Google Play / music_and_audio / SPOTIFY: MUSIC AND PODCASTS
REVIEW
Spotify is no longer trying to be a music app.
The 2025 redesign reorganised the home screen around video, podcasts, and audiobooks. Music was the third tab. Spotify is following its own audience, not its name.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 7, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Spotify: Music and Podcasts
SPOTIFY AB
OUR SCORE
7.6
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.3
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
Spotify’s home screen used to open to a row of “made for you” playlists with covers of records you actually liked. In late 2025, after a redesign nobody asked for, it opens to a vertical scroll of recommendation cards that mix music with podcasts, audiobooks, music videos, and short-form video. Music — the thing in the company name — is one of four content surfaces fighting for the top of the feed, and not always the winning one.
The product is following the audience: more than half of Spotify Premium subscribers now stream non-music content monthly, according to the company’s own filings. The strategic logic of the pivot is fine. The user-experience cost — that opening Spotify is no longer the same as opening a music app — has not been internalised in any visible way by the team building it.
The catalogue is still the largest. Apple Music has caught up on personalisation. Tidal and Qobuz remain better for sound. Spotify wins on breadth and on Connect. It’s a moat. It’s just no longer the only thing it has.
Spotify wins by having every song. It loses, slowly, by no longer believing songs are what you're there for.
FEATURES
The catalogue is the same one everyone competes against — most major-label music plus podcasts plus, since 2022, a growing audiobook library. Personalisation runs on a mix of collaborative-filtering legacy systems and the newer "AI DJ", a TTS voice that introduces tracks as you listen and adjusts based on your skips.
The home screen is now a vertical scroll of cards mixing music recommendations, podcast episodes, audiobook chapters, music videos, and short-form video clips. The bottom-tab bar is Home / Search / Your Library / Premium. The search tab opens with browse categories that prioritise podcasts and shows over music genres.
Free, Individual ($11.99), Duo ($16.99), Family ($19.99), Student ($5.99). Audiobooks are 15 hours/month for Premium subscribers; more requires a separate add-on or audiobook-only sub.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Library, library, library. Almost every artist is here. Cross-device handoff between Android, iOS, web, and Echo / Alexa speakers works. The AI DJ is genuinely better than radio for filling silence in the kitchen. Connect — Spotify's protocol for handing off playback between devices — remains the single best multi-room music experience on Android.
Personalisation, even after the home-screen pivot, is still industry-leading for music specifically. Discover Weekly, Daily Mix, and Release Radar consistently surface music you didn't know you wanted. The yearly Wrapped social moment is the kind of marketing nobody else has been able to duplicate.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The home screen is a battle for your attention between four product categories that don't always belong on the same surface. Pulling out a phone to play an album shouldn't require ignoring three video clips and a podcast suggestion. Long-time music subscribers have publicly migrated to Apple Music in noticeable numbers; Spotify's response has been to push more video and audiobook content, not to refocus.
Royalty rates remain the worst in the major-label streaming market. If you care about that as a moral question, the app's existence is the issue, not its UI. The 2024 jukebox-style "queue" rebuild also broke offline-mode reliability for many users — those bug reports were quiet, but consistent.
CONCLUSION
If you want one music subscription that has every song and works on every speaker, this is still it. If you want a music app that opens to music, Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz are all closer to that idea than Spotify is in 2026. The catalogue advantage is real and getting smaller.