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5 Spotify settings you'll wish you changed sooner
Improve your audio quality, keep kids music out of your algorithm and more.
Spotify's app feels designed to get you listening to something as quickly as possible. From the moment you launch it, you're greeted with a flood of suggested playlists and podcasts that head you off at the pass before you can start crate digging. It's undoubtedly a well-tested system that many users enjoy, but it does mean that fewer will venture into the deeper pockets of the app, such as the settings menu. And that's a shame, because leaving Spotify's settings in their default state can degrade your music-streaming experience.
We rounded up five of the most impactful settings to your Spotify experience. These options will improve the sound quality you're getting from Spotify, help you to hear more of the music you prefer and prevent people from seeing your guilty pleasures. Any one of them will provide immediate benefits for your listening experience.
Most of the settings discussed here are available for users who are subscribed to Spotify Premium, and will not be on offer for free users. You can make most of these changes in the main settings menu of the Spotify app, accessible on mobile by tapping your profile picture in the upper left corner of the app, then tapping Settings and privacy, or on desktop by using the Ctrl + P shortcut (Cmd + comma on Mac). Some settings can only be changed in the mobile app. The mobile settings menu is divided into further submenus as of this writing, whereas the desktop app throws all the controls onto an interminably long, scrollable list.
It can be quite jarring to go from a quiet ballad to a high-powered rock anthem when you're not expecting it. The music files themselves can be vastly different volumes, and the problem is even worse when listening to music from different eras. Modern music has grown increasingly loud as digital workflows made it possible for engineers to apply so-called "brick wall" techniques to sound louder than their competitors. The result is that listening to equally generational talents back to back, such as The Beatles and T-Pain, can give a listener sonic whiplash as the latter's autotune croon slams into the eardrums. For that reason, Spotify includes a loudness normalization setting that ensures all the music you play sounds like it's at the same volume.
Volume normalization sounds like a good thing, but it has a major drawback. Whether you're making quiet songs louder or loud songs quieter, one of the two is getting compressed in the process, which means it's also being subjected to a reduction in quality. You might be the sort of person who prefers the convenience of normalization and is willing to accept a small loss in audio quality in exchange for it, and that's entirely fine. Go ahead and enable it. But if you're the type of person who felt their heart skip a beat upon hearing you might not be getting every drop of sonic perfection from your favorite songs, you should disable volume normalization.
To toggle volume normalization on or off, head into Spotify's settings and find the volume normalization toggle in the Playback section under Volume controls. If you enable volume normalization, you can choose between three different modes. Quiet will bring more loud songs down in volume, loud will raise quieter songs in volume, and normal does a balance of the two. Spotify warns that the Loud setting may diminish audio quality. That's not the whole story, since all volume normalization does so to a degree, though it is the case that Loud will introduce the most compression.
In the early days of the iPod's success, Apple encountered a bizarre user complaint. As recounted in WIRED editor Steven Levy's book The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness, users were increasingly convinced that the iPod's shuffle feature was broken. Their rationale seemed solid — out of hundreds or thousands of songs in their libraries, songs from the same artist or album