Spotify has launched a fun way to discover new songs, with its take on a Magic 8-Ball.
You just ask the Song Psychic a question and it will answer with a selected track.
Spotify has launched a fun and funky new music discovery tool, of sorts, in the form of its Song Psychic.
The feature is available now and lets you ask Spotify any of a long list of pre-composed questions about situations you might encounter in life, from small things like what you should have for lunch to bigger worries like whether your career is heading in the right direction.
It works on a smartphone – whether that be an iPhone or one of the best Android phones. You just head to the dedicated website at songpsychic.byspotify.com, sign into your Spotify free or premium account and follow the steps.
Having selected your question (chosen from a list of topics to help narrow things down), you'll place your finger on the screen while Spotify "contemplates" the answer.
It'll then come up with a single song that gives you the message, the title of which is likely to be the biggest clue.
We asked the Psychic whether our team (Liverpool) would win the championship this season, and got a resounding "No Way", a song by Young Fathers, which is a little dispiriting.
If you don't have a burning question in your mind, there's also a handy button to randomly select a question for you, making it easy to do a few in a row to see how things work.
The whole thing is soundtracked by soothing ambient synths and wobbling visualiser-style bands of colour, which makes it a pretty zen-like experience. However, with only one song to be served up for each question, it's not exactly going to give you a whole new library of music very quickly.
It's a fun little feature, though, and there might well be people out there who find it's a useful way to focus their mental energies on questions that they should be considering, but perhaps aren't.
In the small print attached to the feature, Spotify is at pains to confirm that the answers selected to its questions are completely random, though, reiterating that "Song Psychic was created as a fun experience and absolutely, positively, without a doubt cannot predict the future."
Whether that robs the experience of some of the fun for you might be down to your attitude, but it at least dispels any possible notions of creepy AI calculations or algorithmic peeping.
