With Spotify Wrapped having launched this past week, I can’t help but think of three specific feature requests I’d like to see implemented into Spotify. As someone who works from home and spends a lot (76,589 minutes this year, to be exact) of time with Spotify on in the background, I am intimately familiar with the app and its foibles.
A lot of you are going to read this article and tell me the easiest solution to my Spotify woes would be to simply switch to Apple Music, and that’s fine. Before you do, though, know this: I’ve already given Apple Music a go, and I absolutely enjoyed it, and I absolutely prefer its UI to Spotify’s by a landslide. However, the reality is that I’ve been a Spotify subscriber since 2013 – meaning I have a decade of my musical identity stored within Spotify. The thought of switching (re: losing) that many years of playlists isn’t something I’m prepared to do.
Apple Music disclaimer, done. Moving on to the three things I’d love to see Spotify implement the iOS app.
Podcast cleanup
While not everyone likes that Spotify has podcasts to begin with, I am not one of those people – in fact, I love that I can listen to both my music and my favorite podcasts within the same app without having to download a separate, additional podcast app to further clutter my iPhone.
That said, Spotify’s podcast feed is… a mess.
In the picture above, there are three podcasts that I’ve played, as noted by the checkmark icon. In reality, I’ve only listened to Offline with Jon Favreau, and the other two I have “marked as played,” meaning I never really listened to them to begin with.
If you listen to a lot of podcasts, the “marked as played” feature – which produces the same result as listening to a podcast the whole way through – means that you are left with a graveyard of podcasts that serve no purpose except to clutter your feed. What I would love to see in this space is the ability to dismiss podcasts you no longer want to see (think: swiping to delete/archive emails), allowing you to only keep in the feed the podcasts you’re currently listening to or haven’t yet had the chance to hear.
Personalizing the homepage
Spotify should give us the ability to rearrange our homepage; not only would this quell the Spotify-subscribers-who-don’t-listen-to-or-care-about-podcasts crowd, but it would allow all of us to highlight the facets of Spotify that we are most interested in. I’m not talking about a ton of autonomy, just the ability to move rows of features – new music, recently played, podcasts, Spotify Originals, etc. – into a homepage that makes sense for each user’s preferences.
The above picture is the top half of my current homepage, and while I understand that Spotify is pushings its Wrapped feature across its platform, I’m already over it. In its place, I’d love to see newly released music by artists Spotify knows I listen to or suggested podcasts based on what I currently enjoy.
Travel mixes
A true pie-in-the-sky moment for me would be if Spotify, using your location, allowed you to toggle on a “Travel” feature.
A couple of years ago, a good friend and I took a two-week roadtrip over the summer. We went from Michigan to Colorado, Colorado to Utah, Utah to Wyoming, and then Wyoming back home to Michigan. While we were of course prepared with a couple of collaborative playlists that were peppered throughout our dreamy two week roadtrip across the country, a “Travel” feature that pulled local artists into a playlist would have made it that much more special – a Roadtrip Mix, if you will.
The same could be applied anytime you visited a new country. Rather than only checking out which music is popular beforehand, it would be amazing if you could open Spotify on your phone while on a beach in Belize to see a playlist tailored with local musicians, songs, and artists from your exact location.
Wrap-up
I know Spotify leaves a lot to be desired by Apple fans, but for those of us who have been with Spotify a long time, these features would make for a more personalized, user-friendly in-app experience.
What other features do you think Spotify should implement? Let us know in the comments below.
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