Spotify, like most modern online platforms, is a “mobile first” service, which means that the main efforts are made to ensure the best possible user experience for users who access it on phones. Because of this, the Spotify desktop app sometimes appears to be “abandoned”, receiving major updates and interface changes very often. What’s more, some basic functions of some music playing apps are completely missing even almost 20 years after the service’s debut. For example, Spotify only recently introduced a “Miniplayer” in the desktop version.
Spotify Miniplayer provides quick access to music playback control
For those listening to music on PCs in the early 2000s, the idea of a miniplayer is a completely logical and necessary one. Legacy applications like iTunes or Windows Media Player could be “minimized” into compact, widget-like versions that could be placed on the screen and accessed quickly. They offered basic functions such as playback control: play, pause and next track, maybe sometimes quick access to the track list.
Well, that’s exactly what Spotify is introducing in 2024. After the latest update, the desktop app got a new button in the lower-right of the window on Windows and macOS, which opens a smaller app window. This can be resized at will, becoming a tiny rectangle where only the artist, song title and three control buttons can be seen. If you make it bigger, in square format, you can also see the album cover.
This miniplayer window is independent from the main one. You can close the big window, and the small one stays on the screen, like a widget, which you can position anywhere on the screen. When you no longer need it, you can close it without interrupting playback, as Spotify remains in the background.
Premium subscribers are the first to get access to the Spotify Miniplayer. It’s not clear when it will arrive on “free” accounts, but this could be Spotify’s strategy to show that there are other benefits to paid subscriptions than no ads and fewer playback restrictions. The fact that it’s said to be coming “first” to payers, however, suggests that it will eventually come to “free” accounts as well.
