• Atonemo has launched the new NTS Radio Player box
• It connects to your speakers and to online radio
• You can also stream to the box from your phone

If you find the abundance of choice on streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music a little overwhelming, consider this new gizmo from Swedish electronics firm Atonemo: its minimal design features just two buttons and one dial, to connect you to curated online radio stations run by NTS.

It's called the Atonemo NTS Radio Player (via Deezen), and it hooks up to your speaker system of choice via a 3.5mm analog line-out port (and there's an AUX to RCA adapter in the box if you need it).

Once connected, you can press one of the buttons to tune into either NTS Channel 1 or NTS Channel 2. The dial, meanwhile, gives you access to 16 'infinite mixtape' feeds from NTS, with icons matching the mood of each one: these mixtapes include Sheet Music (the violin icon), Sweat (the water drops icon), and Island Time (the sunshine icon).

There's a mixtape for most types of mood and most types of music, pulled directly from the NTS site. The device offers 24-bit / 192 kHz lossless audio quality, gapless playback, and a 10-band graphic equalizer that can be accessed through the app.

Bring your own tunes, too

According to Atonemo co-founder and radio player designer Noah Constantinou, the gadget follows the Japanese concept of 'omakase' — that's where in a restaurant you let the expert chef choose the dishes, rather than selecting them yourself.

If you don't want the NTS DJs to pick your music, you can also stream your choice of tunes to the radio player from your phone using Google Cast, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, or Tidal Connect. In that regard it doubles up as an easy way of connecting your phone to a set of speakers (which Atonemo's standard Streamplayer also does).

"I think people miss tactile objects," Constantinou told Dezeen. "We have become so used to putting screens on everything when it is in many cases not necessary, and even sometimes counterproductive."

Judging by the Reddit reactions, Constantinou is right: "such a cool idea" and "I gotta have it" are just two of the many positive takes on this new gadget. The device will set you back $179 / £129 / AU$250 and can be ordered online now.

• Spotify is rolling out its Reserved concert priority scheme in the US
• ROLE MODEL is the first partner artist, with more to follow
• 'Top fans' are determined based on overall engagement in Spotify, which poses questions about who the true fans really are

A few weeks ago Spotify unveiled Reserved, its new priority scheme that gives top fans first pick of tickets to see their favorite touring artists — and it’s finally going live in the US today (June 18).

Premium subscribers over the age of 18 will be eligible for Reserved access, which has come out of Spotify’s partnership with Live Nation, powered by Ticketmaster. To kick off the new scheme, singer ROLE MODEL will be the first official artist partner, who just announced his US tour.

Starting today, listeners will receive notifications informing them if they meet Spotify’s criteria and qualify as a ‘top fan’ of ROLE MODEL. From there, Spotify will reserve two tour tickets for eligible fans, which they can purchase within a 24-hour window before tickets go on sale to the general public.

In addition to push notifications, Spotify says it will notify you if you’re a top fan via email and pop-ups in the ‘Your Updates’ section of the Spotify app. The platform recommends having your notifications for live events turned on, and ensuring your app is updated.

If you wish to claim your Reserved tickets, tap the ‘Buy now’ button when your purchase window opens. Once you’ve selected your tickets, you’ll be taken to Ticketmaster where you can complete your purchase.

As per Spotify’s announcement the platform says that, if prompted, you’ll have to connect your Spotify account to your Ticketmaster account in order to verify your Reserved access. As far as availability goes, Spotify notes that “Reserved allocations include a range of seating and prices, and specific availability varies by show,” adding the following:

“For some high-demand shows, you may enter a queue before reaching the ticket selection page. No matter what, two tickets on the tour will be held for you throughout your entire on-sale window. Each show has its own availability, so if you reach the end of a queue and your preferred seats are sold out, you'll still have the opportunity to purchase other tickets”.

Once the purchase window closes, unclaimed Reserved tickets will be released to the next most dedicated fans, and Spotify will notify them in the same way.

How do I know if I’m on the list?

This is the burning question we all want the answer to, and in short, there’s no way of knowing if you’ve met Spotify’s criteria prior to receiving a Reserved notification.

In deciding who qualifies as a ‘top fan’, Spotify doesn’t just take the number of times someone has streamed an artist into account. For the platform, it’s all based on engagement, meaning it considers shares, saves, and your overall streaming history with the artist. “There’s nothing random about who gets chosen!” Spotify claims, but the company is holding its cards very close to its chest.

While the company says it uses the above to measure engagement, it’s refraining from revealing every detail regarding how it decides who the top fans are. This is because Spotify wants to avoid strategic engagement, and prioritize authentic fandom (it also clarifies that relying on background listening to bump up streams won’t get you on the list).

Though you can purchase tickets to any date on an artist’s tour regardless of where you’re located, Spotify does take your location into consideration when it’s deciding who top fans are — which is a huge pain point. So, if an artist is touring a city that isn’t far from you, you’ll be more likely to receive a Reserved notification, which is a punch to the gut for mega fans who live in the sticks. Then there’s the case of fandom itself.

While I do think Reserved could be a good preventative measure for stopping ticket scalpers, there’s always the chance it could make fan culture even more of a battlefield for people to prove themselves as 'genuine' fans and gain bragging rights, when fandom has always been a place of community and not competition.

Does this mean that those who stream an artist to the ends of the earth are ‘bigger fans’ than those who engage in other means outside of Spotify, for example by investing in physical music which goes directly into the artist’s pocket? Will Reserved solve a legitimate issue that’s plaguing fans, or is it simply a badge of honor?

Convenience has become a much more acceptable concept in hi-fi these days. No longer shorthand for compromise, its importance for modern listeners has instead inspired whole lines of products — and the impressive Cambridge Audio Evo range is one of the most impressive among them.

Initially made up of a couple of just-add-speakers streaming amplifiers and an all-in-one player, the line up has offered a great solution for anyone looking to simplify their setup since its launch five years ago.

Last year, Cambridge retired the lesser powered of the two streaming amps — the Evo 75 — leaving the reconfigured Evo 150 SE and the also-includes-speaker Cambridge Evo One holding the fort on their own… until now.

Cambridge recently unveiled the Evo 300, a brand new range-topping stereo streaming amp, promising to be twice as powerful and, the brand says, a “real step up” from last year’s Evo 150 SE in “pretty much every way”. I got to hear it at this year's High End Vienna hi-fi show, and we deemed it good enough to win one of TechRadar's High End Vienna Best in Show awards.

As much as I love the fun of system matching with hi-fi separates, it can be expensive and time consuming, so there’s a lot to be said for a the simplicity of a streaming amp — particularly one that is claiming a hefty output of 300 watts per channel of Class D amplification, all wrapped up in a seriously stylish design.

You even get to choose from interchangeable side panels for the Evo 300’s black aluminum body, with the option of a traditional real-wood finish or a more modern black slatted look. I’m partial to the wood look myself.

The Evo 300 is like a slightly stretched out version of the Evo 150 SE, measuring just a couple of inches wider. This means it also features the brand’s largest screen at 7.8 inches, which is an OLED that looks as bright and crisp as ever. This shows any changes to volume and input as they happen, but also displays album artwork or a choice of digital VU meters, if you prefer.

The same incredibly tactile dual-concentric control dial from the 150 SE sits along the front panel, for adjusting volume and choosing input, plus there’s a front-mounted 6.35mm headphone output and a handful of playback controls just to the right of the display.

While Cambridge told me that it’s managed to squeeze even more power from the same Hypex NCOREx amplification modules as the 150 SE, the company’s flagship streaming amp has had a DAC upgrade, with the improved 32-bit ESS Sabre ES9038Q2M now on board to support playback of just about any Hi-Res Audio you can throw at it.

It also now features a dual-mono layout under the hood, for maximum channel separation, and improved stereo imaging, alongside a balanced pre-amplifier stage. Plus there’s now the addition of HDMI eARC for the most up-to-date connection for your TV, and flexibility with independent volume and subwoofer controls.

These join the things we loved from the 150 SE, such as dual speaker outputs, optical, RCA and balanced XLR inputs, and a moving magnet phono stage for hooking up a turntable.

Comprehensive streaming support is of course offered via Cambridge Audio’s excellent StreamMagic platform, which includes Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect and Qobuz Connect, plus you can use AirPlay 2, Google Cast, and Bluetooth 5.4. It’s also Roon Ready for multiroom support with other Roon-compatible devices.

All of this points to a seriously capable centrepiece in a serious hi-fi system — particularly considering the much more powerful speakers it can now be paired with.

I got to listen to the Evo 300 hooked up to a pair of Dynaudio Contour Legacy floorstanders — which really aren’t messing around at $14,000 / £10,000 / AU$20,000 per pair. But the Evo 300 takes them in its stride, with a confident, full-bodied presentation, and volume to spare.

From a brief first listen, it’s easy for the power and scale that this relatively compact single box is capable of to be the main takeaway. Streaming from Spotify Lossless, the Evo 300 delivers an incredibly expansive and spacious sound, with a solid stereo image and good separation.

But the level of insight, clarity and detail retrieval also feels notable here. Combined with Cambridge’s reputation for musicality and what appears to be a more refined tonal balance — even at high volume levels — it all means that, on first impressions, the Evo 300 certainly sounds to be the substantial step up it is promising to be.

Of course, trade show demos offer far from perfect conditions for a truly critical appraisal of sound, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing how it performs in the real world.

The Cambridge Evo 300 is very much priced for its capabilities though, so at $3,999 / £3,499 / AU$6,399, you’re going to want to make sure your space or gear can really make use of these beefier specs before you invest.

If not, the Cambridge 150 SE remains a great option for just-add-speakers convenience, and at almost half the price in the UK and Australia (£1,999 / $3,299 / AU$3,849). In the US, the price is bizarrely close between the two models, though the Evo 150 SE often falls to $2,699.

• Spotify is rolling out Track Reactions for Collaborative Playlists
• This lets you react to songs added by other members from a choice of six emojis
• It's rolling out in select markets now, but Spotify hasn't said which ones

One of Spotify’s most handy tools are Collaborative Playlists, which allow you and your friends to work together to pool songs into one monster playlist — now they’re getting a new upgrade that makes them even more interactive.

The best music streaming service shared on a community page that it’s in the process of rolling out Track Reactions, which is essentially a feature that lets you use emojis to react to songs added to your Collaborative Playlists.

Spotify says the tool is rolling out over the coming weeks in select markets to Free and Premium users aged 16 and older, though we don’t know which markets will be first.

Just like emoji reactions on platforms like Facebook Messenger, it works similarly, giving you a choice of six; a standard red heart, a laughing face, a thumbs-up, headphones, fire, and an emotional face. When you send a reaction, it appears next to the track name, and you can view the reactions added by other collaborators in the playlist.

The addition of Track Reactions means that Collaborative Playlists will now look slightly different than before. The profile image of playlist collaborators now appears on the song thumbnail indicating which member added which song, and now the Track Reaction icon has taken the spot to the right of a song title next to the three-dot button.

Track Reactions are automatically enabled in Collaborative Playlists that have 10 or less members, and only the people within the playlist can view them, meaning outside viewers won’t be able to see which songs have which reactions. You also don’t have to stick with them if you don’t want to — the playlist creator can disable Track Reactions in the playlist’s Name and Details settings.

We’re going through a time where most of Spotify’s new tools are reliant on the powers of AI, most recently its two new AI features for podcasts, so Track Reactions feels like a reminder that Spotify does have human elements to its user experience.

When it comes to Collaborative Playlists, I use them mainly for creating playlists with friends for gatherings and other social events (we have an annual summer meet-up, so the tool really comes in handy there). Now that Spotify has thrown Track Reactions into the mix, I can’t see it being used for anything other than judging each other’s song choices — and I’m actually okay with that.

Emoji reactions are a commonly-used feature among my friends across our slew of group chats, whether that’s for reacting to silly texts on Facebook Messenger or responding to unhinged videos we send to each other on TikTok. It won’t be any different in the case of Spotify, and hopefully it will encourage more conversations about the music we’re currently listening to.

For now, the emoji options are very limited and don’t quite represent a wide scope of emotions — they all seem to be pretty positive-leaning, with the exception of the emotional face emoji, which is often used to represent sadness or that feeling of ‘smiling through the pain’. To really take it to the next level, the choice to use custom emojis would open the floodgates for users to be even more expressive, or in my case, severely more judgemental.

Track Reactions are locked into the Collaborative Playlist experience for the time being, and Spotify hasn’t announced any plans to expand it to other playlist-making tools yet. We’ve contacted Spotify for more details about this, as well as which markets will have access first, so we’ll update this story when we know more.

If you had problems with DoorDash or Spotify today, you weren't alone — both apps experienced major issues that were later confirmed and resolved.

The problems on both apps appeared to start at around the same time, 9.30am ET / 2.30pm BST. However, there was no confirmed related issue between the two, despite small simultaneous reports of issues on AWS and Cloudflare.

At the peak of the problems, there was a massive 35,000 reports for DoorDash on Downdetector, with users reporting that they were locked out from the app and from making orders. Spotify's issues were slightly more minor, with a peak of 4,800 reports in the US.

You can follow what happened during both outages in this live report...

A huge spike for both

Welcome to this liveblog for the issues thousands are experiencing right now on both Doordash and Spotify.

Right now, it isn't clear what the connection (if any) there is between the two, but we'll be getting to the bottom of it in this liveblog, and bringing you all of the latest official information.

As you can see, the spikes on both Doordash and Spotify on Downdetector are considerable. Let's hope they're both short-lived, unlike the Google Gemini outage we saw last week...

A widespread outage for DoorDash

DoorDash down? Or am I the only one? from r/doordash

This Reddit thread shows that the DoorDash issues are pretty widespread across the US right now, with reports from Tampa to Michigan, and also in Australia too.

It appears to be down for both users and drivers, which is causing widespread worry for those who need their hit of energy drinks and snacks. Most are seeing an error message like "the data couldn't be read because it's missing", and logging out seemingly isn't helping.

Spotify joins the outage party

Today's Spotify issues don't seem to be as widespread as those on DoorDash — the app is working fine for me and many here at TechRadar, but there are thousands of reports on Downdetector and social media platforms like X.

Many are experiencing the classic "something went wrong" message when trying to play tracks that haven't been saved for offline listening, while others are seeing "Spotify can't play this right now" or "That didn't work right" messages.

It's definitely intriguing that both the Spotify and DoorDash issues seemingly started simultaneously, but so far there's been no confirmed cloud connection between the two.

DoorDash confirms a problem

Well, that's a slight relief at least — DoorDash has just officially confirmed that it's experiencing issues, which explains the thousands of reports we're seeing across the US and Australia.

There's no real explanation in the post on X (above) about what's causing the outage, but DoorDash promises it's "working urgently to resolve it".

Lots of questions for DoorDash

This is the problem facing most DoorDash users and drivers right now — they can't log into their accounts, which is leaving many stranded mid-order.

As many have asked in response to the DoorDash post on X, this raises many questions — most urgently, what happens to orders that are already en route? This necessarily a major problem if the Dasher driver already has the address, but that's not the case for everyone.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to cancel the order or request a refund while the app's down, but drivers can call this number for assistance: ​​855-431-0459.

Spotify is "aware of the situation"

Unlike DoorDash, there's been no confirmation of a Spotify outage on X via the SpotifyStatus account on X, although this thread has started on the Spotify forums.

On there, an official moderator says "we're receiving reports where the app is showing different errors (103, something went wrong) mostly on the desktop but other clients seem to be affected as well".

It adds that "the relevant teams are aware of this situation and working on a fix", so that's promising news — and the reports appear to be dropping slightly on Downdetector (above).

Could AWS or Cloudflare be the problem?

There are no official AWS (Amazon Web Services) issues reported today on Amazon's dashboard, so that seemingly isn't the cause of today's problems on both DoorDash and Spotify. Similarly, Cloudflare only has a reported issue with its Workers AI platform.

However, DoorDash and Spotify are known to use AWS for some of their cloud infrastructure — and both AWS and Cloudflare have experienced small spikes on Downdetector today. Still, those may simply be the knock-on effect of today's other outages, so there's still no single official cause for the DoorDash and Spotify problems (or a connection between the two).

Spotify is "all clear now"

Is Spotify fixed? It's looking that way, according to Downdetector — the reports of issues have fallen as quickly as they started just under two hours ago.

And now Spotify has confirmed on X that it should be "all clear now". If you have any more issues, you can check out the Community thread — but according to a few users on there, the problems now seem to be resolved. Phew.

Things are also now looking up for DoorDash too...

No official DoorDash fix — but it's back for many

DoorDash hasn't yet given us an update since its last post on X, where it confirmed an "issue affecting our platform", but Downdetector suggests it's well on the way to being fixed.

The reports have plummeted to just over 4,000, down from their peak of just over 35,000, and many on social media are expressing their relief that the app is working for them again. Let's hope that continues...

DoorDash is officially fixed

Good news for both DoorDash fans and DoorDasher drivers — the app is now officially fixed, according to the company.

DoorDash has added that it's still "working hard to correct any impacted Dashers and orders ASAP". So if you were hit today, stay patient and your frustrations should soon be ironed out.

Spotify is one of the best music streaming services when it comes to discovering new music, and while I think Daylist is one of the most underrated features for finding your next music obsession, Spotify’s flagship New Music Friday playlists are just as reliable. Now, it’s getting a visual upgrade.

The music streaming giant announced today (June 12) that its New Music Friday playlist will now feature short-form videos from its editorial team, who will share their thoughts on the biggest new releases.

Rolling out to Free and Premium users in the US first, you can find editor videos as you scroll through Spotify’s New Music Friday playlist of the latest releases. We’ve contacted Spotify to ask if and when these videos will roll out to other regions, and a spokesperson got back to us with the following:

“At this time, we’re focused on establishing and nailing the editor-led videos in the U.S. We’ll share any updates on expansion plans if and when they become available”.

In addition to sharing their perspectives, Spotify’s team will also spotlight rising artists and dive into the stories behind new songs and albums. It builds on Spotify’s in-app experience, The Drop Weekly, where editors break down new releases and discuss cultural moments. This experience rolled out in the US in September 2025, but hasn’t rolled out globally yet.

Not only does this give Spotify playlist curators the opportunity to share their recommendations front and center, but it also opens the doors for music fans to form connections with and understand the minds that work hard to pull Spotify’s playlists together.

Head of North America Editorial at Spotify, John Stein, details this in the company’s announcement:

“New Music Friday has always been about helping fans discover the best new music each week. By bringing our editors directly into the experience, we’re giving listeners a closer connection to the people behind the playlist and more context around the artists and songs shaping culture right now”.

I bet that most of you rolled your eyes when you read ‘short-form video’ and thought, ‘Really, Spotify?’ If it makes you feel any better, so did I. I can’t think of the last time I used Spotify’s video tools to find new music, but I feel there could be something different with its New Music Friday upgrade.

There’s one thing missing from music platforms, and that’s journalistic perspectives on music. Though Spotify’s About the Song function is handy for reading flash summaries of a track’s background, this information is gathered from third-party sites and compressed into something you can read in a few seconds.

With these editors' videos, it could introduce a lot of value to one of Spotify’s most-visited editorial playlists. It not only opens a door for you to learn more about the stories, but it also puts faces to the brains of the music connoisseurs who put the playlist together and how they think about which music to recommend.

I spend quite a bit of my time scrolling through Wikipedia pages, online magazines, and even Genius lyrics to get a kick out of my music trivia, and though Spotify’s New Music Friday videos aren’t going to replace these practices any time soon, I’m sure they’ll be a welcome addition to my music research regimen.

• Deezer launches AI music detector
• Scans your playlists to see how much of your music is AI slop
• It's free and works on any streamer, not just Deezer

The annual Spotify Unwrapped has proven itself a masterclass in free marketing, with music lovers across the world posting across social media about, well, how much they use Spotify.

Now, in an iconic "hold my beer" move, Deezer has just launched something to give you a stat you'll really want to brag about.

