Desktop: New "Now Playing View" sidebar

[MattSuda]

Spotify is introducing a new "Now Playing View" sidebar in the desktop app and Web Player to go along with the recently released "Your Library" sidebar.

Together, the individually customizable design of these new views provides a richer experience, more context, and quicker access to personal favorites.

The Now Playing View in the right sidebar shows the album art and info of the current song or podcast you are playing and also shows more information about the artist.

When you expand the album art in the bottom left corner of the app, it will no longer hover over the Your Library sidebar. Instead, the new right sidebar will open up. You can resize the Now Playing View sidebar to your preferred size.

You can open and close the Now Playing View sidebar by clicking the button in the bottom right of the desktop app.

The Now Playing View sidebar will open up on the right side of the app by default when you start playback, but you can disable this behavior under Settings ➜ Display ➜ Show the now-playing panel on click of play.

The Friend Activity feed is still accessible via the "friends" button next to your profile picture in the top right corner of the main content area. There is also an option in Settings. You can swap between showing either the Now Playing View or the Friend Activity feed in the right sidebar.

The new Now Playing View sidebar is now rolling out to all desktop users worldwide, so you should be seeing it soon.

You can read more info about the new desktop experience in the Spotify Newsroom post:

➜ Spotify’s Desktop Experience Gets a Brand-New Look With Redesigned ‘Your Library’ and ‘Now Playing’ ...

You can read more info and give feedback about the new Your Library sidebar here:

➜ Desktop: New Your Library sidebar

FAQ:

This section will answer your frequently asked questions and will be updated with the latest answers.

The Now Playing View sidebar keeps opening at the start of playback, how do I turn this behavior off?

• The Now Playing View sidebar will open up on the right side of the app by default when you start playback, but you can disable this behavior under Settings ➜ Display ➜ Show the now-playing panel on click of play.

How do I get the album art to expand in the bottom left corner like before? When I try to expand the album art, it opens the Now Playing View sidebar to the right.

• Unfortunately, that is no longer possible. When you expand the album art in the bottom left corner of the app, it will no longer hover over the Your Library sidebar. Instead, the new right sidebar will open up. You can resize the Now Playing View sidebar to your preferred size.

Can I hide certain sections in the Now Playing View sidebar?

• Right now it's not possible to hide sections, so you will see all of the sections. However, you can drag and resize the sidebar to your prefered size.

Feedback:

Where can I give my feedback about the new Now Playing View sidebar in the desktop app?

• We welcome your feedback about this change. The best way to share your feedback is to comment here in this thread.

Updates:

This section is to inform you of updates to the new Now Playing View sidebar such as changes and new features.

July 2023:

• Click to enlarge album art on album pages
  
  When you are viewing an album page, you can now click on the album art at the top next to the title to view it bigger in the middle of your screen.

[burnt_garlic_bread]

I think that this is honestly the most grotesque visual change you could have ever made. It clutters up the screen with more info than is needed and makes everything more complicated.

[EoghanM]

Terrible feature that takes up too much space and it not optional - you cannot turn it off for good. It appears per song?! Awful. Get rid of it!

[Kronossan]

The continuous horizontal scrolling animation of overflowing song titles is so incredibly distractive. It's absolutely maddening and reason enough for me to keep the panel closed and out of the way as much as possible! I'd much prefer for overflowing titles to be broken up into multiple lines, possibly have them use a smaller font size too.

Props to whomever came up with the idea of surfacing the artists' touring agenda and available merchandise though. Quite clever and honestly quite useful too. That said, sometimes it'll be good to simply have a large album cover of the currently playing song available in the bottom-left of your screen to gaze at without being bombarded with all that additional information about dates and products and I wish you brought that option back.

[hans-jürgen]

OK, I had to manually update the desktop version to 1.2.15.828, because the MS Store seems to be broken somehow. Now I can see the new option to enable or disable the "Now Playing" sidebar when clicking on Play, and also the album cover is maximised now when clicking on it from the album page. Could be even bigger for my taste, but's it's nice that this is not a Premium feature anymore. Showing also the back cover with a second click would be even nicer, e.g. for classical music where the listed details usually give more infos than the front. Related ideas:

[Desktop][Other] Full-size album artwork - The Spotify Community

[Desktop][Other] Option to maximize album cover in... - The Spotify Community

[Traeighsea]

This new side bar is way too much visual noise all at once, and it gates a very important minimal UI element; the album photo. I understand the intention here is to promote the artist, and fundamentally I like that as an idea for this side bar, but I don't think the album artwork belongs here. I think that's where a lot of this critical feedback is coming from. For me I tend to use Spotify on half of my screen, and another app on the other half, and this current design doesn't work if I want to see the album art - which is largely how I remember the song / album / artist.

