Use “Spicetify” to Give Spotify a Visual Makeover
Spotify isn’t all that customizable out of the box. The home screen displays a mix of what you’ve recently listened to and whatever the company is hoping to promote at the moment (currently audiobooks). There’s little you can do to change the app’s appearance and behavior.
But if customization is important to you, Spicetify is a great little tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux that lets you do all sorts of Spotify customizations. Created and maintained by volunteers, this app offers everything from custom color schemes (including Spotify’s lighting mode) to settings that let you do things like hide audiobooks entirely or place a sleeping cat in your progress bar. There’s even an app store-like interface that you can use to quickly set preferences from within Spotify.
Setting up Spicetify
There is no way to install Spicetify without using the command line; that is, using Terminal on macOS and PowerShell on Windows. Don’t worry, though: it’s not too difficult. You just need to go to the installation documentation and copy and paste a few commands – note that there are different commands for Windows and macOS/Linux. The script will do the installation for you:
Note that for Windows users, Spicetify won’t work if you installed Spotify through the Microsoft Store—you’ll need to download Spotify directly instead. Once you install Spicetify, you should also install the Spicetify Marketplace, which will add a tab to Spotify itself for browsing and installing themes and add-ons. You can do this by typing “Y” after running the Spicetify installer or, if you skipped this step, by copying and pasting the store command from the installation guide.
Using the Spicetify marketplace
After installing Spicetify, you should see a shopping cart icon in the left panel of Spotify. From here you can browse all the proposed extensions, themes and snippets. Please note that these are all created by volunteers, which means some of them may not work with the latest Spotify updates. However, I found that it worked more often than not.
The Extensions and Snippets sections allow you to add features to Spotify. I used this to remove all podcasts and audiobooks from the main page, hide all podcasts and audiobooks, and copy lyrics by highlighting them. There’s even a little cat that will follow your mouse if you really want it to.
Spotify Custom Themes
The marketplace also gives you access to a variety of topics. They change the color scheme and overall appearance of the application. Some of these themes make everything a little more…blue.
But there are almost every color scheme you can imagine. Install the theme you like and it will appear immediately. Many themes also offer multiple color schemes; you can toggle this at the top of the themes section in the marketplace.
Spotify’s user interface is very dark, regardless of the system-wide settings, but with the right theme, you can make it bright. There are even several Extremely Weird™ themes, including one that makes Spotify look like a Terminal app.
Spicetify update
From time to time, Spotify updates its desktop player, and some of these updates break Spicetify. You’ll know this is happening when all of your settings, including the store button, disappear. To change everything back, open PowerShell or a terminal and type “spicetify update” then press Enter or Return. This should fix the situation; if not, then the team is probably still working on a patch. Try again in a few days and you’ll be done. I’ve been using Spicetify for about six months and haven’t had to do it very often.