The streaming service has unveiled an online music detector, which it calls... the AI music detector (no zingy names here). It's an online site that can link up to your streaming service of choice to quickly scan all of your playlists and tell you how much of your tracks are AI-generated. It takes literally a minute or so to do — although in TechRadar's tests, Apple Music libraries took the longest.

Naturally, the goal is to either prove that you listen to no AI slop, or, if you receive a shock diagnosis, work out where these 'songs' are so you can treat the offensive condition. Deezer makes no secret that it'd be chuffed if you'd transfer all those playlists after the scan and thus sign up for its service yourself — and AI avoiders might find that ideal, since Deezer tags AI music (so you'd know what that offending 1% was, say).

To work out if this AI music detector is any good, and hopefully boast about my clean AI-free record, I booted up the tool and linked it to my Spotify account.

Livin' On A PrAIyer

I was already pretty confident that I don't listen to any AI music — it'd be pretty hard to when 90% of your music taste is from the noughties — but as an outspoken anti-AI-er, it bears checking.

It was really quick to pair the Free AI music checker by Deezer to my Spotify account, and it took less than a minute to comb through my libraries. Colleagues who've checked via other streaming services, particularly Apple Music, report longer wait times (and even one crash before it worked), but for Spotify and Tidal it was simple.

The Deezer tool quickly returned the score I was expecting: 0% AI. Nice. It even let me save a little badge to post on socials.

Some people on TR's team received a 1% AI score, much to their chagrin, and it did raise some questions. Firstly: which song? They weren't told, and so weeding out that errant strand of slop was way harder than it might be, if it were simply disclosed. Perhaps the only way to find out is to transfer your playlist over to Deezer, which the tool is very keen to help you with…

Secondly, where was this AI track found? It's not 100% clear, but the Deezer tool most likely checks your custom-made 'static' playlists only, rather than algorithmically-generated ones which you have no control over (or even other people's which you've saved).

Even though it'll still leave some users with as many questions as answers (is that 1% lurking somewhere in your hyperpop playlist?) it's great to see Deezer forging ahead in its war on AI-generated music.

The Spotify AI slop debacle has dragged on for longer than it should have, and despite the company rolling out measures to counter the spread of AI-generated music, some users are still wielding their pitchforks and torches over the controversy.

I came across a recent Reddit post in the r/truespotify forum that brought attention to the artist page of Selah Stone — an obviously AI-generated artist. But it wasn’t the artist the poster had an issue with; instead they decided to shade Spotify, claiming that the platform has been “creating fake bios and pictures to hide AI artists and further confuse users”.

Now, I’m all for pressuring the best music streaming services to tighten their AI-detection measures, but what the user addressed is completely out of Spotify’s hands, and I’m not the only one who thinks these conspiracy theories are becoming exhausting.

Though AI slop is becoming more apparent to some users (I haven’t run into it myself), Spotify is not the one uploading AI-generated music, nor is it creating the artist profiles that come with it. Every song and album uploaded to Spotify is an action taken by the artist and their team, or in the case of an AI artist, the person who sits behind that façade.

Comment from r/truespotify

The thing to remember is that Spotify doesn’t take direct music uploads. When a (human) artist shares music to Spotify (or any music streaming platform for that matter), it’s all processed through their label or distributor. Additionally, since Spotify rolled out its new ‘Verified by Spotify’ labels for artist profiles, another layer of reassurance that the artist you’re listening to is not AI has been added.

The same applies to AI artists, and even the music they generate can’t go through Spotify directly. Similarly, they’ll also need to use a distributor, with some common ones including DistroKid and Ditto Music — but the blame doesn’t end there.

Another AI conspiracy doing the rounds is that Spotify is making more profit by allowing users to rack up stream numbers of AI-generated music. This isn’t the case, because of how Spotify’s royalty and pay-out system works.

All subscriber fees are put into a pool, and from there the artists with the highest streaming numbers receive a larger portion of those pay-outs. While it’s not the fairest way of paying artists (even if you don’t stream Taylor Swift, your money is going to her and not necessarily the artists you actually listen to), and it puts indie artists at a disadvantage, AI-generated artists are not making heaps of money, although they do take up spots where human artists should be, something which I agree needs fixing.

In addition, Spotify paid out 70% of its annual revenue in 2025 to artists and rights-holders, so the majority of the money it makes from subscriptions is going right back into the industry, with what’s left over being invested back into the company.

Comment from r/truespotify

I don’t think such complaints are the real reasons why users are bothered. Instead, I believe it’s Spotify’s transparency issues that are the cause a lot of users' frustration. But because the platform hasn’t been the most transparent regarding AI music, the annoyance among users has reached boiling point, leading them to come up with ridiculous conspiracies — and now they’ll point the finger anywhere to find new reasons to blame Spotify for the increasing presence of AI slop.

Like many users in the Reddit replies, I also agree that Spotify needs to do a lot more to flag AI-generated music. I think that while the platform has tried to do some good with its online reporting resources, and new Verified by Spotify badges for artists, other services got there first.

However, the finger-pointing has to stop at some point — and those pushing conspiracy theories either need to provide clear evidence to support their claims, or shut up.

• Apple Music's iOS 27 upgrades include new artist pages and performance upgrades
• The platform has yet to roll out highly-requested functions such as continuity tools and social features
• The longer Apple Music goes without them, the better chance Spotify has at snatching its users

Tim Cook took what may be his final bow as Apple CEO at the company’s WWDC 2026 event, and there’s lots for iPhone users to look forward to with iOS 27, including upgrades to Apple Music.

In addition to the announcement of Apple’s next-gen Siri upgrade, Siri AI, the company is rolling out a handful of upgrades to its music streaming platform. It hasn’t been long since Apple last updated the Apple Music UI, but its Liquid Glass look divided subscribers.

One of the most notable new changes to the UI is a new look for artist pages, which now places the ‘Play’ and information buttons in the center of the page under new name displays. The ‘Essentials’ carousel, which spotlights an artist’s popular albums, has also been changed and is now in a list form that doesn’t look as punchy, which is a bit of a design downgrade if you ask me.

Apple Music redesigned artist pages from r/AppleMusic

It’s not just Apple Music’s UI that’s had a bit of a nip and tuck; the platform is also getting some performance enhancements in iOS 27, starting with the Automix tool, which uses AI to beat-match songs and create seamless DJ-like transitions.

According to Apple, the company has improved its algorithms to make room for better transitions. That's quite a vague way to put it, but I assume this means it will perform more efficiently when creating transitions between songs of different genres — a pain point I experienced during my time testing it out. Additionally, Apple says it has upgraded start times for quicker playback, and the 'Now Playing' page will now load much faster.

Apple Music is allergic to continuity tools and social features

I’ll always welcome new design approaches and performance upgrades — I’ve been running into delayed playback times far too often recently. But once again, Apple has chosen to overlook the meaningful features users actually want.

Many Apple Music subscribers like to criticize rival platforms such as Spotify, but if they can agree on one thing, it’s that Spotify Connect destroys Apple Music on the continuity front. To this day, Apple Music users are still waiting for a similar feature, and it’s one of the tools, if not the tool, that will really bring Apple Music into line with its competitors. The fact that Apple has never even discussed such a feature only adds to the frustration.

The platform also faces scrutiny for the inconsistency of its features across devices, creating a far-from-seamless user experience. For example, Apple Music’s new live concert information and playlists and albums tabs are still missing from the Mac version.

Something I was patiently waiting for during WWDC was Apple’s official announcement of Playlist Playground, an AI-integrated playlist-making tool similar to Spotify’s Prompted Playlists. To my dismay, though, nothing was mentioned, even though we were expecting a wider roll out to be confirmed after Playlist Playground came arrived in beta in February.

Just like continuity tools, this feature would give Apple the perfect opportunity to not only match a popular Spotify feature, but give its users another reason to stick around. Apple Music has already won on the audio streaming quality and editorial fronts, but Apple now it needs to start paying close attention to how it can build social features that complement its ecosystem.

It’s been four months since Playlist Playground first appeared, but there’s still been no word from Apple on when it will finally open its doors to the public. We might see a reveal at Apple's iPhone launch event, which will likely be in September, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

• Spotify is eyeing up live concert streaming
• It's part of the company's strategy to shift more into video content
• YouTube is still leading on the livestream front, and I think it'll be tough competition

Spotify is doing all it can to move beyond being just an audio platform — now it wants to offer live concert videos for subscribers, and I’m not sure how to feel about it.

According to Bloomberg , the audio streaming giant has plans in the works to become “a hub for live music”, and has reached out to concert promoters to secure licensing rights to broadcast live videos of music festivals right from the Spotify app.

Spotify has recently been experimenting with concert videos, adding a slew of pre-recorded music videos from Dua Lipa’s show in Mexico City, accompanying a live album released by the artist. Additionally, Primavera Sound festival took place in Barcelona over the weekend, which has gained substantial popularity and following online over the recent years — so it makes sense as to why Spotify would want to capitalize on this.

The move into live concert broadcasting reflects Spotify’s evolving plans to become a pipeline between artists and their most dedicated fans. A few weeks ago Spotify unveiled its new in-app tool Reserved, a concert ticket-reserving tool that aims to give legitimate fans top priority for securing tickets to their favorite musician’s live shows. On the other hand, the move into live concert streaming plays into Spotify’s wider video monetization strategy.

Spotify first started out as an audio-only service, but over its 20-year lifespan it’s rolled out many visual components from short-form content feeds to music videos, and even video podcasts. Not only have these helped increase subscriber engagement levels, it’s also established a more profitable means of ad revenue that Spotify doesn’t quite get through its audio content and this is reflected in the company’s recent quarterly earnings, as Bloomberg highlights.

In the first quarter of the year Spotify’s total advertising revenue saw a drop — The Next Web reports that it fell 5% year on year to €385 million (roughly $443 million) — therefore adding more video content means higher advertising rates and a better chance at boosting this profit.

That said, some see Spotify’s venture into live concert broadcasting as just another means of reducing artist’s streaming revenue — but that’s not the first concern that crossed my mind.

YouTube, always and forever

Spotify’s video offerings aren’t my favorite ways to engage with music. Compared to Apple Music, I find Spotify’s music videos interface to be unorganized and almost forced upon you while listening to audio (I never use the ‘Switch to video’ button).

I’ve said it before and I shall say it again, YouTube is still the holy grail of visual music content, even if Spotify is still doing all it can to compete. You have to give it to Spotify though, it’s drive is undeniably admirable, but competing with YouTube is like attempting to shade the sun.

In addition to its slew of pre-recorded live music channels (I watch a lot of NPR Tiny Desk Concerts as well as artist music videos) YouTube plays a huge part in bringing fans closer to the biggest music events across the world. This is most notably the case for the Coachella music festival in California, which I’ve been streaming via YouTube since I was 17.

Spotify has a lot to think about, and for its live concert broadcasts to stand out it needs to match, or totally defy what YouTube has. As well as this, there’s also the question regarding where in the app these broadcasts will be situated — the app is already bulky as it is, so an entirely new live stream interface would be a bit of a squeeze.

With that being said, I can see the minor user benefits. Depending on which artists sign on to this agreement, it could give music fans a higher quality, more robust way of consuming live concert content as opposed to relying on watching videos posted to TikTok or Instagram reels.

Right now, my feed is inundated with content from Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine tour which kicked off over the weekend, and it’s making me regret not going for tickets. I have no issues with watching clipped videos on social media, but thinking about it now, having an accessible live stream of the show from start to finish would make good background viewing/ listening. But let’s be real, Netflix works an awful lot faster to sign deals with artists for live concert movies, and that’s essentially the same thing.

The 2026 High End audio show is in full swing in Vienna. The show is a key fixture of the hi-fi enthusiast's calendar, and was previously held in Munich — this year, it made the big move over to the Austria Center on the banks of the Danube, and TechRadar followed it.

We've had our audio team on the ground, rapidly learning how not to get lost in the new layout and exploring the mix of returning companies and new players who've jumped on board as part of the change.

We explored as many listening rooms and headphones booths as we could, to identify our favorite products in the audio areas we cover here on TechRadar, so naturally we've got a mix of speakers, streamers, a soundbar-that's-not-a-soundbar, and headphones, rather than hi-fi cables and pre-amps.

So here, in alphabetical order, are the products our team picked as the products that really stood out to us at the end of the show days, all chosen based on listening to their performance.

Astell & Kern SP4000T and Clarus

Let's start with a double winner — we got to test these together, and while each seems phenomenal, the combination was the most impressive part. The SP4000T DAP is an upgraded version of the already fantastic A&K SP4000 player, now packing four vacuum tubes for a taste of the analog.

The Clarus are wired earbuds with nine drivers per bud, using a bunch of different technologies, each targeting different frequencies.

The combination of the two really leans into the 'clarity' suggestion in the Clarus' name — we were instantly taken by the pin-sharp attack in their dynamic range, and the fine detail that they were able to bring out of the music, all while giving every listener a huge sense of scale that feels well beyond something handheld or that fits right in your ear conch.

Bowers & Wilkins 801 D5

Bowers & Wilkins is celebrating its 60th anniversary, so what better time to release its new flagship 801 D5 loudspeaker? This model features B&W's famous Diamond Dome tweeter and an upgrade to its internal Matrix bracing, including a new Space Frame Bracing extension.

The aim is to deliver even more incredibly natural, generous, and immersive sound. During our demo with the 801 D5, we were blown away by life-like vocals, brilliantly regimented deep bass, and super-defined treble, as well as its sophisticated soundstage and spacious presentation.

Cabasse Pearl Pelegrina Édition Atelier

The High End show is always full of bonkers speaker designs, and Cabasse's spherical Pearl design is old news to hi-fi fans — but we can't help but be taken by the Pelegrina version's 'alien eyeball squid has come to Earth to negotiate a new intergalactic peace' design — and what's new this year is the Atelier system, meaning that you can have any finish you want on them, to make them fit your spaceship listening room perfectly.

But what's most important is the astoundingly powerful sound from a speaker cabinet that's actually amazingly compact. The front driver is a tri-coaxial system, meaning it's actually three drivers nested inside each other, and there's a hefty custom-design woofer on the rear capable of especially high excursion.

The end result is a set of speakers that look like an art installation, but can party like a warehouse rave. They can thump the low-end with the best of them, while delivering super-rich and detailed sound that wraps across the room despite their compact 'pupils'. And they're active speakers, so you can put them wherever you want in your home and just start playing.

Cambridge Evo 300

This is the artist formerly known as Cambridge Audio's new, more powerful compact streaming amp — if you've got a really beefy speaker. Still, if you don't want to dedicate too much space to components, then the 300W per channel you can get from the Evo 300 might be exactly what you want.

That's paired with Cambridge's excellent, super-comprehensive streaming platform and digital skills, so you've got easy access to Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz, Roon, and Deezer, with various casting options from your phone and aptX Bluetooth if you prefer. There are two sets of speaker outputs, plus a sub out; for input, you've got XLR, HDMI eARC, and analog options including an MM phono input.

It's just the ultimate all-in-one modern amp if you've got big speaker ambitions — and here in 2026, why shouldn't you?

Canvas Hi-Fi Canvas L

This is basically a pair of floor-standing speakers disguised as a soundbar for Halloween. You've got a stereo setup where each side has a tweeter, a midrange driver, and an 8-inch bass woofer with a matching 8-inch passive radiator. There's 1500W of amplification behind that, as well a necessarily well-braced cabinet — all of which are designed to attached to the rear of your TV using a mounting bracket, with the speakers sitting underneath the screen.

And it's in this list because it sounds like two excellent floorstanding speakers. It delivers unbelievably deep and resonant bass for a floating speaker bar, with the low end dispersed well throughout the room. There's phenomenal texture and realism to vocals, and it's all brilliantly musical and full of excellent rhythmic energy. It's delicate when it needs to be, but our overarching takeaway from listening to music is just how firm and 3D every instrument feels.

We didn't get to try it with music, but this is the first time we've heard something claim to be an audiophile soundbar and responded, "Yep, that's fair". It was electric, musical, and kind of addictive.

iFi iDSD GR 2

The iFi iDSD GR2 portable DAC is a considerable upgrade on its beloved predecessor, the venerable xDSD Gryphon, in a number of ways. It delivers far more amplification power, longer battery life, and even a touchscreen for a more user-friendly experience.

After trying it out at the show, we loved how it more seamlessly helps you to bring the very best out of a pair of premium headphones, and with K2HD tech for enhanced harmonics alongside a whole load of connectivity options, the GR2 has just about everything an audiophile needs, whether listening at home or on the go.

Meze Audio Arta

These new planar magnetic headphones come from a brand known for bringing high-end sound to a very reasonable price — but this time, Meze Audio just went all out, price be damned.

The result is one of the biggest and most cohesive soundstages we've ever heard from a pair of headphones. From the tinkliest treble with heavy sub-bass, these headphones deliver it all with total control and clarity, all at the same time if they have to. It's that cohesion that stands out, partly because it means individual parts don't stand out — everything sounds simply 'correct' in a way that deeply satisfies the brain. They deliver total audio order — a perfect, seamless whole.

Noble FoKus Artemis

These are wireless active noise-canceling headphones, from a company that most people will probably know best for putting improbably powerful driver arrays into earbuds. Well, it's now put an improbably powerful driver array into over-ears, including a dynamic driver, a planar driver, and a balanced armature — and somehow, the end result is pretty lightweight and comfortable, with a 50-hour battery life.

The end result is probably the most revealing noise-canceling headphones we've ever tried. They're utterly impeccable at picking out every nuance of instruments, even in the most dense mix, and even with the ANC mode activated (which is pretty good too).

There's a huge dynamic range, and really steep level of attack to them: every drum is hard, and every plosive is picked up with precision in a voice. The sound is maybe a little cooler than most people will be used to from ANC headphones, but that will be exactly their strength — they create the silence, and then fill it with tiny details you'd never heard before.

Ruark R710

The Ruark R710 streaming amplifier blends a beautiful retro-style look with an expansive suite of modern features — as well as some not-so-modern ones that we very much welcome. It builds on Ruark's previous R610 in a number of ways, packing in more power for the speakers, along with an integrated CD player, which has apparently been included by popular demand (and is hidden in the handsome wooden front grille, making it a fun secret touch).

When listening to the streamer alongside Ruark's new Talisman R speakers, we were impressed by the warmth and tonality of vocals, the high caliber of instrument separation in the mix, and the striking power of the overall presentation from a compact box.

Yamaha NX-70A

Yamaha's new active speakers have a very sleek and stylish look, but generally seem quite unflashy and demure — though in our demo at the show, they seemed like something of a wireless wonder.

They offer a lively, precise sound with really well-honed handling of transients, which helps them to build an excellent stereo spatial presentation. The diffusion of ambient sounds into the room while holding the tension on the sharper central sounds makes them a really exciting listen. There's so much detail, creating a really physical sense of texture to something like the hum of a saxophone reed. Add the pleasingly weighted bass response, and you get a set of active speakers that really grab your attention, in the best way.

This year's Amazon Prime Day has officially been announced for June 23 - 26, and the retailer already has great early promotions to check out for Prime members. In fact, some of these promotions won't even cost you a penny.

One such example is Music Unlimited, Amazon's premium streaming platform, which is currently free for a full four months. That's a massively extended free trial that lets Prime members try everything out while saving a significant amount of cash.

Amazon Music Unlimited usually costs $11.99/£11.99 per month, so today's early Prime Day promo can save you well over $40 with the full four-month duration.

As a brief overview, Amazon Music Unlimited offers access to more than 100 million songs along with a large catalogue of podcasts. We rate it as one of the best music streaming services on the market — and a particularly strong option for Prime members, in particular. If you want a deeper look at all its features, you can check out our full Amazon Music Unlimited review for more details.

Get three months of Music Unlimited for free

• See more: check out all of today's Spring deals at Amazon

Aside from being cheaper for Prime members, Amazon Music Unlimited has a few other major selling points if you're interested in switching up your music streaming.

Firstly, Music Unlimited offers high-quality audio thanks to support for lossless FLAC up to 24-bit/192kHz. That's something that a few rivals lack right now, so it's a solid all-around choice for audiophiles.

