Tag Archives: Playlists

Spotify, You One-Stop-Shop for All Your Netflix Soundtracks, Playlists, and Podcasts

In a world where experts thought, just a few years ago, that TV would be dead and short form content platforms like YouTube will takeover, TV and films are doing better than ever. You cannot credit their strength to manufacturers though. Rather, these things come because of technologies that exists and allows the existence of Netflix.

Netflix is now bigger than life though. While there are other platforms like Disney+, or Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix is still king. It is the one platform that you go to time and time again to find contents to watch. It is, at least personally, the first platform that we switch on to find entertainment before even YouTube.

You can never get enough of Netflix though. After every show, you might discover something about the show that you liked. The most common of that is the soundtracks used in the show or movie. Within two weeks of Squid Game’s debut on Netflix, 22,500 unique Squid Game themed playlists were created by Spotify users to keep the show alive.

Netflix very much understands that their users are looking for entertainment far beyond their own scope. Spotify sees this too, obviously, being the largest audio streaming platform known to man. A collaboration was imminent.

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Source: Spotify

They call it the Netflix Hub on Spotify and it is the best way for you to experience your Netflix shows beyond the streaming platform, at least according to Spotify and Netflix. In the hub premium users can find all official soundtracks, playlists, and even podcasts from Netflix’s shows. You can easily access soundtracks from shows like Squid Game, Bruised, and even Cowboy Bebop.

The collaboration is more than just compiling soundtracks, playlists, and podcasts though. In honor of the final season of Money Heist, Spotify has included new videos from the cast of the show (not available in Malaysia yet, as far as we can tell). They have also updated the soundtrack playlist with songs used the latest episodes of the show. There are also new features like Character Match Playlist quiz that matches you to your favourite characters from the Spanish show.

Of course, the collaboration will not just end at Money Heist. As Netflix populates its library with new contents, so will Spotify with dedicated Netflix contents. You might see a Squid Game related video content and quiz in the future, you will never know.

Spotify Launches Blend for You to Share Playlists and Compare Musical Tastes

Sharing your playlist with your friends in the old days means that you have to copy a whole music library you have created over a USB drive, or a CD. That was the days before content streaming services like Spotify came to be. Even when Apple’s iTunes was a thing, it served more like a digital music library that requires you to have the music files stored in your device.

Before the days of Spotify too, you still had to pay money for individual songs and albums if you want to legally listen to them and own them for your own personal consumption or even share it with your friends. Obviously, sharing your music library before then is still a grey area in terms of copyright.

Spotify may not be the first music streaming service and cloud-based music library to exist. It is, in 2021 at least, the most successful thus far. This is amidst the rise in other services like Deezer, Tidal, YouTube Music, and more. If you think about it, Spotify has a tough competition to work with especially in Tidal and YouTube Music at this point. Tidal features a higher quality music streaming that allows music to play at near lossless quality while YouTube Music offers a more robust and complete music library compared to Spotify. At some point Taylor Swift criticised Spotify’s royalty structure and pulled all her assets away from Spotify.

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Source: Spotify

When spotify launched, sharing your favourite songs and curated playlists is made super easy. You only need to share a URL with your friends now and you can listen to it at anytime where you have internet or data. Of course, your friends can still comment on your music selection and judge your music taste according to what you have just shared. You could also say sometimes that you share the same music taste with your best friends, but you would not really know how similar sometimes.

Spotify introduced Blend Playlists in June 2021 as a Beta feature. It was introduced as a way for two users to create a shared playlist that is dedicated to their shared musical tastes. It is also created as a new way for friends to interact and bond over their love of music.

The feature is now out in full force on your Spotify. Blend Playlists also now allows you to customise the playlist with unique cover arts for easy identification. The Blend feature also scores your music taste compatibility with your friends. Of course, you can share those on social media to brag that you and your besties are very similar to one another.

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Source: Spotify

Blend is not a personally curated list though. It is still a curated list, but it is curated via Spotify’s clever mechanism that adds and changes the playlist to adapt to your listening behaviour combined with your friend’s listening behaviour that you share the list with. The best part is that both you and your friend can have a similar playlist experience but in completely different situations and locations at the same time.

Of course, this experience is not just limited to you and your best friends. It is a good way to start sharing a curated playlist with your family members, or a loved one. This is a way to keep your bonds as strong as they are in these trying times where face time and physical interaction has to be limited.

The feature should now be available on the Spotify app. You can supposedly access the feature from the “Made for you” hub on mobile devices. You simply hit “create blend” and invite your friends to create a Blend Playlist with whichever friends you choose to have a blend with (if the person accepts) and let Spotify do everything for you there. To our knowledge, we have found that the feature has not been made available to us (could just be us). The Spotify app is available for free on both Android and iOS via Google Play Store and Apple Play Store respectively.