exploring the social buzz of emerging bands.
What's your favorite app on Spotify right now? Let us know in the comments section below.
1. Fuse
Best for: Creative playlists The Fuse Spotify app is a perfect resource for curated playlists. With a gorgeous, image-heavy layout, the app is fun to use and very visually appealing. Fuse's 'What We're Listening To' playlist features over 200 tracks and is updated by staff members daily. You probably won't find new songs with this app, but you will enjoy the creative approach Fuse takes when compiling its playlists, such as 'This Niles Rodgers Playlist is Like the History of Disco and Dance,' 'The Daft Punk Samples Playlist' and 'Single Ladies: The Best One-Named Female Singers.'
2. Blue Note
Best for: Perusing classic jazz songs Blue Note is an essential Spotify app for jazz enthusiasts. The app features more than 70 years of music. Its interactive timeline and filters let you customize your browsing selection. 'View' or 'Read More' links bring you to a landing page with historical context and profiles of contributing artists. 'Add as Playlist' and 'Share' buttons make the interactive experience social, too.
3. TuneWiki
Best for: Looking up lyrics Say goodbye to those '[song name] +lyrics' Google searches. The TuneWiki Spotify app generates lyrics for whatever track you're listening to, and then as the music plays, it automatically bolds the current line. The app struggles with more experimental music like Dillon Francis and XXYYXX; since the words are so muddled, it simply says: [Instrumental] (Instrumental) {Instrumental} And I have to admit, I appreciated the creativity in conveying the different sets of instrumentals.
4. Emerge
Best for: Tracking social buzz of emerging artists The Emerge Spotify app uses data visualization to track new artists you care about. While most apps on the Internet try to cater to Millennials' notoriously short attention spans, Emerge takes a more long-term approach: It tracks social buzz and Spotify activity of 10 upcoming artists over a six-week period.
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5. Pitchfork
Best for: Alternative music discovery Pitchfork's publication is exceptional for finding new music, so it's no surprise that its Spotify app is equally helpful. You can browse album reviews in three ways: an all-inclusive stream, the best new albums, or Pitchfork-made playlists. Each album listed comes with a numerical rating, an 'Add as Playlist' option, and a 'Share Album' option, as well as a full-length, Pitchfork-style album review.
6. Rolling Stone Recommends
Best for: Reading reviews of new releases The Rolling Stone Spotify app works hard in all the right places. The interface is hassle-free and the album and song reviews are hosted directly on Spotify. A large selection of the playlists are curated by top artists, from David Guetta to Tom Petty.
Mashable composite; image via iStockPhoto, iconeer
Spotify—one of Apple's main rivals in both the latter's services strategy and in antitrust investigations—has released a new version of its iPhone app that supports home screen widgets, one of the flagship features of iOS 14.
Last month's release of iOS 14 brought home screen widgets—previously only the domain of iPads and Android phones—to iPhones. As we noted in our iOS 14 review, the value of the feature depends entirely on strong adoption and clever uses by third-party app developers.
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Releases of widget-supporting apps from developers have been slow. Part of that was because Apple launched iOS 14 with less notice to developers than usual, meaning many were racing to play catch-up. But even now, a month later, the roster of widget-supporting apps has only grown a little.Spotify is one of the most high-profile apps on the App Store, and it finally made the jump with version 8.5.80 of its iOS app. Unfortunately, the new widget isn't all that powerful or useful. It essentially does the exact same thing the Music widget does: it shows a list of recently played songs or playlists that you can tap into from the home screen.
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Tapping an entry doesn't just take you to the song in the app—it starts playing it right away, saving you an extra tap. Many users will wish they could customize what appears in the list or that they could control playback, as they currently can in the Android widget. As the setup stands now, the widget offers no customization options at all.
Some app developers (like Spark) have found creative ways to use the somewhat limited iOS widgets API (WidgetKit) to offer multiple, flexible uses of that precious home screen real estate. But users have said a lot of widgets just aren't that useful at the moment.
Those same users might wonder why we're not seeing essentially fully working slices of apps appearing on the home screen. Apple is likely to expand what developers can do with WidgetKit in future software releases, but there will always be some big limitations because of an emphasis on maintaining battery life.Lots of interactivity and live data from multiple apps on the home screen could have a negative impact there—that's probably why Apple and many devs have generally been conservative in terms of making widgets ultra-powerful.
By contrast, the Android Spotify widget offers playback control. But Spotify actually removed that comparatively powerful widget in August of last year, only to reintroduce an improved version of it shortly afterward when users complained. The brief removal led to a plethora of user-made widgets to replace the lost functionality.
But at least Spotify is supporting widgets on iPhones at all—that wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Listing image by Samuel Axon