Secondly, beyond its audio quality and expansive library, Amazon Music Unlimited also works great with other products in the broader Amazon ecosystem. If you're already using a ton of Alexa-compatible devices, then it's a strong addition to your line-up.

As with all early Prime Day promos, you need to be an Amazon Prime member to be eligible for this extended free trial. If you're not a member, don't fret, as you can simply make use of the 30-day free trial outlined below. That will cover you for not just this deal, but for any Prime member exclusives during the upcoming Amazon Prime Day sale.

Also available at Amazon today

• Spotify could be rolling out a tool that allows you to change your username
• It could also roll out profile bios
• They're minor but exciting new tools, however, I need Spotify to make improvements to Messages and Listening Stats first

Spotify’s integration with third-party social media platforms allows you to seamlessly share what you’re listening to with your friends, but I’m still bitterly disappointed with its limited profile customization functions — but the music platform could finally be expanding on this.

At the start of the year, Android Authority spotted strings of code in the Spotify app pointing to a tool that lets you edit or change your Spotify username. Fast forward to now, and the outlet has come across more evidence that this feature could be in the pipeline.

In its most recent teardown, Android Authority found more text strings referring to “edit profile social handle” as well as one that states “you can only change your username twice within 14 days”. If you’ve been using Spotify for a while and have been forced to stick with a default username, or you created an embarrassing one at the time you signed up, it could solve a huge pain point, and I’m already excited for the possibility of its arrival.

But it doesn’t end there, because profile bios could also be coming to the Spotify app after being restricted to artist pages since the platform’s inception. It means so much more than simply giving you the freedom to tell the world exactly who you are in flash form, but it gives you a whole new way of curating and a proper musical identity on Spotify.

Android Authority’s findings also reveal that you’ll be able to add and edit your bio, as well as have the option to choose who can view it in your profile — that’s if Spotify decides to release it, that is.

Messages and Listening Stats need some more TLC

I'll admit that this is pretty basic stuff — most social media platforms have always given you the freedom to curate your own identity through usernames and profile bios, but this could mark the beginning of a big transformation for one of the best music streaming services.

Spotify has always been dedicated to its social functions. You can share music to other platforms, and your algorithm is completely determined by your personal habits, but Spotify has yet to really hit the nail on the head with other social functions.

I’ve always wished for more profile customization tools in Spotify. In fact, it was one of the improvements I said I wanted in 2026 — think Musicboard, which lets you set banner images and profile photo borders to give your page a bit more personality. Though Spotify is nowhere at this stage yet, its username and bio tools are a small step forward, but there are other things the platform needs to tweak, too.

Spotify introduced the Messages tab in August 2025, allowing you to DM the people you follow and share music recommendations, which in hindsight is handy for some, but I find that this part of the interface still needs a lot of work. I’m still waiting for replies from friends whom I messaged weeks ago, so there must be a notification issue there.

In relation to Messages, Listening Stats also had an overdue glow-up, which now tells you exactly how many songs and artists you listen to in a week. It also allows you to compare your own stats to your friends’ and view them side-by-side, but Spotify is being funny about how it determines who your friends are.

Instead of automatically adding the accounts you follow to your ‘friends’, Spotify says you have to invite friends to chat in order to view their weekly stats, even though you can see what they are listening to in real time. I tried to do this as soon as I came across the Listening Stats update, but the person on the other end couldn't accept my invitation.

It’s got me thinking, is Spotify only doing this to get more subscribers to use the Messages function? Because given how my experience has panned out, that theory seems even more legitimate.

• There's evidence for a new free tier for Apple Music
• It will no doubt come with certain limitations
• Users are worried that there will be adverts involved

The streaming, unlimited listening component of Apple Music differs from Spotify in that you can't use it for free — you have to pay a monthly subscription. According to code spotted in the latest Apple Music app for Android, that might be about to change.

Discovered by tipster Aaron Perris (via 9to5Mac), the code snippets mention limits on track skipping, and a "Premium access required" message, which are both consistent with some kind of subscription-free tier for the Apple Music streaming catalog.

However, Perris himself admits the code strings could be related to something else, like radio stations. These might soon work differently depending on whether or not you're currently paying for an Apple Music plan.

Spotify's free tier comes with adverts, and limits on audio quality, playlist creation, track order, and track skipping. Premium subscribers also get to save playlists of offline use, and usually get access to new features first too.

Does this mean ads?

Based on the Reddit reaction, this might not be such a popular move. "Oh no not the ads," is one typical comment, and there seems to be quite a swell of resistance against Apple Music offering a free tier if it comes with adverts attached.

Having traditionally kept advertising in its products down to a minimum, Apple has recently started heading towards a more Google-like approach: ads have started appearing in Apple Maps with iOS 26.5 for example.

In fact, as we've already noted, this is a trend that many apps and services are joining in with, in an effort to squeeze more money from consumers — whether it's advertising on streaming services or new subscription models for social media sites.

We'll have to wait and see if a free tier for Apple Music makes an appearance soon — perhaps at WWDC 2026 on June 8. You can already use Apple Music the app for free, of course, if you bring your own digital music with you.

• Spotify has rolled out new playlist tools, including bulk editing functions for queues
• Background downloading is rolling out for iOS users after being limited to Android devices
• Playlist folders are also being rolled out globally

I love making new playlists in Spotify, but sometimes its limited editing and queuing tools make the experience more of a chore rather than a fun activity. Thankfully, the platform just dropped a shedload of tools to make playlists more enjoyable and to ‘help keep listening smooth’ for both iOS and Android users.

Spotify announced yesterday (May 28) more control tools to help you edit your playlists and queue more effectively. Rolling out to Premium users globally, the new ‘Edit’ button allows you to select multiple tracks at once, which you can either bump up higher so that they play next, or remove them from the queue altogether. This was a tool once offered on Spotify and is now being resurrected, and it also applies to audiobook and podcast episode queues.

Spotify’s new ‘Reshuffle’ button is another feature I can see being a welcome addition to the app. If you find that a playlist isn’t quite giving you what you want, be that one of your own or one curated by Spotify, the Reshuffle button will generate an entirely new sequence of tracks — meaning you’ll no longer have to manually disable and enable the standard Shuffle icon to change the order.

Yes, queue controls have had a much-needed upgrade, but so have Spotify’s playlist organization tools. Though we first spotted it a few weeks back, the ability to create and add to playlist folders is rolling out globally for all users after being locked behind the desktop experience for 15 years.

However, these upgrades are just the start, and Spotify is also making offline listening for iOS users even more reliable with background downloads — a tool that’s been limited to Android users until now.

If you want to download a playlist or podcast episode, for example, you’ll no longer have to keep the Spotify app open to complete the downloading process. Now it does it all in the background for you, and you’ll get notifications to see the progress. “So whether you’re on a flight, underground, or out of range, your listening is ready to go,” the company says in its announcement.

Spotify adds a feature I've wanted for years

Recently, I’ve found myself hitting a bit of a wall when it comes to making playlists in Spotify, and it’s not just because of the lack of inspiration. Playback and queuing features haven’t always made the experience as easy as it could be, but Spotify’s new additions could alleviate many pain points for music fans.

I chronically add songs to a queue while I’m commuting or while I’m at a social gathering with friends, and one thing I’ve always wanted from Spotify is a ‘play next’ option that’s similar to Apple Music — which is one of my favorite parts of the Spotify rival.

Although there still isn’t a ‘play next’ option for when you want to add individual songs, you can bump up your song of choice directly from the queue. But unlike Apple Music, Spotify lets you move multiple songs at once to the top, which not only saves you bags of time dragging them individually with the three-line icon, but it will get your friends to stop nagging you to bump a song they’ve just requested.

As for playlist folders, I can’t believe it’s taken this long for Spotify to roll out a very basic feature, but hey, at last we’ve got it now. If you’re anything like me and have different types of playlists for the same occasion (I have multiple workout and music-by-the-year playlists), keeping them stored in a categorized folder does wonders for keeping your profile neat, tidy, and navigable.

• Apple Music users are asking for better playback continuity tools like Spotify Connect
• At the moment, Apple Music doesn't let you pick up where you left off when you switch between devices
• Subscribers are hoping for some improvements to be announced at WWDC 2026, but chances are slim

For hardcore Apple Music subscribers, the platform has everything they could possibly need from a music streaming service, but there’s one feature missing that is integral to pretty much all of its rivals — and its cross-device continuity.

While Apple Music has it all, from Dolby Atmos-supported albums, a clean-cut interface, and lossless audio at no extra cost, users have been asking for the company to upgrade its device-switching feature that allows you to hand off music to other devices and pick up where you left off in your listening sessions.

This has been a common annoyance for users for years, and a recent Reddit post (see below) reveals that this frustration is only growing. Though AirPlay allows you to cast videos, music, and other media from your iPhone to supported devices such as Apple TV 4K, if you want to switch from your iPhone to a smart speaker to play Apple Music, for example, it doesn’t resume your listening session in the way that Spotify Connect does.

The one Continuity feature Apple still refuses to add to Music in 2026 from r/AppleMusic

The author of the Reddit post expressed their disappointment with this, using the iPhone-to-Mac switching as an example. Basically, if you're streaming Apple Music from your iPhone and want to hand it over to your Mac to continue listening, you'll have to start from scratch and even rebuild your music queue, as this won't transfer over either. I’ve also tried controlling Apple Music on my Echo smart speaker from my iPhone, and it’s the same case.

It’s pretty common for major streaming platforms to offer their own versions of this tool. Spotify Connect is arguably the leading playback continuity feature, which seamlessly resumes your listening session and music queues across smart speakers, Bluetooth speakers, and its desktop and car apps. Even services such as Tidal and Qobuz (which aren’t as popular as Apple Music) have their own continuity tools.

But why hasn’t Apple Music jumped on this bandwagon when users are actively begging for the upgrade? The short answer is, we don’t know, and it’s a lot more frustrating being left in the dark than it is knowing the truth — and it turns out that it’s irritating more subscribers than you think.

Users are longing for the 'one killer feature'

There’s no doubt that those who love Apple Music love Apple Music — Spotify is nowhere near an option for them. That said, the Reddit thread has garnered something I never thought I’d see — Apple Music subscribers across the board are praising Spotify.

Despite Spotify’s poorer audio quality and clunky interface, both of which Apple Music subscribers still criticize, Spotify Connect “is the one killer feature that’s missing from Apple,” as one user puts it.

Another Apple Music user notes that although they quit Spotify for Apple Music, it’s the one tool they miss the most; “This is the single worst thing about Apple Music. On the green disco all app, I can pick up from any player and or control any player”.

In between the glowing Spotify comments, a handful of users have questioned whether it’s a matter of a patent getting in the way. Though one user mentioned that Spotify apparently has a patent on its Connect tool, others were quick to point out that this doesn't mean companies won’t be able to develop similar features of their own. It’s a matter of simply building around it, as we’ve seen with Tidal, so it could be a case that Apple is satisfied enough with the current version of AirPlay — even if it gets a bad rep.

Aside from playback continuity, users in the same Reddit thread have taken the opportunity to shed light on other functions Apple needs to improve, like the search bar.

For many, and I include myself in this, Apple Music's search feature doesn't perform as smoothly as the likes of Spotify. One user says what we're all thinking; with Spotify, you can type in less than half a word, and it gives you exactly what you're after. With Apple Music however, search results aren't as quick or thorough, so it requires a bit more elbow grease.

However, there’s only a few weeks until Apple’s WWDC 2026 event kicks off on June 8 where we’re expecting to see a handful of iOS 27 upgrades, so that leaves a perfect gap for the company to solve a handful of issues — but users still think it’s a long shot.

When it comes to intentional listening, the algorithmic foundations of music platforms can sometimes reduce the joy that comes with listening to complete bodies of work. Enter Cantilever, the audio service that’s putting album-listening first.

Though it’s a relatively new addition to the pool of music streamers, Cantilever wants to make a difference with its approach. For £4.99 / $5.99 / €5.99 a month, the platform lists 10 albums each with a 30-day expiration date to encourage full-length listening, filling out the space with detailed accounts of each record from music journalists, on top of a user-centric payment system for artists.

It’s been a passion project for founder Aaron Skates since he began developing the idea in 2022, and he himself has worked his fair share of jobs in the music industry since the mid-2010s. During our in-depth discussion about the music start-up, Skates goes into detail about why he wanted to create the ‘Mubi for music’ and why there are good and bad sides to algorithmic music discovery.

From music writer to CEO

Cantilever stands in its own lane compared to the likes of the head honchos of music streaming, Spotify and Apple Music. It’s designed to blend audio with music journalism while embedding a structure similar to Substack, which was sparked by Skates’ own experiences working in the industry.

“I’d been working in independent music at independent record labels since 2019, and I'd also been writing since I was 17 and going to gigs doing university-related music journalism,” he tells me, adding “when Substack as a platform started to gain traction, I realized that it's not really a secret that many music websites weren’t paying the journalists that were writing for them”.

From there, Skates had a lightbulb moment. “It was maybe 2022 when I started formulating some of these ideas of ‘where is a good online space for music journalism and how can I kind of participate in that?’” he says. “It was also the same time we were seeing a lot of stuff around remuneration not being as good as it could be on streaming, and middle-tier artists were missing out”.

So Cantilever’s mission is multi-faceted. On the one hand, it’s dedicated to spotlighting independent artists and giving music journalists their flowers by including thorough written accounts of albums to provide context for the music, just like Substack. But where Cantilever stands apart from other music streamers is with its focus on intentional listening.

Albums aren't going anywhere

Instead of offering an extensive catalog of music, Cantilever operates as an album rotation, spotlighting 10 at a time, which remain on the app for 30 days. It works wonders for eliminating doom-browsing, which everyone is guilty of doing when navigating the best streaming services, but there’s more to it for Skates.

“There's an argument that the album is an anachronistic format, which is the reason that it lasts as long as it does. It's 45 minutes because there was only so much music that you could get two on two sides of a 12-inch record,” he says. “The album as an art form was invented because of a piece of technology and its limitations, and then we kind of just ran with that. When cassettes and CDs came along, we kept the album format, almost like referring back to the past”.

But things are different in the digital age. Now that it’s become easier to access individual songs from albums, there’s been a shift in the way consumers approach album listening. However, despite the algorithm, Skates is confident that the album as a body of work is timeless.

“The point is that it remains a format that people continue to gravitate towards even during this culture of playlists and algorithmic streaming. When major stars release their music, they release albums, and there's an excitement and a buzz around the album almost as an event,” he elaborates. “So it's not saying ‘album good, track bad’ but saying well, here's a space where we can celebrate this format and have that durational experience”.

“It’s a genuinely brilliant and exciting time for music right now. There's so much awesome stuff happening in every genre,” he concludes.

The ups and downs of the algorithm

Cantilever is very simple in its interface, so you won’t expect to see a slew of tools such as playlists or an algorithm that’s constantly spitting out music recommendations. If anything, Skates is looking to avoid this.

“Contrary to my previous point, I also think that there is a potentially negative downside to having algorithmic personalization across the board. It creates this personalized experience, but not necessarily one that fosters social connection,” he believes.

“At the same time, one of the things that the algorithm-generated playlists have over album listening is that they can foster this non-intentional listening,” Skates adds and, as someone whose entire relationship with music has been rooted in album listening, I completely agree. For Skates, it also makes him question the value it imposes.

“There’s this idea of ‘I’ll put something on in the background and just have it there’, and I personally don't think there's anything wrong with that, it suits a particular time and place, but then there's another question about the value that's ascribed to that: Is something that you're paying attention to worth more money than something that you're not really paying attention to? Is the music you listen to when you're asleep as valuable as the music that you listen to when you're awake? And the platforms that we currently have have no real way of making that distinction,” he says.

This is just the beginning

Though Skates is very much focused on keeping Cantilever’s in-app experience a simple one, that’s not to say he doesn’t have plans to develop it further and enrich the platform with more features.

“It's actually more media features than the features we might typically associate with digital service providers or streaming platforms. One thing is offline downloading. So, I really want to have it so you can listen to music on your commute. Another thing is that we're going to increase the number of albums that are on there. Right now it's just 10, and that's a capacity thing, and then for the app experience I want the media to be very similar to Substack,” he tells me.

When I look over the leading music platforms out there, Apple Music is one that’s winning on the editorial side. Its extensive collection of radio stations and exclusive artist interviews bridges the gap between fan and artist even more, and it provides rich context and background behind an artist’s music and their creative process. This is another thing that Skates wants to tap into.

“[Cantilever] will have video journalism, interviews even with the artists, and potentially live sessions that we film with artists. Those kinds of ways of telling an artist’s story that have previously been the purview of the media and bring that into the app,” he reveals.

As well as audio listening for in-app articles and diversifying the genres of its albums, one of the end goals for Skates is to shift beyond mobile. “The final feature is to have a web player version, so that it’s not just a mobile app but also a desktop version that can be more familiar with how news magazines and websites operate,” he says. But before he leaves, Skates reveals that he’s always keeping an open mind about the possibilities that could arise for Cantilever.

“We have all the music we could ever want for a very cheap price, and so it feels like the more we learn about the audience who want to use this, the more informed I'll be to answer that question of what do those people want, and what do they need and how can we best serve that community”.

• Spotify is launching a new system that gives an artist's top fans a first chance at scoring concert tickets more easily
• If you're an eligible fan, Spotify will reserve two tickets for you
• The platform wants to ensure fans get tickets first over scalpers and scammers

Live music tickets are becoming increasingly difficult to score, but Spotify is doing something about it, and the platform is about to launch its own ticketing priority system for top fans.

During its Investor Day 2026 briefing Spotify unveiled Reserved, a new system that’ll grant top fans first priority for purchasing tickets to their favorite artists with no additional fees. It’s launching in the US to eligible Spotify Premium subscribers over age 18 in the US starting in the next few months, with other countries set to follow.

To start, recently-announced tours for select artists will have the opportunity to reserve tickets for fans. Spotify plans to expand this to tours of any size in the future.

In a world where ticket scalpers are rife and the Ticketmaster sales are becoming more like battlefields, Spotify’s Reserved experience aims to make the ticket-purchasing experience a smoother one — ensuring that long-time fans who give to their favorite artists get a fair chance of seeing them in person. Essentially, Spotify wants to reward your fandom.

Spotify will determine if you’re a top fan by looking across your overall Spotify activity, which includes your streams and shares, as well as monitoring the activity of Premium users. This will help Spotify determine if you’re a “real human fan”, and not a bot.

If Spotify decides that you’ve streamed an artist enough to be a top fan and they’re playing a show in your area, the platform will reserve two tickets for you which you’ll then have the chance to buy within a dedicated window (Spotify says this will be around a day). Having said that, there are a few things to keep in mind.

Jump to the front of the line

When Spotify declares that you’re a dedicated fan, you’ll receive an email and an in-app notification informing you of your eligibility to buy tickets. Spotify recommends turning on notifications for live events, enabling your location settings, and ensuring your app is updated if you don’t want to miss out.

After receiving your notification, you’ll have the chance to purchase two tickets in the dedicated timeframe before the sale opens to the general public. Although this quantity doesn’t cover large groups who may want to attend a gig together, if your friends are also big streamers of the same artists, there’s a chance they’ll also be eligible fans with Reserved access — meaning no one in your group will have to miss out.

If you decide to go ahead with your purchase, you’ll be taken to a ticketing partner’s website to complete the sale — but then there’s the matter of availability.

Spotify says that not every fan is guaranteed an offer for tickets as the number of fans aiming for tickets exceeds the total capacity of venues. Additionally, Spotify says that ticket offers with Reserved will be based on the tour’s location, meaning that if a tour isn’t coming to your area there’s a chance you may not receive priority access.

However, if you do receive an offer in spite of this, you’ll be able to buy a ticket to any show on the tour where you can select the date, location, and seat selection when you check out. Spotify also adds that ticket type availability will vary per show.

Fan engagement matters

As a serial concert attendee, I’ve noticed first-hand the shift in ticket purchasing over the past couple of years, and though the pandemic contributed to the sky-rocketing demand for live music tours, scalpers and Ticketmaster’s controversial dynamic pricing method have also made ticket purchasing an anxiety-riddled process.

