Tag Archives: Spotify

Now you can Easily Block Other People on Spotify

Today’s generation is the most connected one so far. But it is a generation also where cutting off someone is as easy as a click of a button. There is something called ‘cancel culture’ in the world of social media today.

While there are plenty of reasons why you would want to cut a person off, for whatever reasons, on social media, wanting to block a person on streaming platform like Spotify is a little odd. There is a way to block certain artists from ever appearing on your Spotify home feed. That feature was introduced back in 2019. For whatever reason as well, users have been wanting to block other users instead on the platform.

To be fair, Spotify is more than just a music streaming app today. It is also a social platform where you can add friends, follow their playlists and even see what they are playing in real time. In a sense, if someone is in your friends list, their listening privacy is gone. You can ensure that your listening session does not appear on any of your friends feed by turning on ‘Private Session’, but that only lasts for a limited time before Spotify kicks you back into online mode to update your songs and your recommendations.

You now can decide to block other users from accessing your activities now though. It is as simple as clicking the person’s profile and tap the “Block User” option. Once you have done that, the person will not be able to see you appearing on their ‘friend’s activity’ list on the right side of the app anymore, at least on the desktop interface. That way, you also limit what you show the person you blocked.

While showing your Spotify activity may not seem all that harmful, it could lead to a bigger impact. Some might think that just showing the ‘Now Listening to’ information as an empty information your friends cannot use. For example, other users can use the activity information from Spotify to harass you on other platforms like Facebook or Instagram, for example. They could also use whatever information they can gather against you as well for that matter. Remember, information in the wrong hands can be dangerous.

The function should be available to users very soon, at least according to Spotify as per Engadget.

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.

SPOTIFYBLEND 1
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.

SPOTIFYBLEND 3
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.

Spotify Will Support Apple’s AirPlay 2, Eventually

Apple’s AirPlay function is one of the best things to have in the IoT focused world today. The system allows your Apple devices to connect to anything wireless in your home with AirPlay support and allow you to stream anything from any of your Apple devices in your home to the AirPlay supported devices.

Apple’s AirPlay 2 comes with added functionalities too. One of them really makes Apple’s ecosystem one of the most seamless in the world, if not the most seamless. It added streaming over WiFi function, which also means you get to play a single audio, from anywhere in your house, to your entire house, as long as you have speakers with AirPlay 2 enabled. It also allows you to choose between left and right speakers on enabled speakers, especially if you choose to use those speakers as your TV speakers.

We are not going to elaborate on the kinds of things you can do with AirPlay 2 though, because it has been launched for a while and you would have known its benefits by now, especially if you are coming from the iOS ecosystem. If you still do not know how to work with AirPlay 2 and the benefits of the system, get learning.

While AirPlay 2 has been Apple’s standard for three years now, it does not automatically become an industry standard. Not all smart TVs in the market gets AirPlay 2 support. Some of them could be hardware limited too though, so there is nearly nothing you can do about that. The big surprise is from app developers instead. For example, Spotify has not been supporting AirPlay 2.

A few days ago, there was an apparent posting in Spotify’s community forum that mentions that Apple’s AirPlay 2 support will not be coming to Spotify “for now”. This is in response to the numerous requests from Spotify’s iOS users in adding its support to the app. Of course, that might not have gone too well with users.

Spotify has since then clarified to the statement. Spotify says that they are still working on AirPlay 2 support on the app. In the clarification also Spotify did shed some light on why their app has not supported the function and why users may not see its support coming too soon.

https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1423744958541058052

The developer that clarified the issue reveals that including AirPlay 2 support on the app is more complex than just adding a provided API to the current app and just let it work its own magic. There are a bunch of new commands that has to be written into the app. While adding a bunch of new command lines may not be the most complex thing for engineers to work with, Spotify says that the API, or at least Apple’s documentation on the API is a big stumbling block for its developers. In that case, developers might have to do a lot of guess work, and experiments to get the API to function without entirely messing itself up.

