Spotify’s Touch Preview feature debuts on iOS devices

By Keith Nelson Jr. January 22, 2015

Not sure you want to add one of those new D’Angelo’s tracks to your Spotify playlist? Now you can check out a little snippet of any song on Spotify thanks to a new feature for iOS devices called Touch Preview.

The Touch Preview allows users to listen to a 30 second preview of a song, artist, album or playlist by simply pressing on the selection. You can even preview a song while in the middle of a listening session and resume seamlessly once the preview is done. If you enjoyed what you heard you can swipe the selection to the left to save it to your Music library and/or swipe it to the right to add it to your Now Playing queue. It’s kind of like Tinder for music matching, minus the security threats.

There may not have been any Michael Mann-style gun fights or espionage involved, but the Touch Preview feature did come from hacking. As Spotify product manager Miles Lennon explained to CNET, the employees noticed users were having trouble discovering new music by simply scrolling through album covers and titles, so a team went to work developing a few hacks to remedy the problem. Touch Preview is a product of that little hack-a-thon.

Late last year, Spotify began allowing songs discovered through Shazam to be added to Spotify playlists. Soon after, the company began offering users a chart showing which songs were most popular within their network of Spotify friends. The Touch Preview feature is an extension of these initiatives aimed at amping up music discovery even further for 2015. The feature is currently only available on iOS devices, possibly likely because mobile usage on Spotify now accounts for 52 percent of all listening activity, and is quickly growing. With last March’s acquisition of music intelligence company, The Echo Nest, Spotify has increased its ability to curate playlists that more accurately compliment individual music tastes. You may never ask a human for music suggestions again.

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Keith Nelson Jr.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Keith Nelson Jr is a music/tech journalist making big pictures by connecting dots. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY he…

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