Spotify is an absolutely amazing tool for lovers of music. It matters little what genre(s) you love, or on what device you prefer listening to your favorite artists, Spotify has something for everyone. Or at least 99.9 percent of the population.

However, as startlingly brilliant as the standard Spotify experience is, it can be improved via the use of websites and apps. Apps for Spotify are no longer going to be featured within the Spotify app, and will now reside in their own web apps, accessing Spotify with the Web API. This means you need to find and keep track of the best ones yourself.

The following apps enable you to get more out of Spotify, transforming an already excellent service into an unmissable one.

Playlists.net

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Playlists.net, formerly known as ShareMyPlaylists, is a website that hosts a community built entirely around Spotify playlists. Founded in 2009, Playlists.net has grown to boast 1 million users. In October 2014, Playlists.net was acquired by Warner Music Group, but remains somewhat independent.

As the name suggests, Playlists.net comprises of hundreds of thousands of playlists. These cover multiple genres, moods, and eras, so you're guaranteed to find some to match your own personal tastes. If, by any chance, you don't then you can join the site and submit your own carefully curated playlist, choosing the right blend of tunes, a catchy name, and a suitable cover photo.

Playlists.net takes the hassle out of deciding what music to listen to at any given time, as well as offering a platform for you to share your music tastes with others. It's extremely useful when you want to discover new music, as you can find playlists pared down by genre, mood, or even individual artists. A playlist generator is the icing on the cake.

Spotibot

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Spotibot is a helpful tool enabling you to create Spotify playlists from nothing but the name of an individual artist. You simply type in the name of an artist you like and Spotibot will generate a short playlist based on that style of music.

Type Slipknot into Spotibot, for example, and get a playlist filled with the likes of Slayer, In Flames, and Static-X. Type Miley Cyrus into Spotibot, purely for a laugh (obviously), and get a playlist filled with the likes of Rihanna, Avril Lavigne, and Pixie Lott.

Spotibot is an easy way to discover new music that has something in common with music you already like and listen to regularly. It isn't packed with features, but it does its job without any fuss and/or need to sign up for an account. Those who have a Last.fm account can use it to finetune their playlists.

Where Is The Drama?

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All songs have peaks and troughs, highlights and low-lights, loud sections and quiet sections. Where Is The Drama? analyzes the audio of individual songs in Spotify's burgeoning catalog in order to answer its own titular question.

The drama in this context is the loudest, most dynamic part of a song, which will be highlighted for your listening pleasure. As well as the most dramatic part of a song, you'll get to see how the rest of the track shapes up, with the crescendos and lulls all mapped out for those with an eye, as well as an ear, for music.

Where Is The Drama? can also be turned into a game. You simply choose a song everybody knows, listen to it once through in its entirety, and try to guess what the most dramatic part of it is going to be. You can then see whose guess was closest to the truth. As you can see, I host the wildest parties.

The Long Tail

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The Long Tail is a Web app which finds the least popular tracks by your favorite artist. Because not even your favorite musician, who you may adore to an unhealthy degree, has a back catalog full of absolute gold. Even The Beatles had their off-days.

This is a way to discover those lesser-known tracks that rarely get any airtime. Some of the tracks you uncover will undoubtedly be terrible, the reasons for their unpopularity plain for all to hear. But others will be amazing acoustic versions of their big hits, or B-sides you soon grow to love.

The Long Tail runs counter to the usual policy of promoting that which is popular. Therefore, it exists for those who are more open-minded to new music and more likely to fall in love with a song everybody else has decided isn't worth bothering with.

Every Noise At Once

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Despite its name, Every Noise At Once isn't a cacophonous mess likely to hurt your eardrums. Instead, it's a brilliant little website that uses Spotify to explore genres of music and how they all intertwine with each other. With 1200 of them listed on the site you're sure to discover something new.

There are several options open to the budding musical explorer. The 'Map' view presents the genres as they all relate to each other, while 'List' view shows them all in order of popularity. In 'Map' view, clicking on a genre will play an example of that style of music, while clicking the arrow to the right of the name will show you all the artists belonging to that genre. In 'List' view, clicking on a genre will open a playlist designed to act as an introduction to that style of music.

Every Noise At Once offers endless opportunities to expand the scope of your musical tastes. You can discover which genres appeal to you and which leave you cold, discover new artists both inside and outside your genres of choice, and generate playlists containing artists belonging to particular genres.

Forgotify

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Forgotify exists to remind us that not all songs are equally loved. While many of the 20 million tracks available on Spotify are played often, some sit unloved, never played, and rarely even thought about. This is a tragedy, and it has to stop; surely all songs deserve to be listened to at least once.

Visit Forgotify, click the 'Start Listening' button, and you'll be presented with a track that's rarely listened to on Spotify. Some are hidden gems, and you'll discover a new artist worth exploring more fully. Others (likely the majority) are nonsense, and you'll discover why everybody else skips past them.

Either way, Forgotify offers a shortcut into the backwoods of weird and wonderful music. Even fans of the artists featured on Forgotify rarely listen to these tracks, and regardless of the reasons, it feels rather adventurous knowing you're venturing into the unknown in order to treat your ears to an all-too-often forgotten aural delight.

How Do You Get More Out Of Spotify?

These are just a handful of the websites and apps that play nicely with Spotify in order to augment the experience of using the service. But there are others out there, some embedded into Spotify itself, and others that are hidden gems used only by those fortunate enough to have stumbled upon them.

We would very much appreciate you telling us how you get more out of Spotify. Do you extensively use Spotify Radio? Have you explored the full range of Spotify apps? Is there another third-party app or website not mentioned above that you think deserves a shout-out? Please let us know by leaving a comment below.

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