Spotify, with the new clarification, has not set a timeline for AirPlay 2 support though. While they did say that they are working on it and is assuring users that it is coming, there are no confirmations as to when. Still, at least you know it is coming, unless Apple comes back with AirPlay 3 this year.

Source: The Verge, Engadget

Spotify Beta App Released with M1 Native Support

Apple’s M1 chip for their Mac platform has been around for nearly eight months now. At the same time, while there is a growth for apps that natively supports the M1 chip, it has been a little slow in adoption from major app developers. At least there is some good news today though.

There are a few reasons why app developers want to develop apps that natively supports the M1 chip. Due to the unique architecture of Apple’s silicon, apps need to behave a little differently to take advantage of the chip’s power. In some sense, apps for the Mac have to be developed to work very much like mobile apps, but more feature rich than one.

This means that regular apps you usually see for your PC and regular Intel or AMD powered Mac, while runs on an M1 variant Mac, will run a little slower with more noticeable lags. This is also something you will see on regular PC apps running on other ARM based chips like the Qualcomm Compute platform. To ensure that the apps behave as they are designed to, they have to reengineer their apps a little bit to optimise its running processes for the ARM architecture-based chips.

Today is one of those days that another major app developer jumps on board of the M1 train. Spotify has just released a new Beta app with native support for Apple’s M1 silicon. For Spotify users currently on M1 Macs, that should mean a major improvement in the apps experience on their Macs.

To be fair, the Beta release should not come as a huge surprise. Users have been asking Spotify to release an M1 supported Spotify app since the M1 chips launched into the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, and iMac. The native support should mean that the app runs a lot smoother and faster, on top of being a little bit more stable on M1 chips.

It is still in Beta though, which also means that you can expect some hiccups from time to time. In that case, you might want to report all sorts of bugs you will encounter in your experience so that Spotify can rectify as much as possible before the app goes full prime time. According to their own Spotify community post, they would also like to hear from users if their app works nicely.

You can download the Spotify Beta version for M1 based Mac devices on their website. Their community page post also features some instructions on how to get the Beta app up and running. You can easily go back to the regular version too, if you are not too keen with the Beta app by simply downloading the app from their website regularly.

Spotify Buys Podz – Finding Your Favourite Podcasts Will be A Lot Easier

Spotify is already the world’s most popular music streaming app. The platform probably also houses the largest collection of podcasts known in the modern world. In some sense, in the world of audio streaming at least, Spotify arguably has the best interface and discovery Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Looking for music and discovering music that would suit your preferences is a breeze on Spotify. Spotify itself will surface music that suits your tastes based on your playlists, and even based on songs that you frequently listen to. Podcasts is a different story though.

It is not exactly difficult to find podcasts in Spotify. We would not call the podcast discovery function excellent either. We think that they might as well be non-existent sometimes. That is about to change though.

Spotify is acquiring Podz, a podcast discovery service. It uses AI to generate highlights for a particular podcast and let users listen to 60-second samples of a chow or podcast before listening to the full show or subscribing to a channel or show. In some ways, it allows you to evaluate the podcast even before you spend your precious time on it.

With the acquisition, Spotify will be looking to integrate Podz’s clever AI algorithm and working into Spotify itself. The integration will make it not just easier and less time consuming for users to evaluate shows before committing to the show. It will also allow Spotify to improve the discovery algorithm of their podcast platform with the highlights.

At the same time, as a user, it will really make Spotify’s library of 2.6 million podcasts much easier to navigate and a lot more interesting. Spotify has been continuously building their podcast platform over the years, even getting some podcast exclusives up and running in the past two years. With Podz integrated, they could surface and push their own exclusive podcasts on users’ landing page in their app or web player. If the service is successful also, it could attract more creators into the platform just because their contents will be a lot more visible than before.

Spotify is planning to integrate Podz into Spotify before the end of 2021. Of course, that also includes the roll out to users all around the world. Last week, Spotify has also launched their Clubhouse competitor, Greenroom. Greenroom is now available for free on both iOS and Android. With the integration of Podz and Greenroom, Spotify looks to be the world’s largest audio streaming solution.

