How to Follow a User on Spotify. Spotify is one of the world's favorite ways to stream and save music. One of its key features is its status as a social media platform, which allows users to discover music through other people. Spotify is cracking down on family plan sharing — again. According to a new set of terms and conditions for the plan that the company published back in August, Spotify is now requiring the. As long as you have a Spotify account and you know the person's username, you can search for and follow any user. There are a few small steps users can take to shield their listening habits from.
Digital music might not have the same allure as sitting down to listen to a record on your turntable, but what it lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in convenience — especially when you aren't home with your collection.
It's been five years since Spotify publicly launched and shifted the music industry's focus toward streaming as a way to combat illegal downloading. While the streaming business model is far from perfect, even the most casual music fan should test out streaming while it's still growing.
See also: How Spotify Engineered the New Music Economy
If you're just dipping your toe into the stream, follow our beginner's guide and soon you'll be listening to Spotify's massive library without the worry of losing precious hard drive space.
Signing Up
As with most services, you can register for Spotify by connecting your Facebook account for optimal social features, or create an account with your email address.
Pick the subscription that suits your music habits. The prices are in USD, but the tiers are the same internationally: No cost will get you desktop listening interrupted by ads; $4.99 per month allows for unlimited desktop streaming; users who pay the premium $9.99 per month can listen on all desktop (via desktop app or web player) and mobile devices with offline syncing privileges on mobile (Spotify Radio is the only free mobile feature.)
Users at the premium tier can also listen to music at a higher bit rate, which is essential for anyone who has quality headphones or earbuds.
Image: Spotify
Before you start listening, check your preferences and privacy settings to make sure you are sharing as much or as little with the world as you'd like. If you connected your Spotify to Facebook but don't want to broadcast your tunes on your News Feed, uncheck the Facebook sharing option. Leave the Spotify sharing section checked to show up in your followers' feeds — this amplifies Spotify's social music discovery potential.
This page is important because you can choose whether or not to make your playlists viewable to the public as soon as you start, or make it public on your own terms. Also, you can opt-out of Spotify showing your top artists and tracks on your public profile, if you aren't one to brag about such things. Plus, you can connect your Spotify account to Last.fm so your scrobbles stay representative.
Organizing Your Music
Library and Local Files
In the left sidebar, you will find your Collection. Here, you can access local files (go to Preferences to manage the folders from which Spotify can import files) and music saved to playlists. The Library section puts all of this music in one place. By accessing the files found on your hard drive, Spotify acts as a one-stop shop for listening to all your music, meaning you don't have to open iTunes or another player.
Playlists
Playlists are Spotify's main draw. You can create your own by clicking the New Playlist button, or following and subscribing to other users' playlists. Bookmark an album by saving it as a playlist, too.
Image: Spotify
You can also set up a collaborative playlist among friends to prep for that that perfect road trip or party. Right click on a playlist to check off the collaborative option and share the playlist with your friends. This alt-menu also shows the option to change the privacy settings to 'Make Public' or 'Make Secret,' depending on your preferences.
See also: 11 Tips and Tricks for Spotify Power Users
Image: Spotify
If you want to stay up-to-date with a specific user's playlist, click the green 'Follow' button on the bottom of the top title bar, and it will save to your side bar. You'll get a notification when songs are added to the playlist.
Play Queue
This option is ideal for when you aren't listening to an album, since queuing up a song via the right-click menu will place it after the track you are currently listening to, and will interrupt a record.
When listening to a playlist or playing music in the background, the queue is great for accommodating requests and spur of the moment sing-a-longs with friends.
Sharing and Discovering Tunes
In the last year, Spotify has significantly amped up its social and music discovery features to keep up with its competitor Rdio, which prioritizes social discovery.
See also: 7 Music Discovery Tools to Find New Tunes
Following
Image: Spotify
Spotify lets you follow friends, artists and organizations (follow Mashable's account here!) to see what your network is listening to. You will get a notification when artists you follow add music to their catalogues.
The social feed lives in the right sidebar, and at the top Spotify will make recommendations to follow, including Facebook friends or artists your friends enjoy. This feed will show what your friends are listening to right now, songs they've added to playlists, new playlists they've created, tracks they've starred, and playlists, songs and albums they've shared on Spotify.
If you didn't register your Spotify account through Facebook, you can still search for friends and organizations via the search bar.
Sending and Sharing Music
Image: Spotify
You can highlight your favorite music in Spotify's social feed by sharing via the button on artist, album or playlist pages, or the right-click menu. Write a message and check your connected social networks if you want to share to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, too.
The Send tab on the right of the box allows you to send music to individual users in a private message.
Discover
The Discover section is filled with custom recommendations based on your music history. If you are stuck picking out something new to listen to, you can get lost scrolling down this page.
Image: Spotify
In addition to suggestions of new artists deemed algorithmically similar to ones you already love, Spotify will remind you of albums and songs you haven't listened to in a while. Sometimes the recommendations don't feel right, but the algorithm can only improve the more you use it. Unfortunately, there is no option to reject or modify suggestions at this time.
If you are unsure you might like one of Spotify's suggestions, hover over the album art until a play button appears. Then click it and hold down to preview the song.
This will interrupt whatever you are currently listening to, but once you let go of the play button, your song will resume. It is not the smoothest listening feature, but it can come in handy, especially when browsing to make a playlist.
Apps
Spotify's unique apps can also help you find music when you aren't feeling inspired, or you'd like a change of scenery. Some apps will tell you the lyrics of the song you're listening to, others will provide you with a review, and a few will show you what is trending on the charts, web and social media.