Though Spotify does have its off days, it’s the first company out of all the best music streaming services to start taking a stance against scalpers who resell tickets for ridiculous prices to spite genuine fans.

Recently Ticketmaster came under fire when its president claimed that queue positions aren’t randomized, leaving fans questioning the real reason that determines these placements.

“We’re building this to give back to fans who support artists the most — and because when fans and artists win, Spotify does, too,” the streamer shared in its announcement.

But for the platform, it’s all about engagement: “When listeners who show up for an artist on Spotify are the ones getting into their shows, fans stick around, artists grow, and live music gets stronger. This is part of a broader investment Spotify is making in live music across artists at every stage of their careers,” the company concluded.

• Spotify is upgrading podcasts with two AI-powered features
• One is a new search function that allows you to ask questions about episodes
• There's also the new Personal Podcasts tool, which generates a short audio briefing based on your prompts

Spotify has used its Investor Day event to announce some new features for podcast listeners — and they're quite big.

The first of the new podcast features enables you to ask Spotify about the episode you’re currently listening to or watching, and it will give you answers in real-time. For example, you could get more information about something mentioned in the episode that you may want to know more about, or ask to find more podcasts that cover the same topic.

From the demonstration images, it shows the user tapping on the AI DJ search bar in the Spotify home page to launch the podcast episode, and then from there the user proceeds with questions. You can also ask generic questions such as ‘play the latest episode from Dissect’.

Rolling out to Premium mobile subscribers in the US, Sweden, and Ireland first, this new tool is part of Spotify’s larger plan to expand its podcast interface. The company said: “This new capability makes the experience more dynamic, helping fans learn more and connect deeply with the topics, perspectives, and creators they care about.”

Now the controversial part…

Additionally, Spotify wants you to start generating your own personal podcast episodes using AI, which builds on the platform’s recent expansion of Prompted Playlists into podcasts.

Rolling out to Premium subscribers in the US first, Personal Podcasts is another new tool that can be found among the roster of other playlist-making buttons when you tap the Create button in Spotify.

Previously, you could create your own podcasts using platforms such as OpenClaw and Claude Code which you could then save to your Spotify library, so this new tool offers a more on-demand option directly within the platform.

As you’d expect by its name, Personal Podcasts allow you to generate short audio episodes which Spotify says are “tailored to your interests and listening habits”, and it works on a prompt basis.

You can ask it to create a daily briefing to include local weather, any live music happening in your area, and daily news headlines across different topics which you can schedule to update every day or weekly.

But Spotify doesn't draw the line there — Personal Podcasts can also generate episodes that dive deeper into topics, connecting you with related podcast episodes for you to explore your curiosity further.

As well as text prompts, you can add more context to your requests by attaching PDFs and website links, and the information should be pulled into the episode.

There’s a slight catch however. Just like Spotify’s monthly audiobook listening hours allowance, the same applies to Personal Podcasts ,which come with a fixed allocation of credits to generate podcasts included with their subscription each month. If you find that you can’t get enough of them, there’s an option to purchase additional credits.

The interesting thing about Spotify’s new podcast upgrades is that nowhere in the company’s announcement doesn't explicitly state how these features are powered, though it’s quite clear that AI is the mastermind behind these generative tools.

We think the streamer is onto something with tools to let you dive further into the shows you love the most and pull information from them, and allowing you to ask for more insights on topics that presenters maybe don't go into detail with.

It's kind of amusing that Spotify recently added features in support of the anti-AI brigade by not only rolling out ‘Verified by Spotify’ badges for music artists to certify that they're real, it then did the same thing for podcasts only a few days ago — and now it's offering AI-generated podcasts right from its own menus.

• Alexa+ can now quickly create custom AI podcasts for you
• Meanwhile, Spotify is labeling podcasts made by AI
• An increasing number of new podcasts are AI-generated

We're now well past the stage where AI models can create convincing audio podcasts, run by convincing AI hosts — and there are a couple of developments this week that are going to add to and fight back against the growing deluge of AI podcasts (also known as 'podslop', if you're not a fan).

First up, Amazon has given Alexa+ new powers to create custom podcasts based on your prompts. Whether you want a dive into Roman history, a round-up of the best new music releases, sports previews or anything else, Alexa+ can serve up a podcast-style audio exploration in just a few minutes.

I'm not a fan myself of AI podcasts — more on that later — but I have to give credit to Amazon for actually partnering with real news organizations, including Reuters and the Washington Post, to produce this audio. Publishers and creators actually getting paid as AI scrapes and repackages their work? Whatever next?

This is US only for now, and as I'm in the UK I haven't been able to try it, but the examples Amazon has provided seem solid enough: the podcasts are similar in style and tone to what we've already heard from apps such as NotebookLM.

Wait just a moment, AI

As Amazon pushes AI podcasts forward, Spotify is putting the brakes on — or at least, making it easier to spot these pods. Following on from its AI verification scheme for music, launched earlier this month, Spotify is now using the same badges on podcast content.

You'll start to see light green badges that say 'Verified by Spotify' on them, used for podcasts where Spotify has confirmed who the hosts and publishers behind the show are. The idea is to protect listeners against fake content that may be misleading or dangerous, Spotify says, while also helping creators maintain their audience.

"It signals that the show has been reviewed against Spotify’s standards for authenticity and trust, helping listeners understand who they’re hearing while giving creators a clear, credible way to establish their identity on our platform," explains Spotify, adding that listener activity and audience authenticity are taken into account too.

A recent survey suggested some 39% of new podcasts are AI-generated, and I'm glad to see Spotify helping us to sort the real stuff out. I'd much rather listen to something with real personality and knowledge behind it, rather than a machine-made amalgamation of scraped content polished up into a generic, flat audio episode.

• Spotify has quietly updated its Listening Stats page
• You can now view the total number of artists and songs you've listened to each week
• There's also a new social feature that lets you compare your stats to your friends

Spotify is packed with all the features you can imagine, but its Listening Stats tool gives you a solid overview of what you’re listening to and how your streaming habits shift from one week to the next — and it’s just got better.

While I was scouring through the r/truespotify community on Reddit, a series of posts about a new upgrade to Listening Stats caught my attention. I didn’t believe it at first, but immediately stood corrected when I took a look at my own account and saw that Spotify has quietly given it a new look, and with new features to match.

First, Listening Stats has received a big design upgrade, and is more visually engaging than before, with bolder text and display cards that are more distinguishable than before, separating your individual stats from each other to give you a clearer overview of your week in music. But it doesn’t end there.

In addition to Listening Stats’ visual glow-up, Spotify has added new data that tells you even more about the quantity of music that you listen to each week. When Listening Stats first dropped, it showed you your top five artists and songs of the week, and that was pretty much it, but now your stats tell you exactly how many artists and songs you’ve listened to week-on-week — including your total number of minutes listened.

There’s also a new social aspect to Listening Stats, which, given Spotify’s commitment to emulsifying social media with its existing roster of features, isn’t totally surprising, but it’s something many users, including myself, weren’t expecting just yet.

While your top artists and songs have their own separate display cards, there are new individual cards that allow you to see who or what your friends have had on repeat during the week or, in my case, spy on your friends for new music recommendations. Now it’s impossible for them to gatekeep artists from you, which is arguably the biggest upside.

It also means you can compare your own stats to those of your friends, including your total weekly streaming minutes, so now you can battle it out to see who’s the more dedicated music fan.

Listening Stats in the process of a rebrand?

Listening Stats joined Spotify’s mobile interface in November 2025 and has since served as a kind of mini-Wrapped feature. As well as the data mentioned above, Listening Stats include special moments to spotlight different aspects of your listening, whether that’s a milestone, a fan moment, or a new music discovery, diving deeper into your weekly soundtrack.

But with the majority of Spotify features, Listening Stats hasn’t updated for a number of users in certain regions, according to the replies in the Reddit threads I’ve read (some users are only now just getting access to AI DJ). That said, Your Sound Capsule is a similar tool to Listening Stats, but it’s only available to Premium subscribers in Brazil, Indonesia, and India — and has been for quite some time.

Your sound capsule (more features) from r/truespotify

Like Listening Stats, Your Sound Capsule spotlights your most listened-to artists and songs but has graphs and other visual elements that dissect your listening habits in detail. It’s unclear why this tool is limited only to the above markets, but some users online believe that Listening Stats is in the process of being rebranded to Your Sound Capsule.

While Spotify hasn’t mentioned anything about this, the latest update to Listening Stats does give the feeling that a larger upgrade is on the way. Design-wise, the Listening Stats tab is a lot more dynamic and bold, and its visual cards have been adopted from those featured in Your Sound Capsule, but I wouldn’t place any bets just yet until Spotify comes out with more details.

I’ve reached out to Spotify for a comment on the above, and will update this story if and when I hear more information.

• Spotify's glitter ball icon change on iOS is only temporary
• The old icon will be coming back in the next few days
• Many users hadn't been happy with the new look of the icon

If you've noticed that the Spotify icon on your iPhone home screen looks... different, you're not imagining things: the refreshed disco glitter ball look is promoting the company's 20th anniversary and its new Party of the Year(s) feature.

The feature gives you a Wrapped-like experience for your entire Spotify history, but the glitter ball transformation has attracted plenty of criticism. Now, Spotify has confirmed the change is only temporary, and the usual icon will be back next week.

"Alright, we know glitter is not for everyone," the Spotify team said via one of its official social media accounts. "Our temp glow up ends soon. Your regularly scheduled Spotify icon returns next week."

Judging by the reactions to that post, it seems there are a fair few Spotify users who quite like the new look — but overall, the reaction has been mostly negative. "If it's permanent I'll go back to Apple Music," threatened one Redditor last week.

Back to the 1970s

The disco ball icon only showed up on iOS, so if you're an Android user, you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. Some thought the change was a joke, while others complained that it gave the impression that an app update was underway.

Quite a few commenters pointed out that the updated look of the icon was a throwback — not just to the disco era of the 1970s, but also to the more skeuomorphic icon design trend that used to dominate on the iPhone.

When the shiny icon first appeared last week, Spotify wouldn't say one way or the other whether the change was permanent, or how long it might last for. The reaction online seems to have forced its hand.

As for the Party of the Year(s) feature, it has had its critics too. Many users were underwhelmed with the depth of the results, and there was a major Spotify update around the time the feature launched as well — not the best way to celebrate your birthday.

There are many reasons why music fans flock to Apple Music over the slew of other best music streaming services to pick from. For one, it offers lossless, hi-res, and Dolby Atmos-supported audio at no extra cost, and its interface isn't clunky.

I’m currently using Apple Music and Spotify interchangeably, and I’m enjoying both of their offerings, but if there’s one thing rival platforms could take a note from Apple Music's books, it’s the Discovery Station — my new favorite way to find new music and artists outside of my radar.

Although Spotify is still my main music platform of choice — I’ve been a subscriber for the best part of 10 years — Discovery Station has become integral to how I spend my time listening on Apple Music, and I’ve even made a playlist to bank all of the new songs and artists I come across.

For those who aren’t on Apple Music, your Discovery Station is a personal radio station that’s powered by your listening habits and the titles in your library, helping you find new music and artists. The best part is that it’s continuous and never-ending, so it doesn’t cap songs after a certain number like New Music Mix — meaning it never runs out of music suggestions.

Do you find yourself frustrated with the shuffle function repeating the same songs? You don’t get any of that with Discovery Station. Instead, it’s designed to spotlight artists and tracks that aren’t in your playlists or saved to your library, so it’s rare to get the same song suggested twice.

But when I compare it to other music discovery tools, it works in a way that’s reminiscent of Spotify’s Daylist.

I’ve pretty much trial-and-errored my way through finding what music discovery tools work best for me in Spotify, and Daylist is by far one of my favorites, which is why I think I’ve taken to Discovery Station so quickly.

What ties the two features together is that both rely on the algorithm’s ability to dive into your daily music-listening behavior, giving you a list of artists adjacent to your taste that it thinks you will enjoy. Both are rooted in personalization and encourage active discovery.

That said, Daylist doesn’t offer a continuous run of new music. Instead, it updates every few hours to reflect your listening habits at different times of the day, and the playlist only consists of around 50 songs. That's in contrast to Discovery Station, which you can refresh by simply tapping on it to generate a new slew of songs. With Discovery Station, it doesn't show you the full queue of songs, maintaining an element of surprise each time.

Although Discovery Station works pretty much instantly for new Apple Music subscribers, I still recommend dedicating some time to exploring and listening to music to develop your taste profile before giving it a shot. But be wary, it can be quite sensitive.

For example, if you devote a listening session to streaming electronic pop and then switch over to your Discover Station, it will focus on that genre. I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, but there are workarounds you can try, such as favoriting artists, frequently adding music to your library, and using the ‘Suggest less’ button to filter out artists and genres.

• Subscribers couldn't access Spotify's Party of the Year(s) tool due to its huge outage
• When the issue was resolved, users were left underwhelmed with what it had to offer
• It didn't give insightful data such as most listened-to genres and behavorial shifts

Spotify’s 20th anniversary celebrations ran into a bit of a brick wall following the announcement of the platform’s latest mobile experience, Party of the Year(s), as many users were left wondering if the service had gone down — in short, it did.

What was supposed to be a day for Premium subscribers to revel in Spotify’s latest music time capsule turned into a frenzy of frustration as many music fans couldn’t access their Party of the Year(s) stats, resulting in a slurry of complaints in the r/truespotify page on Reddit. It could even be that the number of users trying to access the new Wrapped-style experience resulted in Spotify’s going down.

More than 14,000 users issued complaints on Down Detector, which indicated the problems started at around 12pm ET / 5pm BST, but while errors started to drop off for a handful of users, Spotify was still crashing for subscribers several hours later. Thankfully, the platform was quick to jump on the issue, and it took to X to say it had resolved the issues at around 5pm ET / 10pm BST.

A missed opportunity to say the least

With Spotify now running as normal, Party of the Year(s) saw a slew of latecomers but even after all that waiting time, users walked away rather underwhelmed with the outcome.

In a nutshell, Party of the Year(s) is a new mobile experience that gives you "never-shared-before" stats about your entire music journey, going all the way back to the very first day you signed up for Spotify right up to the present day. It’s essentially a Wrapped-style tool, showing you the total number of songs you’ve streamed, your top artists ever, and more.

All sounds good on paper, right? But for some users, these stats simply weren’t enough, as a handful of them took to Reddit to say that they were expecting way more from it.

One of the biggest criticisms highlighted that the feature doesn’t pack in as many stats and as much excitement as Wrapped; “Would have loved some more data included in the story like they do with Wrapped, such as total minutes of streaming and top 5 artists,” said one user.

Over the years people have been begging Spotify to crack down on genre stats when it comes to Wrapped, and though Spotify knuckled down on this for Wrapped 2025, there was none of this in Party of the Year(s). Not only that, but the experience doesn't outline the shifts in your listening habits over the years which, since it’s an anniversary feature, you’d think would be at its core.

Comment from r/truespotify

I tried out Party of the Year(s) to see what it was all about and I thought it was pleasant, but Spotify missed out on the chance to create something insightful and engaging here — it didn’t really differ from what Prompted Playlists can already do.

I side with the majority of users who want to see more stats about genre and music listening shifts and what impacts them, and since Spotify has endless data on its subscribers, I don’t see why the platform didn’t put the intricate readings at the very forefront of the experience.

Everybody was in a panic as Spotify experienced issues, with thousands of reports that the app was not working earlier today, May 12, 2026.

The music streaming service first confirmed that it was "aware of some issues right now with the app and are checking them out!", but there's no word yet on how widespread the problem was or an estimated time to fix.

The problems began around 12pm ET / 5pm BST, with the first reports of the outage appearing on Down Detector. Reports grew steadily over the next 20-30 minutes, peaking at around 14,000 at 1.20pm ET / 6.20pm BST — then appeared to drop off.

However, more than 2 hours later, there are clearly still some issues, with users in both the US and UK struggling to get the app to load on either desktop or mobile — though offline tunes do seem to work. Eventually, the app on multiple platforms came back to life, and Spotify confirmed the issue was fixed shortly before 5pm ET / 10pm BST.

Ahead, you can read our live reporting on the outage as it happened.

Hi everyone. I'm going to dig into what's going on with Spotify, so stay tuned for updates as I get them.

Okay, so what do we know? Well, outage reports started growing on Down Detector just under an hour ago.

You can see in the screenshot below that the numbers climbed steeply, with more than 14,000 users reporting problems 20 minutes ago.

Spotify has responded to users on X, admitting that it is "aware of some issues" and that it is checking them out.

Spotify sputtering in the US

I no longer subscribe to Spotify myself, but I asked my colleague Lance Ulanoff to try it, and he sent me this:

"Even though I can still open the app in the US, Spotify is struggling to respond to any of my requests. I can't play or search for music.

"The situation is even worse on the desktop. After a long wait, I got Spotify to open in Chrome, but when I tried to log in, I got an error message. No music for me."

Poor Lance, he'll have to do some work instead.

And problems in the UK too

Meanwhile, a colleague in the UK, David Nield, confirmed that it's not working for him either, and that "only offline downloads will play."

Right, big news… Lance says it's coming back. I'm still seeing reports on Down Detector, but they are indeed starting to drop.

What do you do when Spotify goes down?

It looks like this outage may be a relatively short-lived one, thankfully — because it can be hard, being cut off from your favorite music source.

Of course, this isn't the first time, nor will it be the last time, this happens. What do you do with yourself in these situations? Tell us in the poll below.

Okay, you know where I said it was working? Well it now seems not to be again.

Strap in, folks, this could be a long one.

We're definitely still experiencing problems in the UK, where my colleague Roland Moore-Colyer is based (as am I). Here's Roland's update:

"Well dammit. I was just enjoying some old-skool rap, courtesy of my broken Spotify algorithm trying to work out my eclectic music tastes and searches, when Spotify ceased working for me on my iPhone.

"While the outage was brewing US-side, I thought we’d missed it UK side, with Downdetector showing a slowing down of outage reports. But whatever is messing with Spotify seems to have blighted those of us in Blighty once again.

"So right now I’m writing with no musical assistance… someone pray for me."

We've reached out to Spotify for an update, and will let you know if we get a response.

Is it up or down?

Spotify is still mostly working for Lance in the US, but he says he's hearing otherwise from people just a state away.

"Perhaps I have all the bandwidth," he says. "I guess I'll enjoy it while I can.

"Still, not everything is A-OK. I'm currently streaming Bohemian Rhapsody from my iPhone, but the website is not quite in sync."

Spotify continues to struggle in the UK

Back to the UK, and this is what you see when you try to load up Spotify on the web right now. The interface partially loads, but music and podcasts are inaccessible, and everything is very slow.

If you're a Premium user, hopefully you've downloaded some of your favorite playlists for offline use. If not, you might have to wait a while to resume streaming (or just switch to YouTube).

Party off

So here's a thing: it’s Spotify's 20th anniversary today and that saw the company announce its new Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s) feature.

This is effectively a tool to show you your data from across your entire Spotify journey, starting from the first day you joined the service until now. it includes your most-streamed artist, the total number of streamed songs, and more.

We have no way of knowing what's caused the current outage, but could the implementation of this new feature have been a factor? I guess we'll find out later…

I said earlier that I no longer have a Spotify subscription, so none of this is directly affecting me — though I do, of course, feel bad for those of you who are unable to listen to your tunes right now.

I made the decision to leave the service in December and now subscribe to Qobuz instead — and I can't speak highly enough of it. Sure, it's not quite as slick as Spotify in some ways, but it fixes many of the personal issues I had with the better-known platform and — most importantly — it sounds absolutely fantastic. Seriously, if you love music and haven't given proper hi-res audio a go, I urge you to give it a try.

As it happens, we have a guide to how to switch from Spotify to Qobuz without losing your playlists.

Stick with mobile

Here's another update from Lance in NYC, who seems to be having a slightly better experience with Spotify than some people right now.

"In my neck of the woods, mobile is now the most consistently trouble-free Spotify experience. The web player tries to keep pace, but can't seem to display anything in the main window.

"It knows I'm listening to Franz Ferdinand, but Spotify can't serve up whatever is supposed to appear front and center.