Tech & Tonic Podcast S02E11 – More Streaming, More Better

This episode is brought to you by Acer. Pre-order your Acer Nitro 5 gaming notebook with AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU from Acer from the 10th May 2021 onward!

In this episode of Tech & Tonic, we discuss the growing number of streaming services. Disney+ Hotstar is finally making its way into Malaysia after a long wait. Disney+ Hotstar joins Malaysia’s long list of streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Go, Astro Go, iflix, and a few others.

Is having more streaming services a good thing though? Does it still make sense for you to pay for Cable TV services like Astro in Malaysia, especially with certain channels being removed with the introduction of Disney+ Hotstar? Do we need more streaming platforms at this time? Would Disney+ be better than the rest of the platforms?

We discuss this and more in the Tech & Tonic Podcast.

Spotify Miniplayer Brings Audio Discovery to Facebook together with Price Hikes

Looks like Spotify and Facebook are playing extra nice with the launch of a new feature which brings even more integration of the music platform to the Facebook app. Come across a song that’s caught your ear on Facebook? The new miniplayer feature will allow you to simply press play to get the beat going as you continue to browse your timeline. The new miniplayer feature will allow you to play music from videos with licensed music as well as other content on your Newsfeed.

The new Spotify feature on Facebook will require users to connect the apps. Upon connecting the apps, users will be able to play songs they come across on their Facebook Newsfeed as they browse. As always, the feature will be available to Spotify Premium users with full access in the miniplayer. Free users, however, will be able to access the feature with shuffle mode and ads from Spotify.

Spotify Miniplayer Video

The new feature is available in select countries including Malaysia, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Thailand, Uruguay, and the U.S. The feature will continue to make its way to other markets soon.

New Features, Higher Prices

In addition to the new feature, it seems like Spotify is also revising its pricing. The music streaming platform seems to be rolling out pricing changes to a number of regions including the U.K. and Europe which have seen the price revisions officially announced through email notifications. The revised prices go into effect starting April 30, 2021. Existing users will have a month’s grace period to decide whether they will be continuing with the service.

Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash

Spotify users in Europe will be paying €5.99 (MYR29.62) for the student plan and €12.99 (MYR64.23) for the Duo plan; a €1 (MYR4.94) increase from the initial price. The family plan sees a €3 (MYR14.83) increase to €17.99 (MYR88.95). In the U.K., the price revisions are £5.99 (MYR34.07) for Student, £13.99 (MYR79.56) for Duo and £16.99 (MYR96.63) for family – an increase of £1 (MYR5.69) for the student and duo plans and a £2 (MYR11.38) increase for the family plan.

The price increase is expected to affect countries in Asia and South America as well. No indication of when though.

Attack of the Clubhouse Clones – Spotify, LinkedIn & Discord Enter the Foray

Clubhouse is arguably the largest buzz word in social media right now. The audio only social media app has been in the news thanks to technopreneurs like Elon Musk. That said, the platform has gained momentum due to its ability of bringing like-minded people together to speak and interact. The platform has become somewhat of a sanctuary for those looking for fun conversations, support and even escape – the three things that people are sorely lacking during the pandemic.

Thanks to the popularity of Clubhouse, we’ve seen a slew of other platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram come up with their own takes on the concept. The most recent was the launch of Instagram’s Live Rooms and Twitters Spaces. The latter launched earlier this month. Twitter’s Space rolled out to iOS and a limited number of Android users when it was initially discovered; many of whom were unable to host their own Spaces. However, it looks like more of us will be able to host Spaces and soon.

Source: Discord

If Twitter isn’t your groove, it looks like Discord has rolled out a new feature called Stage Channels which bring the same features to the forefront of the platform. The new Stage Channels allow users to have and sit in on live, moderated conversations. Unlike its normal channels, Stage Channels highlight the speakers while others join in the conversation as part of the audience. Audience members will have access to a raise hand button which allows them to indicate to the moderators that they wish to speak. Moderators will also be able to invite audience members to speak. Yep – that’s pretty much Clubhouse on Discord. However, the biggest difference between what Discord is doing is that the Stage Channels feature is available across all versions of their app now.