One suggestion I have is to have a toggleable option for the _middle_ area to have the album artwork. For example the Queue uses this as an option and it would be great to have the album artwork at the top of the queue. Having a now playing middle area with the artwork and maybe some other information feels much better than a sidebar of content.

Alternatively the left sidebar takes up a _lot_ of extra space than I feel it should considering how little you need to interact with it, I think it would be pretty easy to take back some area in the home, search, library buttons, and put the artwork there instead.

[TheWizard91]

Good evening, Mr. Suda; I hope this message finds you well. I have a problem with this new feature; I can no longer see it in my settings. I have a 2016 Dell XPS 13 with 16G RAM, 512D SSD, and I am using Ubuntu 20.04. I hope it helps.

[spicyfknrob]

+1 for wanting the friend feed AND large album art (aka the "old" way). I do not care for the new now playing, especially in place of friend feed.

If they consider the sidebar to be "now playing" what on earth is the middle column of the app for?!

[EoghanM]

THIS WORKED!!! Thank you so much my friend!

[HiImKonrad]

The original post says to find the "Now Playing View" sidebar under settings but there is no menu called settings, it is under preferences (hotkey is ctrl + p). Oddly enough, when you click on preferences it opens up a menu that is now labeled settings. Inconsistency can be confusing for some users. I understand these words often can be used in similar situations but it is helpful to clear up the language.

[hans-jürgen]

---

@TheWizard91  schrieb:

I am using Ubuntu 20.04

---

I guess the Linux version is older than 1.2.15, so that would be an explanation.

[ETCL]

Is the rollout complete? I only briefly noticed the sidebar a couple of months back but disappeared since with no indication if it's coming back at all.

[andrefelipe1295]

This feels more like a downgrade than an upgrade. At least let me disable the "new feature" which just add stuff i dont care for in my screen and removed stuff that i previously used.

[hans-jürgen]

The Now Playing View sidebar keeps opening at the start of playback, how do I turn this behavior off?

• The Now Playing View sidebar will open up on the right side of the app by default when you start playback, but you can disable this behavior under Settings ➜ Display ➜ Show the now-playing panel on click of play.

If you don't see this new option in your settings/preferences, you may have to update to the latest version of the desktop app.

[wineamyhouse]

Please, make it a pool, most of us hate all recent changes, we want the UI to be classic like one year ago.

Stop berating your consumers.

[RobotWarrior]

I don't understand why you don't like the changes in the spotify app. In fact you don't like anything about app updates. Me, I find that I like and very practical the new sidebar of spotify.. Spotify improves the spotify app for you and you are never happy with the changes. You are really annoying and you are difficult in the choices of the improvement of the application.

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[Froot]

Echoing what others have said in that the supposed "Settings" menu fix to remove the bar is gravely out of date and needs to be updated. This is one of the most garish and unappealing UX implementations this app has ever had, and actively makes me want to use the desktop app less with how much it hurts my eyes to look at. The fact that there's simply no option to toggle it and the (I guess) assumption on the part of developers that the userbase will just accept it and move along without issue is fantastically ignorant.

[luke_mcdonald]

This honestly seems like a redundancy in the UI. I'd rather have a new "now playing" with all the information and scrubbing etc. Or the old version. Currently the information is displayed in both places and it makes no sense, just extra clutter.

[vaajy]

I don't like gig info and artist info even in mobile. Too much clutter, just for fun?

Third scrollable item is just too much on computer.

Suggested to delete the clutter from our screen. Please be the minimalist and remove excess.

[kyaann]

This change needs to be reversed. I want to be able to see the album art as well as my friend activity like before. One of Spotify's perks is that they have friend activity, and this being taken away by random clutter is annoying. There was no problem with the way it was set up before, when you could see both the album art in large scale and the friends tab. Please change this back, I hate using Spotify on my desktop now that my album art is the size of a penny.

[Danspy501st]

Im not fully sure if this is a bug. But on the webplayer, where I primary listening to podcasts, it just keeps showing up, regardless if I had toggle "Start on play" on or off. I dont have much options for the webplayer as is. Are Sportify devs trying to squeeze their users to use either the desktop app or the app on their phones and so on?