"The good news is that we still seem to be on the mend. Spotify should soon be back for all. I think."

Here's Roland again with a helpful tip:

"If you have songs downloaded on Spotify they’ll still work as expected, so there’s one way to access some of your playlists. But I’m not 100% sure how many people do this, especially as, I believe, if you do this on multiple devices Spotify will then delete some downloaded songs on some devices; you can only spread the downloads so far.

"I tend to have a couple of downloaded playlists to get the best audio quality without sucking up my useless home internet bandwidth. But I could be in a minority with that. Still it means I have some music to listen to while I’m at my desk."

Search is back on Spotify

Here's Lance again in the US:

"Even though the center screen on the Spotify Web Player has been spotty at best, I have now successfully completed a web-based Spotify search.

"My subject: Best dance music of all time, of course. Can't say I'm thrilled with the results. Spotify gave me my playlist and when I clicked on the "songs" tab, I got, "No Songs found for "best dance music of all time"

"That has to be a mistake, no?

"In any case, search functioning is a very good sign, as the Spotify team scrambles to bring all of Spotify back on line."

There's still no word from Spotify since its initial message that it was experiencing problems, but reports on Down Detector are dropping, in both the UK and US.

Lance says that it seems largely recovered, but that it's still suffering from what could best be described as buffering issues.

"I've bought up a pair of playlists, but instead of instantly playing the songs when I hit play, the streamer appeared to be buffering," tells me.

"The only way to get music playing again is to select a different song in the same playlist. It's surely a quirk of the recovery."

Hello there, Jacob Krol stepping in here to keep tracking the ongoing Spotify situation. And the situation is still best described by the music streaming service's original notice: it's 'aware of some issues right now.'

In the US, Down Detector is hovering at around 3,400 reports of issues, and in the UK, the number of reports is higher at around 6,100 as of the most recent update. Spotify still shows an active, ongoing issue on its own blog-like status page here.

Here in the United States, Spotify appears to be mostly back to normal for both my premium account and my colleague, Lance Ulanoff's, free account. Search has resumed normal, and isn't immediately erroring out. I'm also able to play music, quickly jump between tracks, and browse full playlists.

I did ask a few friends, both on the east coast like myself and on the west coast, who are reporting it's working on mobile – iOS and Android – as well as desktop. It is back up and running for my Sonos system as well.

But please do let me know in the comments below if Spotify is working for you and if it isn't where you are.

We're still waiting for further comment from Spotify, as it's been several hours since the initial confirmation that the service was aware of some issues. Even with it returning for me, a colleague, and some friends, it's clear from social posts that Spotify is not back to 100% operation for everyone.

Even with some sharing that Spotify is down on X (formerly Twitter) and on Threads, others are sharing the first song they listened to on the platform as well as how many minutes total they've spent listening.

Certainly an interesting day for an outage.

This post on X likely sums up the day pretty well for Spotify users who are still experiencing issues with the platform — especially if you're keen to see the first song you listened to on the platform.

Down Detector reports for Spotify continue to drop in the United States, now at 622 as of 4:43 PM ET, and in the UK, reports are at 785 as of 4:44 PM ET. Both indicated a sharp drop from the previous thousands of reports we were tracking for issues with the platform.

We're still waiting for further updates from the music streaming platform, though I can tell you it's back for my own premium account in the United States, and Marc McLaren, TechRadar's Global Editor-in-Chief, in the UK, has noted that it's functioning on his free account as well.

Spotify says it's back to normal

Several hours after initially confirming an active issue, Spotify took to X (formerly Twitter) at 4:57 PM ET to write:

"All clear now - thanks for your patience with this! If you still need help, head over to our Community http://community.spotify.com or get in touch at http://support.spotify.com"

Hopefully, this means that if you've been experiencing issues with the music streaming service, it's now back up and running for you. Down Detector reports are still dropping.

Spotify has yet to say what caused this issue, though it did note the extended downtime by thanking users for their patience.

• Spotify has launched its new Your Party of the Year(s) mobile experience to celebrate its 20th anniversary
• It shows you data from across your entire Spotify journey, starting from the first day you joined
• This includes your most-streamed artist, the total number of streamed songs, and more

A few weeks back Spotify commemorated its 20th year of being one of the best music streaming services (I know, I can’t wrap my head around it either), but if you thought the platform was done with the celebrations you’d be wrong — it’s just launched the ultimate Wrapped experience.

Ever wanted to know the deep stats from your entire Spotify lifespan? With the new Spotify 20: Your Party of the Year(s) experience, you can.

Launching today (May 12), the new mobile app walk-through gives you a personal insight to your music listening history in Spotify, which includes exclusive data that encompasses your entire music journey from the moment you joined Spotify right up to today. In Spotify’s words, it’s “designed as a personalized time capsule, the experience captures the moments that defined listeners' music journeys, and celebrates the artists and fans who have shaped Spotify and music culture over the past 20 years”.

Although you can use Prompted Playlists to view stats such as your most listened-to songs of a specific year, this experience takes it a step further.

Behind a gold wax seal sits a nostalgic look-back at your first listens and biggest hits, starting with the exact date you joined Spotify which, if you’ve been using it for quite some time, will reveal a little too much about your age. From there, the walkthrough will show you the total number of songs you’ve streamed from your days as a Spotify baby to your days as a power-user — and Spotify compiles your top 120 songs into a playlist with play counts that you can save to your Library as a keepsake.

To top it all off, Spotify reveals the answer to one of your burning questions: who is my most-streamed artist of all time? But not only does it tell you this, it also reveals how many minutes you’ve spent listening to them since you first hit the play button, as well as the very first song that kick-started your Spotify journey.

You can begin your look-back of your listening life by searching for ‘Spotify 20’ or ‘Your Party of the Year(s)’ in the search tab, so it’s very easy to find.

However, this isn’t the first of Spotify’s anniversary celebrations. The streamer turned 20 a few months back, kicking things off at SXSW in March which was followed by a series of posts where it unveiled its most streamed artists, podcasts, and audiobooks of the last two decades.

We also got involved with the celebrations by recapping the platform’s landmark moments, and even sitting down with Sten Garmark, Spotify’s Global Head of Consumer Experience, who discussed how the company created an entirely new business model, in addition to its plans to expand to new formats and combat against AI-generated music.

One of the most handy features to come from the best music streaming services are lyrics, and although I’m a Spotify user, even I know that its lyrics interface needs some overdue TLC. But I’ve just learned about a hack I never knew existed.

I scour the r/truespotify forum on Reddit a fair bit, mainly to get a kick out of any new rumors on upcoming features I may find. But my latest deep dive took me by surprise, and apparently, you can zoom in and out on lyrics in Spotify. Has this just been launched? Or am I just extremely late to the party?

A post shared by u/mascarariri (see below) includes a side-by-side video comparison of Spotify lyrics on iOS and Android, in which the user shows themselves zooming in and out on Spotify lyrics on Android, using Billie Eilish’s song ‘Wildflower’ as an example. Unfortunately for iOS users like myself, this isn’t available.

Side-by-Side: Spotify Lyrics UI on Android vs. iOS. from r/truespotify

According to the user who published the video, all it takes to zoom is a simple pinch motion on your phone’s screen, just as you would to navigate Google Maps, for example. Additionally, the user demonstrated by zooming out to 75% — though it likely goes further — and zooming in quite far to 150%, so the range appears extensive.

Being an iOS user, I’m not surprised that I didn’t know about this trick sooner, but it turns out that not even Spotify users on Android knew about this. “I'm surprised to see something on Android before iOS. It's usually the other way around, and it takes ages to port those features; even Google apps are better on iOS”, one user said.

But the reason why this is the case for Android and not iOS is still very much a mystery — users are still debating whether it's system or developer-related. But while it's a handy tool for enhancing the lyric-viewing experience for those who are visually impaired, or those who prefer reading larger text in general, it still doesn't fix the main issues with Spotify lyrics.

Apple Music knows how to do it

Yes, Spotify has been my streaming platform since my teens, but my trial runs with Apple Music have magnified the things that Spotify falls short on — and lyrics is one of them.

When I first signed up to Apple Music last year, one of my favorite parts of the experience was the lyrics interface (I believe I said it 'puts Spotify's to shame'). I'm currently on my second round of playing around with Apple Music after being persuaded by a recent offer, and my opinion still stands.

The main difference between the two is synchronization. Not only are all songs on Apple Music synced in time with the flow of the lyrics, but each sentence is highlighted so you can see exactly which part of a line you're supposed to be — and it works wonders for when you're using karaoke mode (another fun feature).

This isn't the case with all songs on Spotify. Not only are lyrics quite static in their fluidity, but not every song is synchronized, meaning you have to scroll manually. You also have to wait at least a few days for lyrics to appear for new music, while Apple Music's catalog of new releases already comes equipped with them.

• Spotify is bringing AI DJ to more countries, including France and Germany
• Users in these markets have been begging for access for years
• AI DJ is also rolling out in four new languages

Is Spotify’s AI DJ still not available in your country? If the answer is yes, you share a common pain point with a lot of loyal subscribers around the world, but that's about to change as Spotify is expanding its digital maestro to more regions — finally!

After years of only being available in select markets around the world, many subscribers have taken to social media to voice their frustrations (you can see an example of these types of posts below). But that's now changing, as Spotify has finally announced that it will be launching AI DJ in more countries.

I really like the implementation of AI DJ, but it feels a bit basic. Here are some of my ideas to make it feel better. from r/truespotify

Starting today, Premium users in a handful of European regions will be getting the AI DJ treatment, including Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Switzerland. The feature is also rolling out to users in Brazil and South Korea.

In addition to the feature coming to more countries, Spotify is also expanding its language availability to French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese, making it a lot easier for you to cast your voice requests to DJ in your mother tongue.

It’s been quite the slow rollout for one of the best music streaming service's most popular features. Aside from unsupported languages, users around the world have been left bewildered with its slow launch given that AI DJ has been a flagship Spotify feature for the best part of three years.

When Spotify first launched AI DJ back in early 2023, it was only available to Premium subscribers in the US and Canada at first. Shortly after, Spotify expanded AI DJ’s accessibility to music fans in the UK and Ireland, followed by a wider rollout to Australia and New Zealand, as well as select markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Even then, AI DJ’s availability still felt quite restrictive and despite these expansions, a lot of users in bigger markets were still left out of the equation. This has mainly affected Premium subscribers in European markets such as France and Germany, and Spotify subscribers haven’t shied from expressing their annoyances.

One Redditor recently said: "I got a notification saying the DJ was there... so I clicked on it, and it said it wasn't available in my country." Hopefully these frustrations can be put to bed now that Spotify is bringing AI DJ to the countries that have been missing out.

We reached out to Spotify who gave us more insight to why AI DJ has taken its time to roll out to more markets, who shared the following:

"To build DJ, we want it to feel like a native experience. So, we went through over 100 auditions, selecting voice talent that felt authentic to each market. From there, the team worked with local teams to help shape each DJ's personality — making sure the tone, warmth, and cultural nuance felt genuinely local, not just translated".

Additionally, the platform also teased new AI DJ developments that are in the pipeline: "Our plan is to continue to gather listener feedback and enhance the DJ experience to make it more interactive for our listeners".

• JL Audio, owned by Garmin, unveils new hi-fi products
• Two speakers: T6 and S3, each with high prices
• Also unveils CS Stereo Centerpiece preamp and streamer

Everyone's favorite smartwatch brand Garmin has taken a break from wearables, such as the recent Tactix 8, to release a series of home audio gadgets with bank-breaking prices.

This is JL Audio's Primacy range, and this is one of Garmin's sub-brands. You'd be forgiven for not having heard of them, as their chief areas are car and maritime audio, and this jump into luxe hi-fi is sure to raise some eyebrows.

Don't expect these gadgets to price similarly to the best Garmin watches, though. They're seriously expensive pieces of hi-fi gear — priced to match the elite stuff from the likes of Bowers & Wilkins and Wilson Audio — that you can only pick up from specialist audio dealers.

Meet the Primacy pals

Let's talk about the Garmin JL Audio Primacy T6 first (just above). This is the priciest of the bunch, retailing for around $90,000 per pair.

These floorstanding active speakers have six drivers each: a 1-inch carbon tweeter, a 5.5-inch mid-range driver, and four 5.5-inch woofers. These are three amps per unit, totaling 1000W of output, and each amp has its own DSP and DAC, with support for 32-bit/192kHz audio.

The JL Audio Primacy S3, selling for $35,000 per pair, drops the specs a little. They're active speakers again, with the same 1-inch dome tweeter as the bigger model, plus a 5.5-inch woofer, and two amplifiers per unit.

Both speakers have various refinements such shaped enclosures and audio filters to offer tuned sound. They connect via XLR, RCA or Cat 6

Rounding out the trio, ostensibly to control the others, is the $15,000 CS Stereo Centerpiece. This is both a streamer — with compatibility for various audio services — and a preamp. It has all the trappings you'd hope at the price, such as room correction, user profiles, Bluetooth compatibility, and a built-in screen.

None of Garmin's new devices are available from its website. Instead, the listings guides you to your local retailer, who you can pick them up from.

• Spotify could be releasing a 'Bulk Downloads' feature
• This means you won't have to delete and redownload your music to upgrade to offline lossless streaming
• The platform could also be bringing playback speed tools to music

Over the last few weeks Spotify has spoiled us with a number of new tools including its partnership with Peloton, and it shows no signs if slowing down any time soon, with two more new features apparently in the pipeline.

In Android Authority’s latest deep dive into the Spotify app, the outlet came across a line of code referring to a ‘Bulk Download’ feature, an upgrade users have wanted for a while, and which could fix a small, yet frustrating problem for many.

As it stands, Spotify allows you to download music for offline playback at five different audio-quality settings; low, normal, high, very high, and lossless. But when the platform unveiled lossless back in September 2025, users noticed that switching your offline download quality to lossless would only apply that change to future downloads, and wouldn't automatically upgrade your existing ones, even though Spotify automatically does this for non-lossless tiers.

This can be quite a tedious task, especially if you have a rather large library of downloaded music, as you have to remove content from your downloads and then redownload them one by one to upgrade to offline lossless listening.

So the addition of Bulk Downloads would be a welcome improvement, removing this hassle for Premium subscribers who want offline lossless streaming across all the music in their downloads library.

Android Authority also spotted code strings referring to warning notifications for data usage and storage space — and a popular podcast feature that could be on the way for music playback.

Is playback speed for music on the way?

Spotify already lets you change the playback speed for podcasts, and in another teardown Android Authority found code suggesting that you’ll soon be able to change music playback speed too.

At the moment there aren’t any further details that suggest when it will arrive, or what speed options it will offer. With podcast playback speeds, you can choose from a range between 0.5x to 3.5x, so we might get the same options for music — but whether it’s a feature users will actually want is another question.

I've often made use of the playback-speed feature while listening to podcasts when traveling, speeding up playback when conversations are too slow, so that I can get through an episode quicker.

But what benefit does this bring to music playback? I know it’s become a popular practice for artists to release sped-up and reverbed versions of their songs that go viral, but even then, those versions are no match for the original recordings. As a passionate album-listener I couldn’t think of a less satisfying way of listening to a body of work, or a single track for that matter.

Perhaps there are some people who might want to get through an album faster, rather than just enjoying it at its original length, but I just can't see it. If Spotify does in fact introduce such a feature, it'll be interesting to see how the streaming giant tries to pitch it to users.

The competition between the best music streaming services has become increasingly tough over the years, and new entrants to the sector have their work cut out when it comes to competing with the big players.

One such startup is Vocana, the independent-only streaming platform that’s challenging Spotify’s payment system at a time when music fans are criticizing music platforms for the unfairness of the pro-rata system.

Vocana’s journey began in 2021 when Dale Chorba and Dave Petruziello joined forces to build a platform designed to "fix what’s broken in streaming". Its President is Neil Sheehan, who joined Vocana shortly after it was founded, bringing his experience in live music promotion and indie label management to the table.

The Vocana app entered public beta three months ago, and Sheehan is driving plans to expand the platforms offering by enlisting more artists, onboarding more users, and launching live subscriptions to take the indie-centric platform to new heights — all while keeping the brand’s ethos at the forefront of everything it does.

No major labels allowed

“It’s the brainchild of these two businessmen that were live music aficionados,” Sheehan tells me. “They would go to live shows and see tip jars on a stage, and they were like ‘why are these artists, if they have Spotify and they're playing shows, need a tip jar?’, assuming all artists that are on a stage or have streaming numbers are making money. What they kept hearing from artists was that they don't get paid well from streaming services. So they thought ‘why can't this be rectified?’”.

Payment was one of the trio's top priorities. “Spotify and most of the other Digital Service Providers (DSP) pay in a pro rata model, so your $10 subscription goes into this big pot. It doesn't matter who you listen to, Drake, MGK, and Taylor Swift are going to take the majority because they are listened to mostly by everybody. So we wanted to do a true user-centric system,” says Sheehan.

Equally, Sheehan wanted to eliminate the unfairness of the competition — but how do you do that? You exclude major labels, that’s how. “When you're on these DSPs, nine times out of ten the algorithm or the playlist, whether it's editorialized or not, is going to prop up some major label artists or the ones that are getting listened to the most,” Sheehan observes.

“So we said let's be independent-only, meaning we’re just going to license content from true independent distributors where almost every time you get a song, it's pure discovery. There are millions of these artists out there, but they're not being propped up. So you're not going to get major label content. Everything that's going to come to you is most likely going to be discoverable that you've never heard before,” he adds. That said, it doesn’t mean that Vocana is shutting out the big artists that you love listening to altogether. Sheehan tells me that, despite his popularity, Snoop Doog qualifies for a Vocana artist page as he’s technically signed independently.

Though Sheehan has had a long four-year run at Vocana so far, this is just the beginning: “It’s been quite a journey for myself,” he tells me. “There are a lot of artists now who are getting their masters back, and then going to an independent distributor. They own their own masters, they own their own publishing, so they can do whatever they want with it. I think you'll see a lot of these artists that are leaving the major label world on our platform”.

Human curation goes a long way

As it stands, Vocana is still in public beta and is awaiting a wider rollout, but it already has 40 million tracks and 2 million artists, as well as all the music features you can imagine.

“We took the basic idea of streaming and kept it so that you can queue songs, you can have your playlists, and you can have your catalog selection,” Sheehan tells me. This is where Vocana spins the social features on its head. “The features that we prop up are community-focused like the old Myspace, but we also have shortform videos like TikTok”.

There’s one thing that Vocana does differently to other music streaming giants, and that’s reinforcing the idea that music is supposed to be discussed. “We also have what we call ‘Hubs’,” says Sheehan

“These are private groups that you can join, so they could either be by city, or you can create one like ‘emo guys in Liverpool’ for example. Whatever you want to make, you could make that hub and then people could talk privately in those groups,” he adds. At the same time, these Hubs aim to offer listeners music discovery on a level that’s not just algorithmic. “Hopefully people now are talking and not just relying on something pushing them somewhere,” Sheehan says.

As far as algorithms go, Vocana’s structure doesn’t rely on AI models to do it all for you like Spotify does. If anything, it’s a simple model that does what it needs to do, and that’s use your listening habits as one of the bases for your new music recommendations. But the Hubs tool is Vocana’s true catalyst for driving discovery: “We pride ourselves on human curation,” Sheehan tells me, and it’s music to my ears.

“What I mean by that is, I brought up Myspace in the past where we are leaning into allowing fans to discover music, and then share that music with other people. I’m a firm believer that people move in tribes. If you are in an emo tribe, you follow those people and that's how you’d discover new music, because those people are now talking about it,” he continues. “So we are encouraging people to share as much music as possible within their hubs, on our system. We don't have an algorithm that's going to spit out music to you”.

Looking beyond the US market

Vocana has pretty much laid the groundwork for all future expansions. It has a solid brand image and a structured app interface with the features to go with it. So how is the company planning to climb the ladder of success from here? The short answer is; marketing.