We recommended the following apps: Pitchfork, This Is My Jam, Domino, Twitter #Music (formerly We Are Hunted), Any Decent Music?, Blue Note, TuneWiki and Billboard.
Radio
Spotify Radio functions like a typical Internet radio service. You can create stations by artist, song, album and genre, and upvote or downvote songs you love or hate. Spotify Radio is free to use on the mobile app, even if you aren't a Spotify Premium user.
Mobile
Image: Spotify
Spotify's mobile app is a pared-down version of the web player (tablet apps more closely resemble the web player), from which you can select playlists to download for offline listening, to save your data usage. This is only available for Premium users.
Another feature exclusive to the mobile app is Browse. This saves you the trouble of coming up with a playlist yourself, which is helpful when you're out and about while using Spotify on your smartphone.
Now that you've completed your crash course on Spotify, get streaming!
Mashable composite image: iStockphoto, akindo
Contents
1 How to be an Artist on Spotify
As you know that Spotify is one of the best digital music platforms. There are millions of songs available for the users of all side of worlds.
But, this not the whole story because you can also become an artist on Spotify. If your question is how to be an artist on Spotify, you are at the right place.
How to be an Artist on Spotify
This is the other side of the Spotify because there are two types of accounts available. First is free with basic services and second is premium with all the services.
There are millions of users of both accounts but some of the people know about this feature of Spotify.
As I told that there are millions of music tracks on the Spotify so you have to compete all of these tracks to become popular.
If you think that you are good enough to become popular on the Spotify, you should try your luck. Before becoming an artist on the Spotify, you have to follow some tips.
Also Read: Spotify vs Joox Complete Review
Do you want to know some tips to get a proper understanding of this feature?
That’s great! There are some tips I am going to discuss before uploading any music track on the Spotify. Just stay with me to get the tips one by one.
Tips
First of all, you have to choose your audience. Be specific to get a good response.
According to your audience, choose the lyrics for your music tracks. When you are going to choose the lyrics, you have to know the rules and regulations by the Spotify. The rules say that the content should not be sexual, illegal etc. so, follow the rules and policies of Spotify.
Now, the time to choose the composers for your music tracks. For this purpose, you have to invest some money to get the services from the composers. If the composers are good, there are good chances for you on the Spotify.
Before uploading the content, you have to ensure the quality of the content according to the competition and the polices of Spotify.
If you are confused about anything, just leave a comment below, I will try to provide the best solution to your problem.
This is not the end, now you are ready to upload your content on Spotify. Wow! You can become more popular than your expectations because it is a big platform.
First of all, you cannot upload the music on the Spotify directly.
It’s necessary to ensure that everything on the Spotify is properly licensed. So, the organizers of Spotify allow you to contact some distributors. And the distributors have an access to the Spotify artist part.
You need to sign with one of these distributors and ask them to publish your music track on the Spotify.
If you don’t want to sign with the distributors, there are some music companies that have a deal with the Spotify. Just ask them to publish your music on the Spotify.
How To Follow Someone On Spotify Iphone App
There are different distributors of music have connections with the Spotify. You just need to connect with one of these distributors.
These distributors publish your music on Spotify. And collect royalties for you. Some of these distributors preferred by the Spotify. These distributors are the following:
EmuBands
Record Union
AWAL
CD Baby
Tune Core
You can choose any distributor preferred by the Spotify because they are all trusted and well-structured to provide you with good services.
Before uploading any music on the Spotify, you have to take care of some policies by the Spotify premium. Some instructions are following for you.
Prohibited Content
Basically, Spotify encourages all types of music from artists. But, some types of music are prohibited, so, if you upload prohibited music, it will be deleted soon. So, avoid uploading prohibited music. Illegal, hateful and explicit music is considered as the prohibited music.
I hope you have understood the point. Now, the time to upload the music. To get a better understanding of the service.
Stay with me!
How Do You Follow Someone On Spotify Apps
Upload Music to Spotify
Have you decided to become the artist on the Spotify?
Wow! that’s great! There are some instructions for you. These instructions will help you to become popular on the Spotify. If you take care of these instructions, you will get more success than your expectations from Spotify.
As you know, Spotify is the popular app and the competition is very high. There are more than 30 million music tracks on the servers of Spotify. So, you have to compete for these tracks.
Create a quality music track that can provide more fun in less time. People prefer short tracks now so, try to compose the short tracks.
There are a lot of music composers in the market. If you have enough budget, you have to consult with these composers.
Try to select your audience. It is impossible to provide the best music to all the music listeners because everyone has different taste. So, you have to choose your audience and provide the best music according to the taste of your audience.
Now, the time to advertise on social media. If you can spend the budget on social media, create a Facebook Page and advertise the music that you have uploaded on the Spotify.
How much does Spotify pay artists
This is very complicated to answer because Spotify’s payout depends on their own revenue and how many people are using the service. Also, Spotify doesn’t pay artists, period. They pay aggregators, which pay labels, which pay publishers, which pay artists. So some artists payout rates will appear to be much lower than others. At any rate, in terms of what Spotify pays aggregators, I’ve seen estimates anywhere from .001 to .008 per play. Note that if a fan loves your music and puts it on infinite repeat, you get paid for each of those plays.
Let me know if you have any question.
I hope you have found the answer to your question about how to be an artist on Spotify.
Thanks for visiting my website. Stay tuned for more posts related to Spotify.