Each year, streaming giant Spotify makes it possible for its loyal Premium subscribers to investigate their past 365 days of listening, providing them with cool insights into their favorite tunes, podcasts, and genres.
This year’s Spotify Wrapped site is a bit hard to find (you can log in and check out your picks at this link), but it is well worth the hunt. With 11 different pages of information about your listening habits and two algorithmic playlists designed specifically for you, it’s chock-full of rad information and great songs new and old.
The 11-page slideshow opens by sharing the first song you listened to of the year, as well as the first artist you discovered, followed by pages that showcase how much time you spent listening throughout 2018, as well as lists of your favorite artists and genres of the year.
One cool thing that the company has also done is curated a playlist of your top 100 tracks of 2018 (some of which might surprise you), and a list of what it calls “Tastebreakers”. The Tastebreakers playlist offers you a group of artists and songs that you haven’t listened to this year, but that the company’s algorithms think you might like, based on what you spent the most time with in 2018. It’s a neat feature that is bound to aim your ears toward exciting new sounds — one of the things that makes Spotify our favorite on-demand music streaming service right now.
To find those two playlists in the desktop or mobile apps, simply go to the “For You” section, where both will be readily available.
The Digital Trends staff has been having a great time investigating our listening habits, with notable top artists including, Perfume Genius, Ryan Adams, Jeff Tweedy, and Saba, among others. Thanks to our ability to constantly listen to Spotify at work, many of us racked up a massive number of time listening to music this year. One staffer listened to more than 57,000 minutes of music — more than 39 days of listening time!
If you’re a Spotify subscriber, we absolutely recommend you check out the Spotify Wrapped feature, if just for a quick peek under the hood at your listening life. As always, if you’re in search of new tunes, we highly recommend you check out our weekly playlist of the best new music, as well as our list of the best albums of the year so far.
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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