Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Audio / Video
  3. News

This new Spotify feature is like a Magic 8 Ball for music

Derek Malcolm
By
An image of a hand on a smartphone showing Spotify's Song Psychic feature.
Spotify

Music streaming behemoth Spotify is leaning hard into this year’s leap day, using the once-every-four-years phenomenon as a springboard for its new Song Psychic feature that, like a Magic 8 Ball, serves up a song suggestion for all of your burning (or not-so-burning) questions.

Spotify is excellent at regularly adding fun features to its music streaming interfaces, such as its hugely popular year-end review Spotify Wrapped, collaborative playlists, and algorithm-based DJ. Today the company is at it again with Song Psychic that it’s calling “a new, mystical music experience.” They even enlisted the help of American rapper Baby Tate to help with the launch with this TikTok video.

Recommended Videos

Spotify users can go to spotify.com/songpsychic on their mobile devices (heading there on a computer browser serves up a QR code for scanning and prompts you to use your mobile phone), or you can search for Song Psychic in the Spotify app. Either way, the psychedelic Song Psychic experience launches in the Spotify app. There, you’re served up nine topics for your questions, including Love, Career, Life’s Greatest Mysteries, My Future, and my favorite, Lunch.

Screengrabs from Spotify's Song Psychic feature.
Spotify

Choosing your topic opens you up to a list of pre-populated question, like “Should pineapple go on a pizza?,” or, for those looking for love, “Does my crush like me back?” You can also ask your own questions. Hit enter, and the app generates a song that will give you the answer you seek … or not. In our case, Song Psychic answered the pizza debate with Lily Allen’s Never Gonna Happen and reassured me that my wife still loves me with Muse’s Yes Please. You can then click the track and listen to the suggested song on Spotify.

Screengrabs from Spotify's Song Psychic feature.
Spotify

Will Spotify’s 226 million subscribers and 570-plus monthly active listeners use Song Psychic as a tool for making important life decisions? I sincerely hope not. But at the very least, the new feature, like many of Spotify’s efforts to increase user engagement, can serve as a fun way to discover new music and be a revamped Magic 8 Ball with you and your friends.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Derek Malcolm
Derek Malcolm
Contributing Editor, A/V
Derek Malcolm is a Toronto-based technology journalist, editor, and content specialist whose work has appeared in…
Tidal vs. Spotify: Which music streaming service has the features you need?
Tidal app for iOS on an iPhone 14 showing now playing screen with Max quality track.

Spotify has over 220 million subscribers and access to an immense library of artists, albums, podcasts, and audiobooks. A go-to music-streaming platform, Spotify is available on just about every desktop and mobile device one can think of. While it's a phenomenal way to enjoy your favorite tunes, it's certainly not the only music streamer in town. In fact, if you're committed to listening to only the best-sounding audio, Tidal may be a better fit. With its emphasis on hi-res content, Tidal is also home to a giant archive of music and video content.

But is one of these music streaming platforms truly the better of the two? To find out, we compared Spotify and Tidal, focusing on criteria like price, sound quality, and supported devices.
Price

Read more
YouTube rolling out some three-dozen new features this fall
The Digital Trends YouTube channel as seen on an iPhone and on a TV in the background.

The tweaks keep coming to the world's largest video provide. Today YouTube is taking the wraps off some three-dozen (more or less) new features. It's a cross-platform announcement, with the goods hitting phones and tablets, as well as televisions and wherever else you do your YouTube viewing.

Here's what you have to look forward to:

Read more
What is Spotify? Music, pricing, and features explained
Spotify app library screen..

Spotify is the first name that comes to mind when you think of music-streaming apps. Love it or hate it, Spotify is currently the most popular music-streaming service, boasting 551 million users and more than 220 million subscribers, putting it ahead of competitors like Apple Music. But what exactly is Spotify, and how does it really work? We're answering all your questions with this deep dive into what you can expect from Spotify. 
What is Spotify?

If you spend even a little time online, you've probably heard of Spotify. It's a popular free and paid music-streaming service founded in Stockholm in 2006 by Swedish friends Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. Fun fact: the name happened by fluke when the partners were shouting names back and forth from different rooms in Ek's Stockholm flat, and Ek misheard one of Lorentzon's suggestions as "Spotify." They later backtracked the meaning as a combination of spot and identify, and there you have it. 
Spotify today is a behemoth of a streaming service that also offers access to podcasts, videos, and highly tailored playlists driven by your unique usage. With several plan tiers to choose from, Spotify's free version lets you listen to unlimited music, podcasts, and even videos, so you can explore your taste without shelling out a thing, but you do have to endure ads and limited functionality (more on that below). It does offer much more robust paid options (more below, too), but the free version is more than enough for the casual listener. 
Spotify is also quite device-versatile, so you can use it on your smartphone, tablet, computer, laptop, TV, smartwatch, gaming console, and even in your car. You get the expected, intuitive controls like play/pause, next/previous, loop a song/playlist, and save favorites. But that's not all. There's a lot that Spotify offers, so let's break down what you can look forward to. 
Spotify features: music, podcasts, and more

Read more