If you're still listening to Spotify with ads, please do yourself a favour and take advantage of this cheap holiday deal for Spotify Premium, even if you cancel at the end of three months. Please.

The free version of Spotify just got a little better. The music streaming service has extended Spotify Connect, a feature that lets you control music on compatible speakers through phones, laptops and other devices over Wi-Fi to free accounts. Prior to the change, free subscribers could only connect to smart speakers via Bluetooth, which generally provides a... spottier connection. (Sorry. Had to).

If you like making playlists, you're more likely to buy video games. That's some of the data Spotify collected for its new tool, Spotify.Me, which helps brands use people's listening habits to predict their personality traits and better market products to them.

I love overly dramatic cover songs, the kind you hear in movie trailers where some lady is stage-whispering "He did the mash, he did the Monster Mash" while the Inception sound blasts over shots of a robot wizard tornado. I play them in two moods: feeling extremely dramatic and pumped up, or feeling goofy. So I took a few dozen of these songs and I made a dramatic, embarrassing Spotify playlist.

Just because a song is old doesn’t mean it will trigger nostalgia. If you keep Beyoncé in regular rotation, listening to “Crazy in Love” probably won’t take you back to 2003 every time. But I’ve found a kind of music that’s way more likely to trigger nostalgia: The one hit wonder.

“Sea chanteys are work songs, so they’re designed to coordinate effort between a group of people doing physical labour,” says video producer Jamison Hermann, who sang them while working on ships at the Mystic Seaport maritime museum. “The saying in maritime historical circles is that a good chanteyman is worth ten sailors on a line” — because he helps everyone pull the rope at once.

Every music streaming service kind of sucks, we already know this. One of the ways Spotify sucks is that it limits how many songs you can download on each device. But the service just raised its download limit from 3333 tracks per device up to 10,000 per device, for up to five devices. Great news for anyone who needs to keep their data use down, or use Spotify anywhere with bad reception. You can finally listen to the music you pay $11.99/month for!

Certain moods need soundtracks. When you’re sad, or excited, or making out, a certain kind of music can elevate the experience and lend a grandiose, cinematic quality to your life.

If you have particular music tastes, playing one of Spotify’s prefab playlists doesn’t scratch that itch. You want a custom playlist, first crafted in a few minutes, then honed over years. Here are the five playlists you should prepare for yourself.

Mac: When you’re jamming to some background music while browsing the web, getting work done, or chatting with friends, a song might pop up on one of your playlists that you absolutely love. The more this happens throughout the day, the more distracted and disjointed your work is going to feel — and you’ll never be able to focus on studying, making money, or your MMO raid if you’re constantly jumping back to iTunes or Spotify to see what’s playing.

iOS/Android: Spotify works great for music sharing and third-party plugins. Apple Music works great for offline play. So I juggle both. It feels a bit like shared custody, but it’s a lot easier thanks to the mobile apps SongShift and Stamp, which efficiently move playlists from one service to the other.

Reckon YouTube Music can't topple Spotify's reign as the go-to for music in Australia? The data says you're wrong.

Every time I have a party, I spend an hour building a playlist, imagining my guests all gasping and dancing and reaching for Shazam. Instead they ignore the music until someone takes over the Bluetooth speaker. So I asked for help from university student Tj Jones, who had a viral tweet this February when he shared the 11 playlists he used to categorise all his Uber and Lyft passengers, such as "quiet ppl" and "white dudes who look like they like rap".

For a while, I had a bit of an obsession with buying vinyl. My mum had let me have the large cabinet record player that lived in our living room during my childhood, and once I got the 225kg thing into my house I was determined to listen to it as much as possible.

Spotify's top playlists feature way more men than women. Not just in the algorithmic playlists, which reproduce inequalities in the music industry at large, but also in the curated ones, according to a thorough, stat-filled feature article on The Baffler. For example, Spotify's top curated playlist of 2017 was RapCaviar, a rotating 50-track playlist with nine million followers. Over the entire month that The Baffler tracked, it included one woman-led song. One.

Spotify just revamped its free tier, which means you get more than ever before without actually having to pay anything — (some) on-demand playlists on mobile, unlimited skips (on a few playlists) and personalised recommendations to more accurately reflect your tastes. So does it make Spotify Premium a waste of money?

Thanks to the rise of music streaming services, it's never been easier to find new music -- so why do I keep listening to the same three albums on repeat?

So I tried to switch to Apple Music. I was sick of Spotify and its thousand little problems and I missed iTunes. (Actually I missed Winamp, but that's not an option.) iTunes feels less like a spreadsheet. It handles device downloads better. It works great with Siri and my Apple TV. Plus it's got all the music I actually own, including all the weird little mashups and SoundCloud downloads that Spotify can't give me.

So, you bought an Amazon Echo but aren't sure what to do with it other than ask it silly questions, set timers, and roll a dice. Before you return it, know there's a whole bunch else you can do with that smart speaker.

This week Spotify announced a relatively big change to its mobile app. At an event in New York City, the Swedish music giant announced that users who don't want to pay up for a premium plan will soon be able to get their hands on more features, including the ability to personally choose songs on select playlists.