Spotify’s Stunning New Redesign Hits All The Right Notes

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Spotify will today rollout a stunning redesign of its entire app catalog. The company has overhauled its desktop, web, and mobile offerings with entirely new user interfaces that make the content the key focus — and you can take a sneak peak at them now ahead of their release.

Dubbed “Cat” internally, the new look is clearly inspired by iOS 7. It’s incredibly clean and simple, with sharp fronts and frosted panes, fancy new icons designed by U.K.-based artist Jon Hicks, and circular album art in place of the traditional squares.

“We have this metaphor of stepping into a theatre — when you dim the lights, the content comes forward,” Michelle Kadir, director of product development at Spotify, told Wired.co.uk. “We wanted to use that for ourselves and the product.”

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Spotify is also making some minor changes to features. “Starred Items” will no longer be as prominent, while a new “My Music” feature holds all the music you’ve chosen to save for later.

When you hit the “plus” button alongside an artist, album, or single, you’ll no longer need to think about which playlist you want to add that music to; it will all end up in the My Music section where it will be organized by artist.

“For example, pressing “plus” on the song Belief by Arcane Roots will place that song under the “Songs” tab of the My Music area,” Wired explains. “But Arcane Roots will also then appear under “Artists” and the album the song is taken from, Blood & Chemistry, under “Albums”.”

From here, you can shuffle songs, store them for offline playback, and add them to your existing playlists.

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Starred items will remain, however, so users with starred items will still be able to access them after the upgrade — and you’ll still be able to add songs to the Starred Items list. But Spotify sees the My Music feature as “much more frictionless way of saving music.”

It’s taken Spotify six months to perfect its redesign, and it sees this as a “first big step of many this year.”

The redesign will be available later today across the company’s Android, iOS, and Windows Phone apps — as well as Spotify for Mac, Windows, and web browsers.