Search facility on mobile app

[Stany70]

Hi. Does anyone know how to search for genres of music or year of release in iPhone app? I know you can do this in desktop version although it always seems a bit hit & miss to me. I have downloaded spotilicious app on iTunes which allows you to create playlist based on genre. It seems quite good-only drawback is that tracks don't scrobble to last fm which puts me off using it as I want this functionality. Any tips on searching in mobile app would be much appreciated.

[soho]

You can do advanced searches, like "genre:jazz" or "year:1980-1990". More info about that here

[Stany70]

Hi. Thanks for your response. I have looked at the page that you linked to in your post. After trying to search for genres, years, artists etc I have concluded that the search function on the mobile version is broken-well at least for me. It works for some things but not others. Example- I type genre:rock into the search box and it returns no results in any of the 3 fields. Same goes for genre:synth pop and many other genres. I have tried inserting search request in " " and also without but it makes no difference. I have taken the genres from spotify's own list so I know they must exist within the metadata of tracks in the spotify library. It's pretty frustrating as there is no easy way to search for certain genres or to discover new music. A combined last fm spotify app would be perfect!

[soho · Accepted solution]

If you search for genre:"synth pop" you will get results (at least I do). No results for rock though, but I get a bunch of results for "soft rock", "hard rock", "pop/rock" and some other rock genres from this list. Not sure how up-to-date that list is though (it's actually the labels that provide this kind of metadata), I just tried some random genres. Note that you need to surround keywords that contain spaces with quotes, not the whole search query. Sorry if I confused you in my previous post.

I agree though that currently we don't have an easy way to browse genres and discover new music that way. Hope to get better at that!

[Stany70]

Hi. Thanks for taking the time to respond it is much appreciated. I have now finally got the search function to work as it should. You were right I wasn't clear about where to put the " ". Having followed your instructions it now returns results for most of the genres except rock. I guess that a lot of record companies would avoid using this term though as there are so many sub-categories for rock which is in itself a fairly generic tag. Thanks once again. It would be great in the future if we could see the radio station in the mobile app or a playlist creator using genres, years artists etc. That would be a pretty cool addition. Also touch wood, the latest update seems to have resolved the crashing issue for me at least. I need to do some more extended listening this weekend to test it some more.