Out with the old, in with the new: Spotify’s rolling out an overhauled aesthetic for its desktop, web, and iOS apps, one that does away with the services long-used (and ugly) gray theme in exchange for a striking new coat of black paint, a fresh font (Proxima Nova), and overhauled icons.
“The new dark theme and refined interface lets the content come forward and ‘pop’, just like in a cinema when you dim the lights,” the company said in a blog post announcing the refresh.
Spotify’s new look on iOS.
Spotify has been testing its new UI for a while, so some users may have already seen the new look. Wednesday, however, it is rolling out to everyone.
In addition to a new color scheme and different icons, the new look does away with Spotify’s star feature, which let you add music to a favorites playlist with just one click. The revamped Your Music section in the left-hand navigation panel is now broken down into Songs, Albums, Artists, and Local Files instead of Library, Local Files, and Starred.
Spotify is also making it easier to add an entire album to your playlists. The old way of saving an album on the desktop app was to right-click the album art and then select Add to… > New Playlist. Instead of doing that, there’s a new “+” icon you’ll see when you hover over album art in Spotify. Click the icon and the album is automatically saved to your playlists.
If the “+” icon doesn’t appear—it won’t in searches on the web app, for example—you just click the Save button next to the album art. You can still access the Add to… menu item with a right-click if you prefer to add an entire album to another playlist.
The new look for Spotify includes an easier way to save an entire album to your playlists.
Overall, Spotify’s new look is a very nice change that makes an already great service even more attractive. If you don’t see the new look on the desktop yet you can get a taste of it by using Spotify’s web app, which already has the new theme. Although Spotify did not announce an updated Android app, we expect to see the new look land in Google Play in the coming weeks.