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How do I unlock Spotify’s experimental features?

Spotify's experimental features
Experimental music: try out forthcoming features first

Spotify is a pretty conservative service – it doesn’t tend to blat users with new features every week. It lets the music do the talking. However, if you’re yearning for a bit more from your music service, you might like to try Spotify’s experimental features. 

These are ideas that Spotify is considering adding to the service, but wants to test on a few guinea pigs first. At the time of writing, there were only a couple of these, but if you want to see what the future of Spotify holds, here’s how to get a glimpse.

How to turn on Spotify’s experimental features

We’ve only found these in the desktop version of Spotify, but if you’ve found them on mobile, poke us with instructions in the comments at the foot of this article, and we’ll add them in and take all the credit. 

On the desktop app, click on the arrow next to your profile name at the top of the screen and select Settings.

Scroll down until you see the option to enable experimental features. Once you’ve ticked that, you can find experimental features as an option under the menu that appears when you click the down arrow next to your profile name.

If you can’t see experimental features as an option then I have bad news: Spotify isn’t offering it to all users. Which perhaps makes sense for experimental features, but is frustrating for those who want to give it a try but can’t.

What can you do with experimental features

Obviously, these will change over time and so what you see below may not be available by the time you read this. 

Given that Spotify is almost telepathic at anticipating what kind of music I like, the first experimental feature surprises me a little – it suggests Spotify isn’t as confident in its ability to discern your music tastes as it should be.

Called Affinity Survey, and open to all users by using this link, the feature invites you to click a link and rate a selection of ten songs that you’ve heard recently on the service so that Spotify can be better tuned to your tastes.

Spotify's experimental features

The rating system is pretty crude – you get to choose ‘Never’, ‘Meh’ or ‘Love’ and you can listen to a preview of the song if you can’t recall it from the track name. 

The second experimental feature is one for classical buffs. It adds a section called Works to the profile pages of well-known composers, such as Bach, Puccini, Stravinsky and many others. 

This groups together recordings of their most famous works: Bach’s suite for solo cello no.2 in D minor, for instance, or Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.

It gives you a brief written synopsis of the piece and then provides links to all the recordings containing that work, letting you take your pick from Yo Yo Ma or an array of other cellists for the Bach, for example. 

Spotify's experimental features

We’ll keep an eye out for any interesting additions to experimental features. 

Now read this: How do I recover deleted Spotify playlists?

About the author

Barry Collins

Barry has scribbled about tech for almost 20 years for The Sunday Times, PC Pro, WebUser, Which? and many others. He was once Deputy Editor of Mail Online and remains in therapy to this day. Email Barry at barry@bigtechquestion.com.

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