Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Daily Record
Daily Record
Lifestyle
Lorna Hughes & Nicola Roy

Handy Spotify hack for finding songs you can't remember the name of

There's nothing more annoying than having a song in your head that you don't know the name of.

And if constantly humming the melody or asking your friends and family is getting you nowhere, there's no need to give up - as you might be able to use Spotify itself to help you identify the mystery tune.

The music and podcast app has a powerful search feature that lets you look for more than just the artist or song name. You can look for the year it came out, or even some of the words if you know them.

Wales Online reports that it's common knowledge how Spotify allows users to search by moods, genres and artist profiles, as well as showing any concerts in your area that you might be interested in.

However if you don’t know a song’s title but know a couple of the lyrics, you can search at least three words to see what Spotify suggests. Songs with those words will show as a "lyrics match" in the results, a Spotify guide says.

You can also carry out an advanced search by entering your search term in quotation marks. This will narrow down the results to exact matches only.

To search by the year, type in the word 'year' then a colon, then the one you're looking for - for example year:1969. For a wider search on a range of years it would be year:1969-1972.

You can also refine your search even more by using AND and NOT, while + and - will do the same job. Spotify suggests one example of this might be typing in Metallica NOT Anger, which will display all Metallica tracks except with the word anger.

And you can search any of the advanced search options to find the exact song you want. Spotify suggests: "Search for a range of years but exclude some - year:1989-2013 NOT year:1993 and find music by genre and year - genre:metal AND year:1982"

Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond. Sign up to our daily newsletter here.

READ NEXT:

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.