“We have another 90 days in public beta, and we're about to allocate a large marketing budget,” he says. “We did some small marketing during the public beta. We started a ‘Pay the Artists’ concert series in New York, and we’re about to start it in Nashville and Dallas as well, but you will see a fairly robust online digital marketing campaign as well”.

That’s just one of the components to Vocana’s long-term plan — it wants even more users to join the family. “Our goal is to onboard 50,000 users in the next 90 days and get a lot more artists to come claim their page. So that's kind of the 90 day roadmap, and then the subscriptions will be turned on and we’ll see what happens after that,” he adds. Then there’s the matter of international expansion, which Sheehan admits will be an even longer journey.

“The reason we started with the United States is because we're based here,” he puts it simply. “Publishing was a little easier here, but we’ve looked at several different areas to expand fairly quickly, at least in Mexico, Japan, UK, to all our big connoisseurs of music, especially independent music,” he shares, so going internationally isn’t off the cards for Vocana.

“It’s been something we've talked about numerous times every week for the last three months,” Sheehan reveals, adding “because we have so many people overseas asking to either be on the platform or they've tried to log in and they can't” (I’m one of those people). Before we bade farewell, Sheehan left me with a glimpse of what to expect in the coming months; “You’ll probably see in the next 12 months hit half a dozen markets outside of the United States”.

Although Spotify is my music platform of choice, I do enjoy what Apple Music has to offer. Last summer I signed up to Apple’s music service for the first time, and I’m testing the waters once again — mainly to make the most of Dolby Atmos-supported listening.

I’ve been using Apple Music on and off for the past couple of weeks after signing up for one of its latest deals, and as soon as I logged back in, I immediately started making a playlist centered around essential Dolby Atmos listening. The best part about my brief return to Apple Music is that I’ve had enough time away to really notice and appreciate the way my favorite records sound in Dolby Atmos compared to Spotify Lossless.

Then it got me thinking, which Dolby Atmos albums would I recommend to new Apple Music members? There are five supported records I’ve had on constant repeat lately because, when I compare listening to them on Spotify Lossless, Apple Music is the clear winner.

Don’t know where to start? Here are my top Dolby Atmos album picks.

Homogenic, Björk

I knew that Björk would make the list, but selecting just one album was almost an impossible job. I was torn between the earthiness of Debut and the urban Post, but as far as electronic albums go, Homogenic is the one that truly shines in Dolby Atmos.

I first got into Björk around 10 years ago and have been listening to Homogenic ever since, but it’s only now that I’ve started picking up on elements I never knew lurked between the layers of each song. Not only that, the album’s orchestral components don’t get lost in the thick cyber forest. Instead, they come front and center just where they belong — balancing perfectly with the album’s electronic core.

3D Country, Geese

Although Getting Killed would’ve been a solid choice, Geese’s album 3D Country is incredibly dynamic, and one that I’ve been listening to non-stop. It’s a fun album to listen to if the blend of indie alternative, rock 'n roll, country, and blues intrigues you.

It sounds like an overstuffed concoction on paper, but listening in Dolby Atmos really allows you to pick out the influences one by one, and then throw them all back together. One of the best parts about the listening experience is getting to hear Cameron Winter’s vocals in all their robustness, which does wonders for showing off his vocal control.

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Chappell Roan

Of course, I had to throw in a pop album, and Chappell Roan’s 2023 album is the record I’ve noticed the biggest differences with when listening to it in Dolby Atmos form — the main ones being its punchier bass and synth clarity.

However, like 3D Country, this is another album where the vocals are one of the stars of the show. Chappell has a voice that really works for a pop vocal album like this, but you don’t notice how polished her sound is and how much vocal layering she does until you stream it on Apple Music. As far as pop albums go, this one sits at the top when it comes to essential Dolby Atmos listening.

Grace, Jeff Buckley

Every time I listen to Grace by Jeff Buckley, it sends shivers down my spine and fills my eyes with tears, so naturally it had to be included. If you thought that his raw voice and acoustic instrumentals were hard-hitting, just wait until you press play on the title track in Dolby Atmos.

Buckley’s musicianship is spotlighted in every isolated guitar pluck, which will make you realize just how many different types of guitars he uses in a single song, let alone the whole album.

Orquídeas, Kali Uchis

If you’re looking for an album with rich production to kick-start your Apple Music/ Dolby Atmos experience, allow me to point you to Kali Uchis’ Orquídeas, a Spanish-language record that explores reggaeton, R&B, and funk in all its glory.

This is another album that’s packed with influences, but again, it doesn’t feel stuffy in Dolby Atmos. If anything, its groovy rhythms, underwater-sounding acoustics, and seductive trap beats are balanced perfectly. One doesn’t overpower the other, and the echo of her angelic vocals is the cherry on top.

• 'Verified by Spotify' badge will roll out over the next few weeks
• Certifies that artist is real, not an AI creation
• No way to use the info to filter playlists, just yet

Spotify listeners are growing increasingly frustrated about the proliferation of AI slop in the streamer's library. The service has made a few steps towards addressing it, such as letting artists approve songs on their profile, but fans' more proactive AI blockers have fallen afoul of the streamers' ToS. But finally, Spotify is doing something with a more solid impact.

The streaming giant has announced 'Verified by Spotify', a checkmark badge that's due to start showing up on artist's profiles (and next to their name in playlists) over the next few months. It looks similar to the verification checks on other platforms, such as Instagram or X.

This badge doesn't explicitly tag an artist as a real person, but instead one who follows three principles: They need to have consistent activity over time (both from themselves and listeners); abide by Spotify's policies; and have evidence that they're a real person (or people).

The latter is the clincher; evidence such as concert dates, merchandise being sold, social media accounts linked, and more factors help Spotify decide if an artist is real.

According to the platform "At launch, profiles that appear to primarily represent AI-generated or AI-persona artists are not eligible for verification", later clarifying "we’ll continue to develop our approach over time." So a Verified by Spotify check hopefully means an artist is real now, but technically might not continue to mean that in the future, depending on how the service "develops" its approach.

Half measures

Music fans have been asking for filters, to stop AI music finding its way onto algorithmically-generated playlists, and so that they can support their favorite artists without money going to AI generators. This verification options seems like a good way to implement that — I'd like to be able to tell the system to only play verified artists in those kinds of playlist — but that doesn't seem to be an option right now, which just feels like a missed opportunity.

Instead of changes like that, we're having to publish advice on how to spot AI-generated music in Spotify, so you can avoid it yourself, as fans avoid some of Spotify's main features to get away from it.

The problem is proving fantastic for rival music streaming platforms, with Deezer seeing success with its AI detection tools and Qobuz surging up the streaming charts too. Even Apple Music is taking a stand against AI-generated music.

In previous comments to TechRadar, Spotify has stated that it removed 75 million AI tracks in the past year, but fans' continuing annoyance at the proliferation of slop shows there's more that really needs be done.

And while the Verified by Spotify tag might help in some way, it's not going to actively affect the kind of tunes that show up in your playlists — at least, not yet. But as a first step to helping users take control, this is a solid one.

• Pro-Ject announces two wireless upgrades for classic hi-fi gear based on WiiM OS
• Stream Box E upgrades your amp with streaming skills
• Wireless Box E turns any passive speakers wireless by connecting to the binding posts

Beloved hi-fi brand Pro-Ject hasn’t slowed down at all in 2026. After announcing a premium turntable in January and record cleaner last month, it has two more pieces of gear coming soon.

The brand has announced the Stream Box E and Wireless Box E, as part of its growing hi-fi ecosystem. They cost £159 (about $200, AU$300) and £199 (around $270, AU$400) respectively.

The Stream Box E is a wireless network streamer and digital pre-amp that can upgrade your wired audio system to allow for Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect and Qobuz. It can be connected to an amplifier, or directly to active speakers.

Then there’s the Wireless Box E, which also gives a tidy tech upgrade to existing gear. This time, it upgrades your passive loudspeakers, acting as a wireless receiver for them, meaning you can position them anywhere without needing to worry about running cable to them, giving you more flexibility over where you put them, or perhaps where you put the rest of your hi-fi setup.

You'll need one per speaker, of course, and each needs to be connected to a power outlet.

A WiiMsical choice

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the news, is that the Stream Box E and Wireless Box E will both run on WiiM OS. This is a platform primarily designed for the brand’s own tech like such as the WiiM Sound, but is also available to other brands, bringing their tech into the burgeoning WiiM ecosystem.

We’ve compared Sonos vs WiiM in the past to help you understand the differences, but the gesture is clear: this is part of a growing alternative to Sonos, and is clearly one that wants to be as flexible as possible based on these launches.

However, there's a big catch here for Apple users, which is not exactly a small portion of the world. WiiM has some kind of on-going issue with Apple that means that many of its products don't include Apple AirPlay 2 as an easy streaming options, and it's the same with these.

While support for the likes of Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect might mean you're actually fine with this, it also means these boxes are basically no good if you're an Apple Music user, or if you want to be able to use AirPlay's platform-neutral multi-room skills.

In this instance, Sonos absolutely still has the edge — it not only supports AirPlay fully, it's the only brand with a streaming amp that has native Apple Music support in its app for lossless listening.

The fast pace with which Pro-Ject is releasing gears shows that it’s only getting bigger and bigger in the home hi-fi game, especially with affordable options like these. Perhaps it’s found an ideal partner in the equally ambitious WiiM — we can't wait to see how well these work in practice.

• A Spotify user has developed their own AI song-filtering software
• It's been downloaded by hundreds of users, but it's creator warns that it may violate Spotify's terms of service
• Over the past 12 months, Spotify told us it removed 'over 25 million AI tracks'

AI-generated music is a growing frustration for users of Spotify and other music streaming services — and now one Spotify user has taken matters into their own hands.

To combat the flood of AI songs plaguing their algorithm, software developer Cedrik Sixtus has built an ‘AI blocker’ that labels and filters out AI-generated tracks from their listening sessions. Since developing the tool, Sixtus has shared it online where it’s been downloaded by hundreds of users via Spotify’s web platform.

Speaking with the BBC, Sixtus summarized the aim of his filter tool quite simply, saying "it is about choice — if you want to hear AI music or if you don't”. He also told the BBC that using his software "may violate Spotify's terms of service" — so you might want to proceed with caution if you're thinking of installing it, or a similar blocker.

So how does the tool work? The main objective of Sixtus’ AI blocker is to filter out a list of over 4,700 'artists' that are suspected to be AI. This detection is based on community tracking methods, and factors in other characteristics such as album art, and how often music is uploaded to the purported artist’s profile.

While users like Sixtus are actively attempting to extinguish the AI flames, the big dog Spotify has yet to clearly label AI-generated songs, which Sixtus finds the most frustrating part.

Spotify has just celebrated its 20th anniversary, and to mark the milestone I spoke with Sten Garmark, the company's Head of Consumer Experiences at Spotify. As part of our discussion he teased the company’s future development plans, which include new measures to combat the rise of AI uploads.

Garmark told me that Spotify removed “over 25 million AI tracks” in the last year, and emphasized the company's ongoing commitment to tackling the issue. “We have rules against impersonation, and we've also helped set up new protectionist mechanisms for artists so that they can more securely control what goes up on their platform,” he added.

At the same time, Spotify has refrained from penalizing artists who use AI as a creative tool in small doses, and a lack of clarity over where it draws the line is one of the issues with its AI filtering system — and it's one reason why loyal subscribers are slowly losing confidence in the service, argues Sixtus. "[Spotify] has to figure out what listeners want and how artists feel — all while AI is improving, being used more widely and becoming harder to detect," he shared.

Not only is the number of AI-generated uploads rising, the technology used to create AI songs is becoming increasingly accessible, meaning pretty much anyone can create a song, and an AI persona to go with it.

In the current UK iOS App Store charts, AI music generator Suno sits in the number one spot in the music category, ahead of Spotify in third (Global Player is in second spot). If major streaming platforms don’t start clamping down on strengthening their AI filters now, it gives the developers of software such as Suno more time to perfect their technology, and fool more music fans — and we could soon find we've passed the point of no return.

• Oliver Schusser from Apple Music says a third of uploads are AI-generated
• Despite this, only 0.5% of all users are engaging with this content
• Apple Music has plans to combat the AI epidemic even further

Apple Music has become the latest music streaming service to be hit with the influx of AI-generated content, says its VP Oliver Schusser — but it’s reaching only a very small percentage of all users.

Speaking with Billboard ($/£), Schusser shed light on the state of AI music in Apple Music’s library, sharing that “more than a third of what (Apple Music) get(s) today is actually what we would say is 100% AI”.

It goes to show that it’s becoming easier for labels and distributors to submit music that’s completely made using AI, and Apple Music isn’t the only service that’s facing this epidemic. Just last week, Deezer declared that nearly half of the new music submitted to the platform is AI-generated, resulting in the company’s decision to stop offering hi-res versions of these songs.

So, how is Apple planning to put out the AI fire? Well, Schusser went into further detail in his interview. “We’ve never talked about this — but we’ve developed technology in-house that would allow us to exactly see what music people are delivering us, what AI (model) it is and all that,” he reveals, likely referring to Transparency Tags.

Back in March, Apple sent out a letter to industry partners revealing its plans to roll out ‘Transparency Tags’, a new metadata system to help flag AI-generated and AI-assisted music. This means labels and distributors can disclose whether AI has been used in a song’s production when submitting to Apple Music. Though it’s optional, Schusser made it clear that he “really need(s) the content providers and the labels to take responsibility”.

There’s no denying that fully AI-generated music is cropping up in the best music streaming services, but Schusser unveiled an interesting statistic that may come as a surprise: despite the rise, it’s not having a huge impact on users’ listening and engagement habits. “The reality is, the usage of the AI music on Apple Music is really tiny. I’m rounding, but it’s below 0.5% of usage. We’re just at the beginning here,” he told Billboard — but fraud is still rife.

This is another issue on which Apple Music is clamping down, but it’s been doing this since the good old iTunes days: “This has been a 20-year journey because there was fraud, obviously, in iTunes already,” Schusser said, which led to the introduction of Apple’s fraud penalty. The company also doubled this penalty as of this year.

But the battle isn’t over, as Schusser puts it, “We invest way more than anyone else in reducing and eliminating fraud. We implemented a fraud penalty four years ago, where if we catch someone, then we actually take the money and put it back in the pool. We need to monitor AI music because there’s a correlation between AI and fraud”. He also shared that Apple has seen a “60% reduction” in fraudulent uploads after implementing the penalty.

As it stands, I’ve been one of the lucky ones not to have run into AI-generated music flooding my recommendations in Apple Music as well as Spotify, though the latter has come under significant scrutiny for housing AI slop. Like other platforms, Spotify is also working toward safeguarding users by removing 25 million AI tracks in the last 12 months, and devising a solid AI combat strategy for the future.

• Spotify and Peloton have announced a new partnership and Fitness hub
• It brings over 1,400 Peloton video workouts to the Spotify app
• It's rolling out globally today (April 27) to Premium subscribers

First it was music, then podcasts and audiobooks, and now Spotify is entering a new era — fitness.

The music streaming giant is joining forces with one of the biggest names in fitness, Peloton, to bring Peloton's extensive range of video workouts to a new Fitness hub in the Spotify app.

As of today, over 1,400 curated classes will be rolled out to Spotify Premium subscribers, spanning strength, pilates, barre, yoga, stretching, meditation, floor cardio, and outdoor run and walk.

Peloton has said these classes will be accessible "in most countries where Spotify is available".

The collaboration is part of Peloton’s wider plans to expand its reach globally and improve the accessibility of its experience. “We’ve always believed that the best workout is the one you actually do, which is why accessing world-class fitness content should be as easy as tuning into your favorite Spotify playlist”, said Dion Camp Sanders, Chief Commercial Officer at Peloton.

“As we continue to forge a path deeper into wellness, our work with Spotify is just our latest move to expand our reach and capture new revenue streams through Peloton’s unmatched experience, content and instruction.”

Last week Spotify celebrated 20 years of being one of the best music streaming services, and as part of our coverage I spoke to Sten Garmark, the company's Global Head of Consumer Experience, who reflected on Spotify's influence and teased plans for it to expand into more formats — and this new partnership suggests it's wasting no time in doing so.

“For nearly two decades, Spotify has been the soundtrack to the world’s workouts,” said Roman Wasenmüller, VP Global Head of Podcasts. “Today, we are expanding Spotify to become a true daily wellness companion. By bringing Peloton directly into our video and audio ecosystem, we are investing in a future where Spotify isn’t just where you spend your time — it’s where you go to build momentum, improve your wellbeing, and get more out of every day.”

Although Spotify and Peloton haven’t gone into great detail about how the new Fitness hub will work, we can get a good idea from some first-look images the brands shared. For starters, the Fitness hub looks like one of Spotify’s existing family of categories, such as its Made For You and genre hubs, so I’m guessing it will appear in the app’s Search tab alongside the rest of these.

Instead of simply putting all of Peloton’s video workouts into one space, Spotify is implementing an onboarding system to match you to Peloton workouts based on your fitness goals and in-the-moment mood. This consists of a series of questions such as ‘what movement are you in the mood for?’ and ‘how do you want to push yourself?’, as well as asking you for your fitness and experience levels.

Once the questionnaire is complete, Spotify will present you with a workout starter pack for you to explore. Alternatively, there’s an option to browse all the workouts on offer.

I’ll be testing out Spotify’s Fitness hub when it drops, and when I've tried it I'll share my experience and early impressions — I'm eager to see if Spotify has the qualifications to be my new personal trainer.

• Spotify's mobile apps are getting new playlist capabilities
• You can now create and manage playlists on the go
• Some but not all users on Android and iOS are seeing the update

The latest Spotify upgrade rolling out to users is one that I've been waiting years for, and which will really make a difference to on-the-go listening: the ability to create and manage playlist folders from the mobile apps.

While you've previously been able to view playlist folders on mobile, you haven't been able to create, edit, or delete them — something that's now changing, 15 years after the feature was first introduced, as Android Authority reports.

Threads on Reddit suggest some people are seeing the update, though it apparently hasn't rolled out to everyone yet. "I've been wanting this for a very very long while now," says one poster, summing up the overall sentiment from most Spotify users.

As there hasn't been any official word from Spotify, it's possible this is only a limited test for now (the code for the upgrade was actually spotted by Android Authority back in March). It may take a while before everyone sees it on their phones and tablets.

Go forth and create

You Can Now Create Folders on Mobile (and move playlists to them) from r/truespotify

I'm using Spotify for Android in the UK, and I can't see the option yet: apparently it shows up if you tap the + (plus) button on the Library page. You'll then be prompted to choose a name for your new folder, and it then gets added to the list.

There are a couple of extra tweaks worth mentioning as well. Besides being able to create new folders for your playlists, the update adds the ability to move existing playlists into them — so you can tidy up your library without heading to Spotify on the desktop.

Users have also spotted the ability to play all of the playlists inside a particular folder in one go, and to shuffle between the full set of tracks across the entire folder. This matches what you can already do in the desktop and web.apps.

Let's hope this is something that everyone gets sooner rather than later: 15 years is a long time to wait for a feature to migrate from desktop to mobile. Perhaps it's part of the ongoing celebrations of Spotify's 20th anniversary.

Earlier this week Spotify celebrated its 20th birthday, and to mark the milestone I spoke with Sten Garmark, the music-streaming giant's Global Head of Consumer Experience, about the company's early years, and its impact on both the music industry and the wider culture.

In the second part of our discussion, we turned to the future, and discussed what Spotify plans to achieve in the next 20 years and beyond. When we first spoke, Garmark teased that Spotify always has ideas up its sleeve — and let’s just say the platform has some ambitious plans, including moving into new formats.

A multimedia future beyond music, podcast, and audiobooks

“We went from music, and we've added wonderful new types of creative people to the platform,” says Garmark. “We've added podcasters and their conversations, and now we have the world's most interesting people come and have conversations for hours. And for authors it’s the same thing. People can put their whole life into writing a book, and it’s just instantly available at your fingertips.”

Music, podcasts, and audiobooks are Spotify’s core formats, and though not all subscribers will make the most of all three, the company still prides itself on giving its members options. “I feel like as humans, this has never existed in the past,” says Garmark. “You can live anywhere and you can have access to everything. It's really inspiring and fun.”

