The Spotify Feature I Didn’t Know I Needed

Lately, there’s a bandwagon of articles about why people are quitting Spotify, chalking it up to how the app is making discovery harder, how it keeps recommending the same popular songs, how it’s too hard to find “your” music from the main landing pages. A lot of that criticism is well founded. If I leave the app alone after playing a song, it will launch into it’s own assortment of what it thinks I want to hear, which ends up being a looping regurgitation of a handful of the most popular songs I’ve listened to in the last few weeks. This is the case if you’ve played through an album, or just picked a single song… the app will regress into this kind of shitty FM radio mode, playing the same few things over and over.

It seems the algorithmically generated song selections when you let the app go on autopilot are a byproduct of the playlists promoted on the home screen under the “Made for You” banner, like the “daylist” or “chill mix” or “release radar.” What gets served tends to be limited, often repeating songs across multiple “unique” lists, and they seem biased to what’s currently popular across the platform (or at least people on the platform with my taste profile.)

I’ve been using Spotify since… 2010? Something like that? I remember when I initially made the switch from MOG, which I had been using for a year or two, and thinking what a pain in the ass it would be to find all my favorite albums and “save” them or “bookmark” them or whatever it was.

Here I am over a decade later, and boy have I saved some albums. One of the features of early-Spotify that I used the most was the ‘Star,’ which you could tag on any song, that would be then auto-added to a ‘Starred’ playlist. Alongside ‘Starring,’ adding albums to my “Library” has been my primary way of interacting with Spotify and organizing what I listen to.

Well, without really publicizing it (how would they have anyway? it’s impossible to get anyone’s attention anymore) Spotify rolled out a feature where all of your “Saved Albums” are added to your “Liked Songs,” which are consolidated into one playlist, and when that playlist is opened, a series of buttons appears, allowing it to be filtered by genre. For someone like me who has spent a million years “saving” albums that I love, this is a godsend.

When I want to listen passively but don’t want the app to give me what sounds like low-key payola, I can easily launch my “Liked Songs” playlist, filtered to whatever I’m in the mood for, and let it roll, playing only the stuff I’ve actively curated and not catching a repeat play for hours and hours.

Thanks, Spotify!