Soon You'll Be Able to Preview Entire Spotify Playlists on Your Phone With a Few Quick Taps
Drag your finger across the album art of a playlist, and you’ll hear a clip played from the middle of each song you touch. (Alyssa Bereznak/Yahoo Tech)
Here’s an on-the-go listening solution designed for the low attention span of millennials.
Music streaming service Spotify announced a new feature on Thursday morning that allows anyone using the mobile app to quickly preview the songs in a playlist or album.
Designed during one of the company’s “hack weeks,” the music discovery tool works like a heat map to help you understand the general feel and composition of a collection of music. So, imagine this scenario: You’re listening to Beyoncé, but you’re also searching for something more low-key to queue up next in the Browse section. You see a playlist entitled “Deep Focus.” The album art makes you think these might be good work jams. But maybe you want to make sure it won’t get too zen.
You tap on the playlist and see a square grid of songs, each represented by its album art. Keeping your thumb down, you can touch each one to hear a quick snippet of the track. It starts 30 seconds into the song and will play for as long you keep your finger down on that particular square. The moment you lift your finger from the grid, it goes right back to playing Beyoncé.
Similarly, you can use Touch Preview to explore tracks in a new album in order to see which are the catchy singles and which might be worth skipping. Artists might balk at the idea of pitting an album’s songs against one another, but it’s exactly the kind of armchair browsing millions of Americans engage in when they’re channel-surfing. And when I tried the feature on Wednesday at Spotify’s New York office, I knew immediately that it would fit perfectly into the frantic multitasking I regularly do on my phone.
When you finally land upon a song you like in a specific album, you can tap it to see the track list, then — in a very Tinderlike fashion — swipe left or right on the track. Swiping right will place the song directly in your queue to be played next, while swiping left will save the song to the Your Music list.
Spotify is rolling out the feature in an update next week. You don’t need to be a Premium member to use it — all you need is an Internet or data connection.
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