And for Garmark, there are no limits to where Spotify might go next. “I think we're going to add some more formats that people are going to love from more creative people. So that's probably in our future,” he tells me.

Control, community, ubiquity

User control and personalization are the foundation of the platform’s entire existence. Over the last 20 years Spotify has doubled down on allowing users to shape their own in-app experiences, and it’s Garmark’s mission to push this even further in future developments.

“I spoke about having more control. The unlocking of AI enables users in their own language, to express who they want to be and what they aspire to do," he says. “Not what an algorithm believes they should do, but what they want to do themselves. It's an inflection point, and I think we have a business model where this makes sense.”

However, Garmark admits that Spotify has been a bit of a “singular player” when it comes to establishing communities. “We've had a multitude of social features. But we think that we can do more in the domain of features of multiplayer that you do with your friends,” he continues, hinting at plans to enrich Spotify’s connectivity tools like Jam and Messages.

“We have many more ideas in this domain, in creating conversations between people (that otherwise wouldn’t happen) around the most inspiring people on the planet. We hope to invest a lot more there.”

Right now Spotify is pretty much omnipresent in terms of its availability on different devices and platforms. Spotify Connect allows you to smoothly play music through compatible smart speakers, while Apple CarPlay and Android Auto give you easy access to music via your car’s dashboard. So where does it go from there?

“This is close to heart”, Garmark reveals. “From a user's standpoint, we’re by far the most ubiquitous experience for music, podcasts, and audiobooks. We’re essentially everywhere. If a brand is launching a consumer product of any type, they call us in advance; ‘I need to have Spotify on my thing, otherwise I can't sell it’. And we have great experiences for all sorts of form factors. We’re available across more than 2000 different device types right now, and of course, there's more coming out all the time.”

The AI plague looms

As the brand looks towards the next 20 years, there’s one major threat Spotify and other music streamers are facing — the rise of AI-generated music and AI clones. There are two sides to the AI debate. The first celebrates it as a helpful production tool which, in terms of championing the creative choices of its artists, Spotify acknowledges.

“Artists on the platform tend to be the people that use the technology first,” Garmark observes. “If you look at the past, when electric guitars came out, they used that, and then you could make music with a turntable and sampler, and then with a computer. So it's a creative tool.

“We're working with the industry to help artists annotate parts of the song that were made with AI, and they can publish that. We believe in transparency to the user.”

But there’s also a malicious side to AI — chiefly fraudulent streams and artist impersonation — which Garmark expresses deep concern about. “There’s a downside in that there are other people that want to scam us and the artists by trying to divert users' listening and attention to things that they don't want to listen to. Basically to have an economic gain from that”, he says.

The company is already taking action on this front. “In the last 12 months, we've removed 25 million AI tracks,” Garmark tells me. “We have rules against impersonation, and we've also helped set up new protectionist mechanisms for artists so that they can more securely control what goes up on their platform.”

The last 20 years was just the start for Spotify, and there’s no doubt the next 20 years will see it shaking things up even more.

Spotify is celebrating a milestone anniversary this week that marks 20 years since the music platform was founded by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon — and what a time it’s been.

I say that in the best way possible because, if it weren’t for its highest highs, lowest lows, and unforgettable viral moments, how else would the best music streaming service keep you locked in? From its endless product launches to industry tensions, Spotify’s history of technological innovations and cultural drama is so rich that not even Pop Crave could keep up.

To commemorate Spotify’s anniversary, I’ve looked back over the past 20 years and compiled five of what I think are the most memorable, defining moments from Spotify’s journey so far. And yes, one of them involves Taylor Swift.

Spotify Wrapped

Much of Spotify’s viral success can be attributed to its annual music roundup, Spotify Wrapped, which keeps subscribers on the edge of their seats all year round, patiently waiting to see which artists and songs defined their year in music. Its rivals have hopped on this trend with their own versions, but none have the same effect as Wrapped.

Every year, it offers something different, like the SoundTown feature from Wrapped 2023 or Listening Age from Wrapped 2025. It’s chameleonic in all its glory, which is the key to keeping us guessing, but it always reveals something new about your listening taste and personality that you may not have known before.

That aside, it has introduced a new snapshot way of sharing our tastes and listening habits with friends beyond playlists. It’s not just a unique in-app experience, it’s a global event.

Launch of Lossless

Spotify was late to the Hi-Fi audio game compared to Apple Music, and it had been promising lossless audio since 2021. The nearly five-year wait for Spotify Lossless finally ended in September 2025, and Premium users finally got their Hi-Fi fix. More recently, Spotify unveiled its new Listening Lounge, a space to really show off Lossless’ capabilities.

Taylor Swift’s dramatic Spotify exit and comeback

As Spotify grew in popularity, it gave artists a new way to put out music and connect with fans, impacting marketing and promotional strategies significantly, so it was only a matter of time before tensions in the relationships with industry moguls rose to the surface — and who can forget Taylor Swift’s 2014 Spotify exit.

To protest the unfairness of artist pay (still a heated discussion topic today), Swift pulled her entire catalog from Spotify and other platforms, resulting in a three-year absence from one of the biggest pop artists of the time and a global conversation about the impact streaming services were having on income.

Swift returned unexpectedly in 2017, restoring all of her music just in time for the release of her sixth studio album Reputation.

Expansion beyond music streaming

Music streaming was just the beginning for Spotify, and after building a strong global platform for easy music access, it needed to take things further. Enter podcasts.

2015 marked a big shift in Spotify’s offerings when it kick-started its podcast ecosystem, and now it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest, platforms for podcast streaming as well as music listening. Additionally, this led to the inclusion of audiobooks, another offering that Spotify is always developing with new tools like Page Match.

Discover Weekly launches a global thirst for new music finds

When Spotify released Discover Weekly in 2015, it marked the start of the company’s journey towards developing an algorithm built with music discovery at the center.

Since the launch of Discover Weekly, Spotify has rolled out a slew of tools and features for optimizing new music discovery based on the genres, artists, and songs you’re already enjoying.

My personal favorite is Daylists, but Prompted Playlists, Release Radar, and Spotify’s countless editorial playlists have also proven to be successful in helping subscribers branch out to new artists.

As someone who loves listening to music and has been writing about tech for a living for a very long time (more than two decades at this point), I of course signed up for Spotify as soon as I could — which in the UK was February, 2009.

A lot has changed since then, both inside and outside the digital music industry, as Spotify told us about in an exclusive interview for its 20th birthday today. But I've kept up a Spotify Premium subscription through it all — it's an app I load up most days and am still writing about.

What you might not know if you're a Spotify user is that there are a host of plug-ins and extensions available for the music streaming platform that add extra features and functionality — a bit like extensions for your web browser. They tap into the Spotify app to do something different, and to enhance the experience in all kinds of ways.

I've tried out multiple different add-ons since I first opened my Spotify account, and these are the most useful I've come across. Check them out and see if any of them appeal: you can be up and running with any of these plug-ins in minutes.

1. Last.fm

Spotify of course offers its own listening statistics, with Spotify Wrapped at the end of each year and more detailed breakdowns now available whenever you want, but Last.fm remains the undisputed champion of tracking your listening habits — something that's known as 'scrobbling' in Last.fm parlance.

Once you've connected your Last.fm and Spotify accounts, you can dig into a host of charts and reports around your music listening, whether it's your favorite genre of all time or the artist you loved the most this month (or this month five years ago). Plus, it can track your listening across all your other audio streaming apps too, and recommend new music.

2. Spicetify

If you want to be able to customize the interface of the Spotify desktop player for Windows or macOS, then Spicetify is the extension for you. It gives you controls for adjusting fonts, colors, and more besides, and there are hundreds of premade themes you can pick from with just a couple of clicks — and tweak to suit your own tastes.

Besides the themes, Spicetify also offers numerous little edits that you can apply to the Spotify desktop player, whether it's adding extra visualizers or removing a button or interface element that you don't like or need. It's all backed up by a busy community of users who are constantly coming up with new customization ideas.

3. The Playlist Miner

Head over to The Playlist Miner if you want some extra inspiration for your Spotify playlists. After connecting to your Spotify account, it searches through the public playlists available on the platform to find a mix of songs tailored specifically for you, whether you're looking for tracks for working out or chilling out.

How you search for new songs really is up to you: maybe you could try building a playlist around "inspiration" or around "high energy". As long as there are enough public playlists matching the search criteria for The Playlist Miner to work with, it'll select the most popular picks across those playlists.

4. Oscurify

Music is more fun if you're sharing it and discussing it with other people — or at least comparing your taste with the wider world, which is something that Obscurify lets you do. Connect your Spotify account, and you get a fascinating breakdown of how eclectic your choice of tunes is compared to other Spotify users.

You get shown the most obscure artists and tracks that you listen to, and the plug-in can also dig down into stats on how happy or sad your music tastes are — as well as telling you how that's changing over time. There's also a recommendations section you can use to check out new artists you might not have already come across.

5. TuneEase

Sometimes the best extensions are the simplest ones, and that's the case with TuneEase. It'll run as a pop-up inside Google Chrome or indeed any browser based on Chromium (including Microsoft Edge and Opera), and gives you control of the Spotify desktop or web player through a little browser control deck.

It doesn't sound like much, but if you do a lot of your computing inside a browser, TuneEase will save you a significant amount of time switching between windows and tabs when you want to pause your music or skip to the next track. You can toggle shuffle settings, adjust the volume, and favorite songs as well.

Over the past couple of decades we’ve witnessed a whirlwind of cultural changes in the music industry, but also major changes in terms of how we find and listen to music. And there’s arguably one entity that has contributed to these shifts more than any other: Spotify — which was founded 20 years ago today (April 23). Feel old yet? I sure do.

For many music lovers out there, myself included, Spotify was their introduction to music streaming, and over the last 20 years it’s climbed to the top of the ladder, amassing over 750 million users and cementing its position as one of the best music streaming services — and in the eyes of many, the daddy of them all.

However, it’s likely that few of today’s users know much about the company’s early days. Someone who knows more than most is Sten Garmark, Spotify’s Global Head of Consumer Experience, who’s been integral to its evolution since 2011.

To celebrate this milestone, Garmark and I sat down for an in-depth discussion, reflecting on Spotify’s impact on music over the last 20 years, and on what it took to craft a strong global brand, and reminiscing about its most iconic product features.

Let’s go back to the beginning

As with so many of today’s tech behemoths, from Apple to Amazon, Spotify had to start small, and Garmark remembers the unpredictable nature of the industry at the time it was founded. “The music industry was in free-fall, and it was kind of a dire time,” he tells me. “So the challenge in the beginning was to turn this around.”

In an age where piracy was rife, this became the catalyst for founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon to kick-start what was then a small business. “Daniel and Martin's wild idea was trying to compete with piracy by forming partnerships with the industry, with labels and publishers, to create an entirely new business model for music to convince users that, actually, there was something better than free,” Garmark continues. “It ultimately also made people realize that music was worth paying for.”

These were the days before the modern smartphones really took off — the first iPhone was launched in January 2007 — which Garmark believes is the key to understanding Spotify’s early struggles in terms of scaling its business.

“This was a world of PCs and the iPod,” he says “The key innovation in the beginning was the ‘freemium’ model, and us believing that music was worth paying for, which most people didn't at the time. Freemium was the way to get there, to give away a really fantastic free product, and we did that on the PC.” However, when the smartphone revolution kicked off, this opened up a gap in the market, and Spotify immediately aimed for it.

Garmark has played a major role in developing Spotify’s mobile experience, and he says of those early years, before he came on board: “After the iPhone launched, the company said ‘oh, go mobile’, then you pay a subscription. So that was the business model, mobile just took off and PC sales weren’t the thing, so we had to totally reinvent ourselves to really reimagine how the whole business model worked.”

It all started with the playlist

One area where Spotify continues to have an advantage over its rivals, is its range of addictive product features, which in themselves have contributed to the cultural shifts in music consumption and discovery. Beloved tools like Spotify Wrapped and Discover Weekly have hooked subscribers and reeled them in, but for Garmark, there’s one feature that’s truly iconic; the playlist.

“It's such a basic feature that it almost feels like you just assume it's there,” he says. “If you go back to before Spotify, a playlist was something you had on your own MP3, but you couldn’t share it. I think (the playlist) is the core innovation, because we built so much on top of it.”

When you think about it, the basic foundation of the playlist has served as the basis for pretty much all of Spotify’s unique product features over the last 20 years. It paved the way for Collaborative playlists and Prompted playlists, and even for fun tools like Daylist, but Spotify also prides itself on its editorial playlists, curated collections of songs put together by Spotify employees who Garmark refers to as “the taste-makers”. But not all of Spotify’s ideas for new features have seen the light of day.

“There are so many”, says Garmark. “There are two ways to do product development. You look at what other people do and copy that. The other thing is you imagine things that you’d want in the world, but which don't exist. We are firmly the latter. It’s our job to make bets and come up with ideas and believe that, if we build this thing, people are going to love it. They might not always be asking for it, but once they've experienced it, they're never going to look back.”

Music discovery is forever

There’s no doubt that the playlist has been a powerful asset to Spotify’s user experience, but I’d argue that the algorithm has been a monumental development, shaping how we find new music, and also how it finds us. The issue of tastes becoming homogenized remains a concern for many and is still a hot topic — but Garmark believes otherwise.

“I think it's totally the other way around,” he tells me.“You have a new user come in on Spotify, and if they're a little bit older, they tend to just listen to the music that they fell in love with in their formative years. Then things get frozen in time, and that's what people tend to listen to for their whole life. But it also means that they fall out of love with music in a way, and discovery is so important to kind of keep falling in love with music over again.

“The algorithms that we have really enable that. What we see with our users coming in as we follow them on their journeys, is that the variation of what they listen to isn't wrong. When they come in they explore more, and they get to discover more, and it never ends. It's this wonderful machinery of just discovering more wonderful, talented artists that people just keep falling in love with.”

Despite Spotify’s vast list of achievements over the years, in terms of both innovating and growing its user base, it feels like, for Garmark, this is just the beginning, and my senses tell me that it has a lot more tricks up its sleeve for the next 20 years and beyond. And sure enough, Garmark leaves me with a tease: “At Spotify, we are full of ideas.”

• A Redditor built a tool to let you blind ear test FLAC and different MP3 quality levels
• Crucially, you use your own music, rather than samples you don't know well
• It's humbling a lot of audiophiles

In a bid to work out whether they had the hearing chops to tell the difference between FLAC and MP3, a Redditor recently built a tool to let you do a 'blind' listening test. It's not the first tool for this, but it addresses common pain points with these tools, to make it easier to directly compare and contrast songs — and most crucially, you use your own songs, so you're testing with tracks you know inside and out.

You upload a FLAC and the tool will create 16, 64, 128 and 320kbps MP3 copies. Then you can seamlessly switch between the lower bitrates and original, with randomized labels not telling you which version you're listening to. Changing won't jump you back to the start of the song, so you can hear excerpts in different streams.

The tool does the rest, and it's all processed in your browser, so your data won't be uploaded to the cloud or anyone ready to sell it. Just note, you'll actually need a lossless file to do the test, and for best results you'll want to be outputting to a good DAC – either in a hi-fi system or powered speakers, or one of the best portable DACs and some of the best wired headphones.

But why I am I talking? You can test out the tool yourself, by browsing to it right here. It's free to use, although there's a donation link for the creator if you find it useful.

Hearing a difference?

Most audiophiles will probably assert that they can always hear a difference between lossless and lossy, but this test might cause some to doubt their own ears. The owner himself said jokingly "turns out I'm deaf I guess", when describing how they can't hear the difference between 128kbps, 320kbps and FLAC.

The original poster's not alone, with other users confirming that they've struggled to hear a difference. One poster simply said "this is very humbling", communicating in four words what many other responders took paragraphs to say.

Another commenter described doing the test on $25,000 monitors, and not being able to tell 320kbps files from lossless.

As many point out, MP3 takes up less space than FLAC, making it ideal for space-conscious listeners.

This isn't exactly breaking news. Sound engineers have long rumbled about the differences between higher-quality compressed audio and full lossless being impossible to pick out. Famed producer Steven Wilson who recently admitted that he can't tell the difference between CDs and high-res audio any more (though I should point out that none of the options in the comparison tool are as high-quality as CD, which is around 1,400kbps).

There is plenty of defense for lossless, though, beyond audio fidelity. Posters point out that storing the best-quality FLAC files means you can easily convert to other file types without introducing artefacts, because while you can convert lossless to lossy MP3, you can't convert back and regain the information you lost.

So for audiophiles, having your music collection in FLAC is still a safer choice, even if it eats up that storage space. But this tool is a reminder that a good MP3 can still sound great, and even on par with lossless in real terms.

And at the very least, it asserts that 16kbps and 64kbps MP3s still sound garbage.

It’s quite a retrospective time here at TechRadar as this week marks the 20th anniversary of one of the best music streaming services, Spotify.

The music giant has pretty much tackled everything a streaming platform can do. It’s rolled out a slew of interactive features and doubled down on personalization, but music discovery is the one reason why I’ve stuck around.

From the flagship Discover Weekly to its regularly-updated editorial playlists, these are some of my favorite tools to use to keep up with the latest releases, build my personal playlists, and craft my growing taste profile. That said, there’s one feature which, despite not being designed exclusively for music discovery, has become one of my most-used Spotify tools for expanding my taste and list of favorite new artists.

Daylists are still super underrated

When Spotify unveiled Daylists in September 2023, I was instantly hooked. Using your listening patterns as a foundation, your Daylist updates multiple times daily to give you a fresh slew of songs from genres you listen to at certain parts during the day. Not only does it show the range of artists and niche genres you listen to between sunrise and sunset, it also weaves in artists you may not have come across before.

For me, it’s a perfect hybrid of the two things I want out of a streaming experience. The first is a circulation of artists that I already enjoy, but one that spotlights the lesser-known songs and one that isn’t mega repetitive. The second being a reliable resource for finding my next music obsession.

Don’t worry, I haven’t left the trusted Discover Weekly and Release Radar in the dark, as it’s still an integral part of my music discovery regime. But Daylist has something different to give, and it’s highly addictive.

From Geese to Wednesday, to Wet Leg and Balu Brigada

I think the reason why my Daylist works for me is because I listen to a lot of different genres daily, so I rarely find myself getting bored from what each updated playlist presents. I could start my day with 90s soft rock downtown vibes, and end it on a high with some new releases from the 2020s — and there’s plenty more in between.

Because of the range of my Daylists, my exposure to new artists has increased significantly, allowing me to build a solid taste profile and open me up to artists and genres I’d a) never have come across anywhere else, and b) wouldn’t have thought twice about listening to.

In the past year alternative pop, indie, rock, and electronic have swarmed my listening habits, and though BBC Radio 6 Music was the catalyst, listening to the artists I enjoy on the radio such as Viagra Boys and Geese on Spotify has done wonders for bringing new artists into my circle through Daylist.

The rock band Wednesday comes to mind who, though I’d heard of them through the grapevine, didn’t really stick out to me until they cropped up in my Daylist. Equally, indie pop band Water From Your Eyes came to me through one of my afternoon time Daylists, the musician This Is Lorelei founded following his solo debut — another artist that I’ve been enjoying thanks to Daylists.

Come to think of it, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of the new finds that can be attributed to discovering through Daylists. My love for singer and producer Caroline Polachek led me to finding English rock band Caroline (oddly not associated with Polachek) with whom she featured on the song ‘Tell me I never knew that’ from the band’s most recent record. Similarly, listening to Wet Leg’s album Moisturizer on repeat subsequently had me hooked on Balu Brigada, and the same goes for my Oklou listening sessions, which Spotify took as a sign to introduce me to the pop duo After.

For as long as Daylists remain in the Spotify ecosystem, I will always refer back to them as one of my main port of calls for uncovering new artists and niche genres alike. What Spotify feature is your go-to for music discovery? Cast your vote in the poll below!

