Music streaming behemoth Spotify is leaning hard into this year’s leap day, using the once-every-four-years phenomenon as a springboard for its new Song Psychic feature that, like a Magic 8 Ball, serves up a song suggestion for all of your burning (or not-so-burning) questions.
Spotify is excellent at regularly adding fun features to its music streaming interfaces, such as its hugely popular year-end review Spotify Wrapped, collaborative playlists, and algorithm-based DJ. Today the company is at it again with Song Psychic that it’s calling “a new, mystical music experience.” They even enlisted the help of American rapper Baby Tate to help with the launch with this TikTok video.
Spotify users can go to spotify.com/songpsychic on their mobile devices (heading there on a computer browser serves up a QR code for scanning and prompts you to use your mobile phone), or you can search for Song Psychic in the Spotify app. Either way, the psychedelic Song Psychic experience launches in the Spotify app. There, you’re served up nine topics for your questions, including Love, Career, Life’s Greatest Mysteries, My Future, and my favorite, Lunch.
Choosing your topic opens you up to a list of pre-populated question, like “Should pineapple go on a pizza?,” or, for those looking for love, “Does my crush like me back?” You can also ask your own questions. Hit enter, and the app generates a song that will give you the answer you seek … or not. In our case, Song Psychic answered the pizza debate with Lily Allen’s Never Gonna Happen and reassured me that my wife still loves me with Muse’s Yes Please. You can then click the track and listen to the suggested song on Spotify.
Will Spotify’s 226 million subscribers and 570-plus monthly active listeners use Song Psychic as a tool for making important life decisions? I sincerely hope not. But at the very least, the new feature, like many of Spotify’s efforts to increase user engagement, can serve as a fun way to discover new music and be a revamped Magic 8 Ball with you and your friends.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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