Spotify, on the other hand, isn’t reinventing the wheel. Instead, the company has acquired Betty Labs, the company behind the live sports audio app, Locker Room. The app is already available on iOS and will be making its way to Android in the near future. It will also serve a wider range of audiences with the topic focus expanding from only sports talk. The company sees the app as a natural complement to the Spotify app allowing creators to interact directly and in real-time with their audiences.

According to a statement from Gustav Söderström to The Verge, Chief R&D Officer at Spotify, the app will remain separate from the main Spotify app. However, it will be rebranded in the near future. The app will also allow all users to host their own session – not just approved users. With users already uploading recordings of their sessions on Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces to Anchor, Spotify’s podcast publishing tool. It looks like the app will streamline the process allowing users a more unified experience and feed the growing podcast ecosystem on Spotify.

Source: LinkedIn

While both Spotify, Twitter and Discord are looking at creating a platform for a wide, diverse range of content, LinkedIn is looking enhancing your professional profile. The company is introducing a “Creator” mode that allows you to get followers on your profile. The new profile will allow users to be followed in a similar way to the pages on Facebook. However, in addition to this, LinkedIn seems to be working on a similar Clubhouse-like approach to live audio content that it believes will be a good complement to a professional profile.

So, with more and more companies releasing their own versions of Clubhouse – where do you, our reader fall with the rise of live audio? Are you going to be taking part in the conversation? Which platform will you be using?

HiFi, Clips & Better Podcast Discovery Coming to Spotify

Spotify took center stage at their StreamOn event and, Boy!… did they have a lot to announce.

The streaming service is gaining even more momentum internationally with a rollout to an additional 80 countries. This comes on the tail of their recent launch in South Korea. The countries joining the Spotify fold include a large number of those in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America including countries such as Bangladesh, Cameroon, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mongolia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka; reaching over a billion potential users. With the new additions, Spotify is now available in over 170 countries putting it on par with competitors like Apple Music and YouTube Premium.

Spotify HiFi: CD Quality, Lossless Streaming

https://youtu.be/W07MvWbuWkI

In addition to this, Spotify also announced “Spotify HiFi”. The new HiFi offering brings CD quality, lossless audio to the music streaming platform. This will make Spotify more appealing to the audiophiles out there as they will be able to get better, more detailed sound via the app. The new service ups the bit rate available on Spotify from the current 320kbps to about 1,400kbps. This means that the more nuanced attributes of songs are able to better come through when streamed. The company did trial the service in the U.S. back in 2017 for a USD$7.50 (MYR30.32) premium on top of its subscription. However, aside from noting that the new Spotify HiFi will be coming to select markets, they have not revealed much.

Artist-Audience Interaction with Spotify Clips

If HiFi streaming wasn’t enough, Spotify also officially announced its Clips feature. The new feature functions in a similar fashion to Instagram Stories or Snaps on Snapchat. They allow artists to interact directly with their audience on Spotify by sharing clips akin to their social media. If this sounds familiar, it’s cause the company was testing the feature out over the past Christmas holidays in the U.S. However, with this announcement, the feature will see a more widespread release. Clips will appear on playlists to allow users to get a glimpse into personal moments from the artists.

Podcasts: Better Discovery, New Experiences

Spotify didn’t leave any stone unturned during its StreamOn event. The app has become one of the largest Podcast distribution platforms since it introduced the feature. Keeping that in mind, the company is looking at making Podcast discoverability easier for creators. In a nutshell, the company is looking to serve podcast episodes to listeners based on their preferences. It will also employ A.I. and machine learning to help users search for podcasts better.

In addition, the company is also working on creating new experiences when it comes to podcasts. Spotify is working with WordPress to create podcasts from written content. Creators will also be able to engage with audiences more directly with interactive Q&As, polls, and even video. The company is also making its Ad Studio available for podcast creators to help monetize their podcasts better.