Spotify Launching a New, More Visual Desktop Experience
Ready for a little bit of change, Spotify users? The popular music streaming service is getting ready to release a new, totally refreshed desktop application for Mac and Windows users in the very near future. According to a report by The Verge, who was given the opportunity to try out a pre-release version of the updated application – which is dubbed version 0.9.8 – features a new, darker user interface filled with large, clear font faces, clean lines, and a larger focus on images.
According to the report, the upgrades and changes are mostly skin deep – the experience on the whole is very much the same one we’ve all known and loved for quite some time now, just with a new, more beautiful feel to it. One interesting change outlined that is representative of a larger trend is featured on the Artist page. While current version of Spotify shows all of the tracks in an organized, comprehensive list, the new version adds considerable more padding between songs, using this extra space to give a visual reminder of the album’s artwork as well as a large, circular profile picture of the artist.
This is still Spotify, but this is a more visual, more beautiful Spotify that ditches an aesthetic of straight up utilitarianism in favor of minimalism. The new desktop Spotify is actually quite visually similar to the new Spotify for iOS redesign that premiered not long after the release of iOS 7 this fall. The Discover tab, for example, has seen a considerable redesign that lays out recommended tracks in a simple grid dominated by album cover art, just like Spotify for iOS.
While there’s no exact launch date given in the report, it seems safe to assume that the new Spotify experience should be arriving sooner rather than later given how far along the client seems to be based on the screenshots. In fact, isolated reports are streaming in that some lucky users have actually already gotten the updated via Spotify’s built in auto updating mechanism, but this doesn’t seem to be representative of a broad, widespread release just yet. Be sure to keep an eye on Spotify however, there’s no saying when Spotify will decide to grace us with the update – and who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky few who have been given pre-release access.