Spotify made a few changes to its Premium service in its latest app update, and the coolest new feature is an endless personalized playlist matching your tastes. The music streaming service's Endless Artist Radio lets you search for a playlist based on your favorite musician or song and find a matching endless stream -- a feature associated with rival streaming service Pandora.
As streaming becomes the main way people listen to music, companies like Spotify, Apple Music , Pandora and others are competing to figure out ways to curate their gigantic song libraries to suit individual tastes. That has competitors freely cribbing from each other. Pandora, for example, has introduced a feature that mimics Spotify's Release Radar, and basically all streaming music services are aping Spotify's Discover Weekly. Spotify's Endless Artist Radio is an example of the emulation going the other way.
Endless Artist Radio lists are "updated regularly to keep things fresh" and they're downloadable to play offline, the company wrote in a blog post.
The Spotify update, which starts rolling out to Premium subscribers on iOS and Android globally on Thursday, also simplifies navigation by cutting down the number of tabs at the bottom of the app from five to three (leaving just Home, Search and Your Library). The redesigned search is the "new one-stop destination for artists, albums, podcasts," Spotify said, with listeners' favorite genres appearing at the top of the screen.
On Wednesday, Spotify revealed its new app for Wear OS smartwatches and got into a little trouble over a scary YouTube ad. The service also turned 10 last week and revealed that we were all really into The Killers' Human back in 2008.
First published Oct. 18, 4:01 a.m. PT.
Updates, 7:15 and 7:51 a.m.: Clarifies Endless Artist Radio and adds context.