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.

Instead of shopping around for a streaming service that will ultimately disappoint you, why not cut out the middleman and start using a music library you actually own? Advantages such as uninterrupted music, increased portability, and increased longevity of the hardware you actually use make it worth the cost of a few albums.

Although vinyl seems to be making a hipster-generated comeback, that old CD collection is nearing obsoletion. The rise and rise of music streaming services might be destroying physical media sales, but man, it makes my life super easy. Spotify, Apple Music... Pandora? Which streaming service is the best?

Some people can dig up great music like magic, or have friends inside the industry who keep them updated. Some people are contented with their weekly Spotify Discover playlist. But if you need more ways to find music, here are 50 ideas, taken from Twitter users, my colleagues at Lifehacker's publisher Gizmodo Media Group, and some of my own habits. Some are obvious, some bizarre, some embarrassing, but they have all helped people find their new favourite song, or even their favourite band.

Your Discover Weekly probably doesn't suck - the feature is so popular that it's the subject of long glowing profiles on tech blogs and business blogs. Spotify even built an ad campaign out of users tweeting how much they love the feature. Each week, every active Spotify user gets a new list of 30 tracks, and over half of them find a new favourite. But depending on your Spotify habits, it is possible to get a garbage Discover Weekly. Here's what's happening and how to fix it.

Spotify is planning to go public through a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange in the next few weeks, and that's piqued the interest of investors hoping it's the next hot tech stock (a little more Netflix, a little less Snapchat). So, should you invest?

Hey what's that song from? Ask MetaFilter commenters named 52 different tunes, mostly classical and big-band, that you'll recognise instantly but might have trouble naming. And we assembled them into a Spotify playlist.

Spotify, a service for turning your music listening habits into public content, analysed thousands of user playlists themed on love, sex, heartache or hating Valentine's Day, and made four Top 10 playlists of the most commonly featured songs.