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Spotify upgrades Blend music-matching to work with as many as 10 people
Get ready to find a musical soulmate — or nemesis
Spotify Blend is all about sharing music with friends, as you can invite someone to share a playlist that will automatically populate with songs you both like. It even adds a rating to see how well your tastes match and updates the blended playlist daily. Since introducing Blend last summer, the music platform has largely left it untouched — until now. Spotify is expanding what it can do, giving you the ability to bring in more friends and discover even more music.
YouTube Music isn't wasting any time getting into the holiday spirit
All I want for Christmas is less Christmas music
YouTube Music has been steadily growing and adding new features, and lately it seems like it's been giving us just a ton of new playlists. Today some users woke to find an unexpected playlist gift waiting for them for the holidays — and we're not even at Thanksgiving yet.
Spotify rolls out Daily Sports curated music-and-podcast playlist
Bangers and sportsball, erry day y'all
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Spotify may be testing or rolling out a new daily playlist which will feature tracks from your favorite artists and genres in addition to sports podcasts. If Daily Sports spreads across to more users, it will join the streaming service's growing list of daily music-and-podcast playlists curated to its users.
You can now collaborate on YouTube Music playlists or take song suggestions from AI
No need to call shotgun to have a say in road trip jams
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YouTube Music is introducing two new ways to help infuse your playlists with new tracks: a collaborative toggle that was revealed to be in the works last month, and an machine learning "assistive" tool.
Google Play Music will be discontinued starting September
And the Play Store will stop selling music in late August
A while ago, Google announced it would discontinue Play Music this year. The company promised to work hard on making YouTube Music a viable alternative, and it looks like it's now happy with what the new app has become. As such, Google shared today that it will discontinue Play Music starting this September.
Spotify starts giving Apple competition with podcast charts in 26 countries
Top and trending lists plus 17 categorical groups in some countries
Streaming audio service Spotify is pushing more chips into the podcasting pot. As if acquiring Gimlet and a variety of original shows weren't enough, the company is looking to challenge Apple's podcast ranking tables with a number of its own. The effort will be headlined with two: Top Podcasts and Trending Podcasts.
YouTube Music working on Spotify-like 'collaborate' setting for playlists
It doesn't reportedly work yet, though, and it isn't present for us
A setting to allow playlists in YouTube Music to be collaborative works has been spotted in the wild by the folks at 9to5Google. The new setting doesn't actually work yet, and it isn't appearing at all for us, but the iconography, label, and other tweaks make it clear that the feature should offer Spotify-like collaboration for composing playlists.
I have a long list of small complaints about Spotify and, until today, one of them was the lack of an option to re-order tracks in the playlists that I've created. I could re-arrange my playing queue after choosing a playlist, or go to the desktop or web player to edit that playlist, but on my Android phone, the "custom" sorting order wasn't modifiable. Now, it appears the function is rolling out.
Spotify is (probably) the most well-known music streaming service, but it isn't without its foibles. Up until earlier this year, it was a common complaint that free users couldn't actually directly select songs to play, and the A/B UI tests are almost Google-level frustrating. By far my biggest personal issue has been the inability to reshuffle tracks in a playlist from the Android app—a very basic feature that even Play Music has. Thankfully, that particular annoyance is now set to be fixed in a future update.
SoundCloud announced today that it's given the home screen of its Android app a fresh lick of paint. Until now, the app would open with a stream of the latest releases from the artists and labels you follow. That content is still there, in a new tab highlighted by a lightning bolt, but the home screen has a few new goodies to keep you interested.
One of the best things about the music streaming service Spotify is the platform's incredible ability to customize itself to the listener. Its automatically generated playlists are second to none, making it easy to find new music you like. The holidays are also a special time for Spotify listeners, as we get to look back at the last year's listening habits in the form of customized playlists, and this year Spotify has turned it into an interactive experience: Your 2017 Wrapped.
Spotify is big on music discovery with features like suggested artists and Smart Playlists that are based on your activity. Now, Spotify users are getting yet another music discovery feature. It's called Daily Mix, which offers a pretty good hint of what it does.
If you have a lot of media files on your computer or server and you like the freedom of streaming them to your mobile phones, tablets, TVs, and other screens, chances are you're either using XBMC or Plex. For fans of the latter, there's some good news waiting for you in the form of a major update to the Android app.
Hey, Spotify users – how's it going? It's about to be going even better, because with the latest update to the music streaming app, you can finally add full albums to playlists (I kind of can't believe this wasn't possible before), and it will also confirm if you try to add the same song to a playlist twice. Both are welcome features, and should improve the playlist experience pretty drastically – it'll definitely make it a lot easier to make playlists from the collected works of a single artist.
Little by little, Spotify is bringing all sorts of new and useful features to its mobile app. First it was Radio, and now the company is introducing a new feature called Browse that will allow users to find the perfect playlist for a specific event or mood.
In the world of the future, where music is as easily accessible as air, the new bread and butter of the music industry is discovery. While services like Turntable.fm center around small social gatherings, and Pandora uses fancy algorithms to predict your tastes, 8tracks asks "Um, hey, what was wrong with how radio worked? Also, do you guys like tablets?" The answers, of course, are "You know, that's a good point," and "Um, YEAH."