This Is How You Use Spotify to Find Music from All Over the World

By Nia Leah  •  20 Jun 2017 in Music

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Fun fact: The Founder of the Swedish-based music streaming service Spotify was once the CEO of μTorrent for a short time. That aside, we have to give a huge shout out to music streaming services like these – and Founders like Daniel Ek – for easier access to legitimate album and song releases. Spotify is made unique thanks to its implementation of a breezy and seamless music experience. Second to it, is the service’s convenient music exploration function that allows you to find musicians and songs you’d never think you’d ever hear. Other than allowing independent musicians to have a discography on their service, Spotify has given voice to artistes from all walks of life via curated playlists that are (actually) properly crafted. With a little help from the Internet and friends, we found a way to cut short the browsing process so you’d be a Spotify pro in no time.

Listen to stuff you’re most likely to enjoy from the Spotify Discover Weekly playlist

How to: Click homepage aka ‘Browse’, Discover Weekly usually appears under the category ‘Overview’ or scroll down on and look for ‘Discover’, where the playlist sits in.

This is undeniably a game-changer, and we’ve got data to boot the credibility of it. According to Spotify, Discover Weekly playlists has reached one billion streamed tracks in just 10 weeks since it was introduced and 71% of Discover Weekly listeners save at least one song to their own playlists. The company even calls it somewhat of a cure for Monday Blues, delivered in the form of a weekly made mixtape that auto-refreshes every Monday.

Matthew Ogle – the man behind Discover weekly – explained how it works to a source, “There’s two parts to it. First, we look at all the music you’ve been playing on Spotify but we give more emphasis to the stuff you’ve been jamming on recently. Something that you played yesterday is probably more interesting to you than something you played six months ago. But the real core of it is looking at the relationships between songs based on what other users are play-listing around the songs that you’ve been listening to and essentially finding the missing ones – the ones you haven’t heard yet, or maybe haven’t heard much.”

You can never go wrong with what’s hot on the charts 

How to: On your homepage aka ‘Browse’, it is right beside ‘Overview’, under the ‘Charts’ category.

The chart playlist titles are pretty self-explanatory, so browse accordingly. Featured charts normally give you a taste of what’s trending within the country, while also incorporating some of the more popular tracks from the U.S. charts. For more diversity than what’s on the radio and Billboard charts, click into ‘Top 50 By Country’ or ‘Viral 50 By Country’ to view a list of countries from Argentina to Uruguay. For a taste of something more universal, Top 50s are your best bet while Viral 50s tend to be more localised. It’s unlikely that you’d like to listen to songs in a foreign language but fans of K-Pop, J-Pop and artistes from the European region would benefit from this feature. I’ve stumbled upon Little Dragon through The Sweden Top 50 chart and never looked back.

Spotify can help you track that song you Shazam-ed not too long ago 

 

How to: On your Shazam homepage, go to ‘My Shazam’ and click into any song to see the Spotify logo.

Make sure to connect your Spotify to your Shazam account to ease the process. Once you’re connected, it’ll be effortless to add a new audio gem into a Spotify playlist or, simply save a song by clicking on the ‘+’ button beside the title of every track. This Shazam infused feature is currently enhanced with the ‘My Shazam Tracks’ that lets you listen to every song you’ve ever Shazam-ed, all compiled into an accessible playlist under your account.

Follow the trail of an artiste you like 

How to: Visit an artiste’s page, and work your way around what’s on the page.

This popular step is called ‘following the trail’ by another fellow writer whom I’ve learned this tip from. Careful though, you’re gonna spend more time on this than you think you would because it can get addictive. Everything you need is displayed on the artiste page itself, but if you’re ever stuck on where to begin, the top five songs in the ‘popular’ playlist or the latest release like the one here by RL Grime is a good start. There is of course, the option of diving deeper in to the artiste’s discography by listening to their whole album, but I enjoy going straight into ‘Related Artists’ to see similar work or the other artistes this particular artiste has collaborated with.

Lacking inspiration in the audio department? JUICE got your back with our music recommendations here. Thank us later.