Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place for music and data. If you enjoy this newsletter, check out my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit in history.
5 Music Streaming Features You Need to Be Using
By Chris Dalla Riva
It would be an overstatement to say that music streaming gets a bad rap. Last month, Spotify alone announced that they had 777 million monthly active subscribers, 300 million of which are paying (i.e., not using the ad-supported tier). In short, streaming is the dominant way to listen to music. That would probably not be the case if people genuinely hated it.
But at the same time, Spotify specifically—and music streaming generally—have faced their share of criticisms. They use deceptive practices to not pay artists enough. They were sluggish to combat AI impersonation. They make it next to impossible for artists to directly reach their fans.
Though I pay the rent working for a music streaming service, I am glad that listeners and fans want to hold the powers that be to task. The last four thousand years of human civilization have taught us that power can be used and misused. It would be concerning if everybody accepted the status quo.
Yet I do think that music streaming is an incredible technology. Not only did it end a decade of declining industry revenues, but it put (almost) the entire history of recorded music at our fingertips. I know that latter point has been normalized, but as I recall chasing down CDs and MP3s two decades ago, the present state still boggles the mind.
In many ways, streaming services are also getting better. Over the last two years, I’ve seen more exciting features rolled out across the streaming universe than the previous ten. Today, I want to talk about those exciting features, some of which may have escaped you.
#1 You Don’t Need the Title or Artist to Find a Song
Let’s say you have a lyric stuck in your head. You know it’s from a Beatles song, but you can’t remember which one. “All I do is hang my head and moan,” you keep repeating to yourself. It’s driving you crazy.
Decades ago, you might have had to dig through lyric booklets or call up that crazy neighbor who knew a little bit too much about The Fab Four. Now, just punch the lyrics into the search bar of most streaming services. Lyrics are indexed just like song titles and artists. In moments, you’ve found the earworm: “Tell Me Why,” the sixth song off of A Hard Day’s Night.
But this search result is even richer than just finding that unknown Beatles track. It shows that there is also a lyric match for David Allan Coe’s “Why You Been Gone So Long.” He also uses that “All I do is hang my head and moan” lyric right at the beginning of his country tune. Maybe he—or rather songwriter Newbury—was quoting The Beatles.
Look a little bit further down the list and you also see that The Beach Boys have covered “Tell Me Why” in a rich four-part vocal harmony barely a year after The Beatles released the song. Your search has not only answered your question, but it’s opened your ears to even more music.
#2 Context is Coming Back
Let’s say you’re enjoying The Beach Boys cover of “Tell Me Why,” so you decide to listen to the rest of the album it’s on, Beach Boys’ Party! You love it. It’s a bunch of loose, acoustic covers of 1960s hits. You’re familiar with all by the penultimate track: “The Times They Are a-Changin'.”
For years, Spotify has (rightfully) been criticized for obscuring song credits. Figuring out who wrote a song was difficult if not impossible on the platform. But the last few years have seen them make significant improvements. They rolled out songwriter pages. They expanded credits. And, most interestingly, they started testing a feature called SongDNA.
What’s Behind the Paywall?
The coolest uses of Spotify’s SongDNA feature
How to improve audio quality on your streaming service
Fun ways to use time-synced lyrics
How to get notified whenever your favorite artists releases a new song
A new and old song recommendation
Thoughts on streaming features from a brand new streaming user:
I used physically owned but digital music (roughly 125k songs mostly ripped from my cd and vinyl collections, but maybe 5% of it digital purchases too) managed in iTunes from about 2007 through 2025.
At the end of last year, staring at looming retirement and fixed income I decided to stop buying music and jump both feet into streaming. (I'm using YT Music, mainly because I was already paying for YT Premium and so it's free. If I switch it would likely first be to Amazon for the same reason)
The missing features that make streaming MOST frustrating to me:
1) No song ratings. Binary 'like' is better than nothing, but having spent almost 20 years listening via smart playlists that distinguish between songs I want to hear again every now and then (three stars) and songs I genuinely love (four stars and five stars)....having to flag them all with the same binary flag makes me want to pull my hair out
2) Smart playlists. There's just a world of difference between 'randomly play from these 200 songs I manually put on this playlist' and 'randomly play from all the songs I gave four or more stars to that were released in 1976-1978 and that I haven't listened to in two years'. An intricate system of smart playlists is THE way to listen to self-curated music.
3) Listening history, visible and usable. iTunes only gave me playcounts and Last PLayed..... but even just those two things gave me so much smart playlist control. See the example above in section 2. Or "give me shuffle play from all Rolling Stones songs [or all songs on my 1945-1954 R&B playlist, etc] I've listened to less than 20 times"...
It's so bad that basically I'm just using two parallel systems.....YouTube Music streaming of anything that came out (or I discovered) after Dec 2025 or my existing iTunes physical library and playlists....and never the twain shall meet.
Anyway, really enjoyed this column.....