Skip to main content

Spotify’s upcoming Taste Rewind takes your musical tastes back in time

Spotify Taste Rewind
Spotify might be expanding beyond music by adding video streaming and podcast support to its service, but that doesn’t mean that the company has forgotten its roots. A new feature on the way aims to make sure you don’t forget your favorite music’s roots either.

The new feature appears to be called Taste Rewind, and while Spotify hasn’t officially announced it yet, you can try it right now. The feature was linked in a Facebook post by someone who gives the impression of being a Spotify engineer, and was spotted by Venture Beat.

“Ever wondered which artists you would be listening to if you were born in another time?” the post reads. “Spotify can help you turn your music back in time, try it out!”

The way the feature works is fairly simple. Log in with your Spotify credentials and you’ll be presented with a short list of some of the artists you listen to. Pick three artists and the app will begin to “rewind.” Once this is finished (in our case it took roughly 15 seconds), you’ll be able to browse through a list of playlists presented by decade.

Essentially, this is a recommendation engine, as we’ve seen in other apps before, but the way it’s dressed up adds a nice touch. While a collection of songs from the last decade is simply referred to as a playlist, songs from the ’90s are collected on “a Spotify CD-R,” while ’80s tunes are compiled on a mixtape.

The app is still a work in progress, but it works surprisingly well. How much you use Spotify obviously has an effect on your initial selections, and unfortunately there is no way to narrow down the initial group of artists you select from, but it’s still fun to play around and see what artists are recommended.

Digital Trends has reached out to Spotify for more information on the upcoming feature, and will update this story if any more information is revealed. In the meantime, you can take a look at the new feature for yourself by heading over to the Spotify Taste Rewind website.

Kris Wouk
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kris Wouk is a tech writer, gadget reviewer, blogger, and whatever it's called when someone makes videos for the web. In his…
Spotify tweaks search functionality to make music discovery more convenient
Spotify

As a streaming service, Spotify hangs its hat on music discovery, but until recently, its search functionality had made the process a bit more cumbersome than it needed to be. Fortunately, the company will soon release a small tweak that places search filters at the top of the page (just below the search bar), allowing users to easily switch back and forth between artist, song, playlist, and album searches.

Previously, people needed to scroll down below their search results to apply these filters, a process that was confusing to some and irksome to others.

Read more
iPod hack puts 50 million Spotify songs in your pocket
ipod hack puts 50 million spotify songs in your pocket streaming device

When the iPod music player launched in 2001, Apple went with the slogan, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”

Skip forward 20 years and a brilliant bit of work by Massachusetts resident Guy Dupont puts 50 million songs in your pocket, streamable via Spotify.

Read more
How to change your Spotify username
How to change your Spotify username

When it comes to streaming music, podcasts, and other audio content, Spotify provides an enormous variety of customized selections for your listening pleasure. Sadly, when it comes to changing your username, there are no official options to do so that are supported by Spotify, so it would appear that you should choose with care. However, with a bit of ingenuity, you can circumvent this obstacle by either setting up a display name for your account or linking your Spotify and Facebook accounts on your mobile or desktop app. Our handy guide will show you how to change your Spotify username as quickly and conveniently as possible.

To clarify, each account on Spotify is assigned a unique identifier that becomes intrinsically linked to the username that you use to create your account, whether free or premium. This makes your username unalterable, at least employing anything the Spotify mobile or PC apps are capable of doing on their own. That being said, the two methods below will either create a display name that the public can see or merge your Facebook username into your Spotify account and replace your original username.

Read more