• Deezer says the number of AI-generated songs on its site is still growing
• Now, 44% of all uploads have been detected as AI-generated
• As part of its anti-AI plan, Deezer will longer store hi-res versions of AI tracks

There’s one key feature that separates Deezer from the slew of the other best music streaming services out there, and that’s its transparency on AI-generated music.

The number of AI uploads is only getting bigger, says the French platform, having grown from just over 30% of all uploads in December 2025, to 44% now — and the company wants giants such as Spotify to join in and do something about it.

Deezer is doubling down on its combat against AI slop, and will no longer store hi-res versions of these tracks. In a statement, CEO Alexis Lanternier said, “Thanks to our technology and the proactive measures we put in place more than a year ago, we have shown that it’s possible to reduce AI-related fraud and payment dilution in streaming to a minimum”.

Lanternier then urged rival platforms to take similar measures, adding “Since January, we have made our detection technology available for licensing, and we’re looking forward to seeing industry peers of all kinds join us in the fight for fairness in the age of AI”.

Deezer rolled out its own AI-detection tool in January 2025, aiming to flag music that’s completely AI-generated and increase trust and transparency with subscribers. It even went the distance and made its flagship technology available to its rivals earlier this year.

Stop the slop (can't stop the slop)

To dig down into the numbers a little more, at the end of last year Deezer said that up to 34% of new music uploads were fully AI-generated, tagging over 13.4 million songs in 2025. Now, that number has shot up to a frightening 44%, which equates to roughly 75,000 a day, or more than 2 million AI-generated uploads each month.

Though that’s a rather alarming stat in itself, what’s arguably more worrying is that a large majority of users have stated they can’t distinguish AI-generated music from human-made music, which is a testament to how fast these technologies are evolving.

One of the driving factors behind the rise of AI-generated uploads is that it's an easy way to mimic other artists and generate profit through fraudulent streams. With the rising number of AI songs in Deezer, the streaming service has also cracked down on demonetization, claiming that up to 85% of streams were detected as fraudulent when it made its AI-detection tools public. We reached out to Deezer who says this percentage is still the same today.

Deezer's AI tagging system is just the beginning of a wider combat against the scourge of AI. While Spotify hasn't vocally clamped down on AI-detection in the way that Deezer or say, Bandcamp has (which lead to a growing migration from the big green streaming machine to hi-res rival Qobuz at the end of last year), Spotify has recently rolled out a new system that allows artists to review and approve what music appears on their profile.

Apple Music is another rival that could be joining the battle against AI-generated music; the company is tipped to roll out Transparency Tags to help identify AI-generated and AI-assisted music — but again, the responsibility lies with labels and distributors to state the use of AI in what you're hearing.

• Spotify is rolling out video controls to users globally
• It will roll out to Family Plan managers first before expanding to other tiers this month
• It allows users to maintain an audio-first experience, and users are already enjoying it

Do Spotify’s visual elements get in the way of your music listening experience? Thankfully, the company is launching new video controls, and users already like what they see.

The music streaming giant announced on its newsroom yesterday (April 9) that it’s started its global video controls rollout, allowing you to tailor your in-app experience so that it remains an audio-first one. Spotify’s video controls will first become available to Family Plan managers who can now enable and disable video content for all members. Previously, account managers could only do this for Family Plan-managed accounts for users under 13 years old.

Spotify also revealed that Premium and Basic subscribers across Individual, Duo, Family, or Student plans, as well as free users, will have control over what video content appears in their Spotify account, which will be rolling out globally this month. I’m signed up to the Premium Individual plan, and the video controls aren’t there for me yet, so there’s still some time before the wider rollout. That said, if you’re on the Family Plan and want to amend your video settings, it’s very easy to do.

Just head to Settings in the Spotify app on mobile, desktop, web, or TV and find ‘Content and display’. From there, you’ll see toggles allowing you to turn off video components, including music videos and Canvas. There’s also an ‘All other videos’ option, which includes video podcasts, vertically scrolling videos, and videos from creators and authors.

Spotify’s visual elements can be quite tedious, especially if you want to switch from audio streaming to music video viewing, then the transitions between the two can be quite janky — at least that’s how I find it. So having the freedom to disable certain types of video content is something I’m going to welcome with open arms, and I’m not the only music fanatic who thinks this.

Putting audio-first experience at the forefront

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Spotify’s music video ecosystem is nothing compared to what YouTube has to offer, which runs smoother, playlist Mixes are better, and when you stream with a YouTube Premium subscription, it’s like MTV never left. Besides, YouTube is my go-to platform for music video content simply because it’s been part of my life much longer than Spotify has.

Although the new Spotify video controls are available to Family Plan managers for the time being, this upgrade has caught the attention of other Premium subscribers for all the right reasons, who have shared their excitement for the wider rollout on Reddit: "This is great," one user shared.

In the same comment, the user also draws on something I never thought of until now. When it comes to music video viewing in the Spotify app, you have to tap the 'Switch to video' button each time a new song plays because it reverts to audio. At the moment, there's no option to enable autoplay for music videos, which, in retrospect, would be a valuable addition to Spotify's video controls.

• NASA has revealed its playlist of wake-up call songs for the Artemis II crew
• It includes Chappell Roan's Pink Pony Club and a cover of Passion Pit's Sleepyhead
• This tradition dates back to the days of the Apollo missions

Aside from being a roaring success mid-mission, NASA’s Artemis II venture is one of the most important historical events of our time, but despite travelling through deep space its astronauts haven’t missed out on the simple things we love about life on Earth.

From its food menu of much-loved delicacies, to using the iPhone 17 Pro Max to snap pictures of our planet from afar, these things make life on the Orion spacecraft much more manageable — and the same goes for its choice of music. You heard that right. In space, pop music still exists.

Manned by the Artemis II control team based in Houston, Texas, NASA is playing a series of songs to the Orion spacecraft as wake-up calls for astronauts Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen. It’s a handy way to ensure the crew is kept on a schedule that aligns with the rest of the team down on Earth.

In between all the seriousness of the Artemis II venture, this is one of the light-hearted elements of the space mission that people have been following online. NASA unveils each song with every wake-up call, so the next one can remain a surprise, but there’s already been a slew of bangers NASA has emitted to the crew since they launched into space on April 1.

Kicking off the series of wake-up calls was Sleepyhead by Young and Sick (a cover of Passion Pit’s original version) — whose title is fitting to how the crew must’ve been feeling at the time.

The second wake-up call was soundtracked by John Legend and Andre 3000’s Greenlight, followed by In a Daydream by Freddy Jones Band and viral pop banger Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan, which was cut only a minute into the song, garnering a humorous response from Wiseman: “We were eagerly awaiting the chorus,” he said to the control team.

CeeLo Green’s Working Class Heroes (Work), Mandisa and ToyMac’s Good Morning, and Glass Animals’ Tokyo Drifting finish the playlist. NASA has more tunes on the way as the Artemis II crew makes its way back to Earth, but we won’t know what they’ll be until NASA updates its official Spotify playlist, which you can stream right now.

It may be a surprise to you, but this isn't unique to the Artemis II mission. NASA's tradition of sending wake-up calls dates back all the way to the Apollo days, most notably when NASA used Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett to wake up the crew, and not forgetting when the theme for 2001: A Space Odyssey was used during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

Which tracks would you want to hear if you were confined in the Orion spacecraft?

• Spotify has rolled out podcast integration within Prompted Playlists
• You can generate a playlist of podcast episodes based on your own prompts
• It's a fresh way to discover new podcasts, just as you can with music tracks

I’ve never been a huge Spotify podcast listener, mainly because the discovery tools aren’t as omnipresent as they are with music, and it’s been hard to find new shows that I actually stick with — but Spotify’s new upgrade could be the solution to this long-term struggle.

Building on its Prompted Playlist feature, which allows you to control your algorithm by using specific prompts to create music playlists, Spotify is now including podcasts in the mix. The tool is rolling out in English to Premium subscribers in a number of regions including the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden.

Now, as well as using prompts to curate playlists of songs based on mood, vibe, or listening history, you can use prompts to generate a collection of podcast episodes to find your next big obsession or dive even further into specific topics. It gives you another way to explore Spotify’s wide array of podcasts, instead of endlessly scrolling through its podcast categories to find new shows — which has never worked out for me personally.

In its announcement, Spotify’s Global Head of Podcast Editorial Lizzy Hale shared that “Podcast fans are always looking for their next great listen”, adding that “Prompted Playlist makes discovery feel effortless and personal. For creators, it unlocks powerful new opportunities for discovery, bringing both back catalog and new episodes to audiences who are actively signaling what they want to hear”.

One giant leap for podcast discovery

Prompted Playlist’s expansion to podcasts works just the same as it does for music.

You build one by tapping the 'Create' button in the bottom right (or by tapping the ‘+’ sign if you’ve disabled the Create button), then entering a prompt as long or short as you want — and you can be specific with your descriptions. You can edit these cues at any time, or start a new prompt from scratch.

Additionally, you can amend your playlist so that it updates every so often, just as you can with a standard Prompted Playlist concerning songs. That way, it gives you a continuum of fresh podcast recommendations, keeping you very much in the know.

As I’ve said, despite being one of the best music streaming services, Spotify's discovery tools (such as Daylists, New Music Friday playlists, and of course Discover Weekly) have only ever helped users find music, until now. I’ve pretty much mastered all the ways to find new tracks that resonate with me on Spotify, but I’ve never been able to stick to a new podcast show — let alone find a fresh one that catches my attention and makes me download more episodes.

The expansion of Prompted Playlists into the podcast ecosystem is the first step in Spotify’s journey to making podcast discovery a smoother experience for subscribers. Because it allows for specific prompts, it also introduces a new way for users to find episodes on culturally-relevant topics that interest them the most, even if they’re hyper-niche.

Speaking of relevant topics, I wanted to see what Spotify's podcasts had to say about the controversial Kanye West (who now prefers the name 'Ye') Wireless Festival booking — and there was a lot to digest. Though the playlist took some time to generate (it often does with Prompted Playlists), what it curated was a solid collection of podcast episodes about the topic I'd entered as a prompt, spanning different types of shows from factual news to more laid-back, conversational and panel-based podcasts.

My trial run revealed that Prompted Playlists' upgrade opens a door to a whole new realm of podcast discovery, but can also serve as an easy way to access and search for how creators and other voices are contributing to culture discourse on a global scale.

I predict a huge hit for those who use podcasts to dive deeper into trending news stories and niche topics, instead of reading an abundance of news articles to get their fix. I’m also excited to explore the tool even more to see what new podcasts will come my way. Maybe 2026 is the year I’ll finally become the podcast enthusiast I’ve always dreamt of being.

With Apple celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, I've heard talk in music circles about what the brand's biggest contribution to audio has been over the past half a century.

Is it the AirPods, which popularized wireless earbuds, or the classic EarPods which are still synonymous with the cheap earbuds you got in your phone's box? Maybe it's the Mac and it's Logic Pro and GarageBand apps, which has changed the tide for music pros, or conversely its killing of the smartphone headphone jack which pushed every other brand to follow suit?

That's not to mention El Classico: the iPod, which I wrote about last year when I dusted mine off and gave it a spin. But to me there's one other Apple product which comes to mind when we're talking about the company's golden anniversary — and it's something I was reminded of when I recently sold by CD collection.

It's something many have forgotten about or talk about in nostalgic tones, which is alarming to someone like me who still uses it. But it's dictated my views on tech and media to this day, and of course I'm talking about iTunes.

iTunes, youTunes, we all Tunes...

iTunes, for all you Gen Z-ers who haven't heard of it, is a media player and library created by Apple — yes, 'is', the company still lets you download and use iTunes. It runs on Macs and Windows: no closed ecosystem here.

Released in January 2001 (five days after Runescape, and six days before Wikipedia, in a period of early internet history which was evidently formative for a young me), it let you buy music from its store or rip them from CDs.

You could then listen to them straight from the player or, if you owned an iPod, sync them so your player had your library. It also offered podcasts, movies, books and, while iOS was in its formative years, apps.

No longer is iTunes the default Apple media app, with the brand now stuffing its iPods and iPhones with loads of different platforms instead of one simple one. And given that most media consumption is now streamed, and downloaded straight to our personal device, there's no arguing that iTunes is mostly redundant. But what it taught me about media is still an important to my views.

Burn baby burn, CD inferno

I grew up when convenient music streaming was still just a twinkle in Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's eye; if you wanted to hear something and didn't want whatever junk was on the radio, you could either put on a YouTube music video (and I did create my fair share of playlists on there), or buy the CD.

I inherited an iPod Classic from my mum, and didn't want to pay Apple's high fees on digital albums, so buying CDs was how I acquired all my music.

A chain of British media stores called HMV was my go-to retailer, offering two-for-£5 deals on many discs. I spent many an hour trawling through its collections, trying to find CDs by my favorite artists which came under this deal. Charity shops, the British version of a thrift store whose proceeds go to charity, were also great for £1 discs.

Over my teenhood I collected hundreds of CDs, to the tune of about 5,000 tracks; not a massive collection by audiophiles' standards, but a lot for a teen who'd only learnt to count that high recently.

I'd take these discs home, burn the disc to my computer using iTunes, and sync my iPod to have them on my handheld device.

I still remember the ritual well: monitoring the burn speeds to see how fast it'd go, manually adding the album artwork since iTunes didn't do it automatically, and correcting any of the many metadata problems (one of many: if two artists contributed on a track, iTunes would generally recognize the hyphenate as its own artist, rather than adding the track to either one of the artist's own menus).

Slowly over many years, I amassed this digital library of albums, which I could listen to on my iPod or computer at my leisure, and this might seem a lot like music streaming but with extra steps. However, crucially, I still held onto the physical discs, and that's what makes all the difference.

Let's Get Physical (media)

Most people I know consume their media digitally. You'll stream music from Spotify, watch your movies on Netflix, buy your video games straight from Steam or the PlayStation Store.

Physical discs have largely been offered up on the altar of convenience, except among diehard fans of the format. It seems especially true of younger people who've grown up with the convenience of streaming and, most crucially, can't afford to buy physical media.

But what have we lost? In 2026, digital is still lower-quality than physical, eradicates the ritual and artistry of putting on a vinyl or enjoying a game's box art, and usage of it puts you at the mercy of the ever-changing libraries of profit-focused companies.

You could probably guess from my previous discussion of CDs, that I'm a physical media boy. While the CDs recently had to go due to a house move, I still have quite a few physical PS4 games, a large DVD collection (and a single Blu Ray) and many, many books.

There's something about owning a shelf of films you can browse through, enjoying the tactile sensation of putting a disc in a drive, and actually owning the products I pay money for. I still long for the days of yore, when DVDs had plenty of special features and games had in-box maps.

Then there's the entire argument about media preservation. Some people treat movies that aren't on Netflix or Disney Plus as effectively nonexistent; I've had friends that have seriously suggested pirating movies that they want to watch, which aren't on Netflix. Yes, we had words after that. Suffice to say, digital media is a walled garden dictated by companies, and we can't trust companies with media preservation.

(And yes, I know that physical media isn't actually very good for media preservation; degradation means a DVD or CD won't last forever. But given how many films simply aren't available on any streaming service at all, it's better than nothing).

I know I'm not alone in this passion. I'm impressed by the frequent Blu Ray hauls TechRadar's resident disc reviewer covers, and there are many people who swear off digital media entirely. But I'm a traitor to this cause too.

The iTunes duology

I'll admit, I stream content too: I use Spotify and Prime Video and the Epic Games Store. I still see some benefits of digital, even if I still want a library of physical ownership too. A weird combo? Not quite, and I think iTunes is to blame.

As you'll remember, iTunes left me with both a physical and digital library: I could enjoy the convenience of my songs on my computer or iPod, but also had the discs themselves. If any accounts were broken or hacked, or my technology stopped working, I still owned the physical media and could simply use it again.

The same goes the other way: when I returned to my old CD collection a few months ago, in order to sell it, many of them just didn't work. Thankfully, I had the digital copies still!

Plus, I could pop the CDs into a player and listen to them out loud, without having to pair via Bluetooth or be connected to the internet and lose connection when the speakers randomly decide to connect to another phone.

iTunes let me enjoy the best of both worlds, and so foster a nuanced view of the physical / digital media dichotomy. I still act on this to inform my buying decisions: I'll buy DVDs or Blu Rays of films I really like, so I have them to hand whenever I want and can display them on my shelf, but don't spend my own money on straight-to-streaming slop which isn't worth preserving.

I don't think this is intentionally what Apple was doing with iTunes; it just wanted a simple media library which would push users into buying straight from the storefront. But during my formative years, it helped me see that physical and digital media wasn't a binary choice: you could have both, and that's been an important lesson I've kept with me ever since.

Sometimes listening to music just isn’t enough, and part of the streaming experience for a lot of music enthusiasts is digging beneath the surface of the songs and albums they love the most, which is why Spotify’s SongDNA is one of my favorite new features to come from the service.

It’s not the first music streamer to do this, however. Tidal Credits has been around since 2019, but SongDNA adds a layer of depth to Spotify’s playback tools, and after spending ample time testing the waters, I’ve decided that I simply can’t get enough. Here’s how my first hands-on went down.

An endless sonic encyclopaedia

That’s what SongDNA is in a nutshell. Ever since it was leaked back in October, I’ve been waiting patiently for SongDNA to drop, and when more users started seeing it in beta last month, I knew it was near. It basically runs like a mindmap, spotlighting every collaborator behind a song from composers to lyricists, producers to sound engineers, and it’s designed for ultimate music fans who want to get to know their favorite songs on a deeper level.

First off, SongDNA is very easy to find and use. You just tap any song you want to listen to, and scroll down in the playback page to find SongDNA under Lyrics. You don’t need to be listening to the song to explore SongDNA either, and you can just tap the three-dot icon on any song and explore it that way, though I found the experience to be smoother when you use it while listening to the song you’re researching.

But where SongDNA shines is how it connects artists and producers through an intertwining web of information, and just when I thought I knew everything about my favorite songs, SongDNA put me in my place.

While listening to Jessie Ware’s song Ride, one of my favorite new releases, not only did I discover more about its producer, James Ford, but SongDNA connected Jessie Ware to artists including Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine, and Depeche Mode just through this one producer. Not only that, it showed me Björk served as a songwriter on one of Madonna’s biggest hits back in the ‘90s.

I often find myself falling into Wikipedia black holes, accumulating knowledge on some of the most niche and unhinged topics, so SongDNA is perfect for this. But aside from its list of collaborators, it tells you what samples and interpolations are being used. This is where it really caught my attention.

Peeling back the layers

Sampling and interpolating other songs is a very common way of adding depth to a song, but for me, it offers a clear view of an artist’s creative mindset. It’s a great feeling to recognize a sample right off the bat, but I didn’t know how many songs I listen to have samples woven in.

When you press the play icon on a song from the samples and interpolations list, it takes you to the exact timestamp of the song to show you exactly what instrument, hook, riff, or melody is being used. The only setback with this, however, is that it doesn’t give you the option of listening to the sample as a snippet. Instead, it overrides what you’re currently listening to in the playback bar — but this is easy to get past.

Going back to the Jessie Ware example, the opening of her song Ride interpolates the theme from the movie The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which I was totally oblivious to, and the same goes for SZA sampling Björk's vocals from Hidden Place on the song Forgiveless.

I wanted to explore this even further, and there was one album in particular I knew would be rich with samples and interpolations: Beyoncé's Lemonade. Although I've listened to it religiously over the past 10 years, it turns out I didn't know as much about its production as I thought.

The song Sorry, an upbeat pop-RnB anthem with trap elements, interpolates the riff of one of the most famous pieces of classical music, Swan Lake, but because of how it's re-shaped and crafted to fit the song, you'd never recognize it. I was truly shocked, but it didn't end there.

Her song Hold Up, another favorite of mine, is also packed with samples. While most of them are easy to spot (mainly the vocal sample of Soulja Boy's Turn My Swag On), there's one that's been lurking in the background I didn't pick up on until now — she samples her own song Countdown. We love a self-referential queen.

It's safe to say that my experience using SongDNA for the first time was a hit, and I'm ready to welcome it into my music streaming regimen with open arms. Apparently, you can teach an old dog new tricks after all.