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Spotify

Music streaming is nothing new. Countless companies have had their crack at it. Few are as successful as this freemium service from Sweden that is Spotify.

With 232 million monthly active users including 108 million paying subscribers as of July 2019, Spotify has a user base way larger than its major competitors – Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Prime Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and the likes.

One of the reasons of Spotify’s success is they are good at serving up music you like. Their website’s tagline says “Music for everyone” and their mobile app tagline says “Discover new music”. I’ll just say those are not false advertising.

Download the Spotify app, give it the names of a few artists of your choice as you start and then heart songs as you go, you’ll have a constant flow of pleasant surprises delivered right into your ears.

Sounds easy and painless, right? Actually, no.

Even that is too much for a lot of people, myself included.

After all, we just want to stream our music and we don’t want to begin by what feels like answering a million questions, and then have to lift our fingers to tell the app we like a song. Our phones should know our music preferences, period. How else could they take over the world and become the overlord they were always destined to be? Oh, they’ll use us for batteries too.

Spotify Stations

If you want to stream music but feel too cool to curate your own playlists, you should try Spotify Stations. The Stations page on Spotify’s website says “Music made simple” and that is exactly true.

The Stations app was launched in 2018, a decade after the world was first blessed with Spotify.

Stations did not make a big splash at its release.

However, people everywhere had the same reaction upon using the app – you did not have to wait long before the music started playing.

Download the app, log in using your Facebook or Spotify account, or create a new account and within seconds you’ll hear your music going.

You do have some of the usual playback controls like play/pause and skip. A free account has ads and allows six skips in one hour which is pretty good.

If you like, you could also thumb up or down a song and with that Stations learns your music preference. You don’t really have to interact with the app too much though. With what they know about the music preferences of hundreds of millions of people and their massive library of 35 to 40+ million tracks, chances are the tunes Spotify serves up will be to your liking.

Spotify Stations also works with CarPlay in case you were wondering. Your commute will be less intolerable. I even find myself singing along when I don’t have a passenger with me.

Now here’s the question, do you think the Spotify Stations app is sent back in time by the evil Skynet to ease us into letting machines control our lives and ultimately take over? Let us know in the comments.