Spotify is a great service, but one of the biggest criticisms of Spotify is its application. It's fine and gets the job done, but it feels immensely lacking in features. I don't really have any complaints as such about Spotify, but I know I'm in the minority when it comes to that. Spicetify gives you theming options to make the client look exactly how you want it, and it even comes with extension support, too.

This application is not affiliated with Spotify. Spicetify has been around for a number of years now, and while I haven't seen anyone get banned for using this application, use it at your own risk.

What is Spicetify?

The best Spotify client mod

Spicetify is a command-line tool that you can use to modify your Spotify installation. It injects itself into the Spotify client, as Spotify is an Electron-based application. From there, it enables extensions and themes, which you can install from within the Spotify client. A new marketplace icon will be in the top left, and clicking it will bring you to a kind of shopfront with options to choose from.

While some of the extensions are pretty interesting, my favorite feature that Spicetify introduces is its extensive theming support. There are so many different themes that you can download and try out, and they'll be applied instantly. While your client will reload once you install it, your music will even still continue playing. I typically switch between the Matte theme (the one used in the screenshots here) or periwinkle-dark.

As for extensions that I use, I have the following installed:

  • Beautiful Lyrics
  • listPlaylistsWithSong
  • Song Stats
  • NPV Ambience

Beautiful Lyrics adds lyrics to all of your songs, even without a Premium account. It also has better cinematic views for lyrics that are a massive improvement over the default Spotify lyrics view, adds dynamic backgrounds to your lyrics, and can give you Romanized spellings of lyrics that are in another language. listPlaylistsWithSong is fairly simple, as you can right-click a song and it will tell you what playlists of yours that song is already in.

My personal favorite is Song Stats, as you can pick a song and get information about it pulled straight from the Spotify API. This includes the company's more "unique" metrics like "danceability", but more practical information like the key of the song and the BPM of the song as well, and can even be used to build your own music recommendation algorithms. Finally, NPV Ambience just provides a nice glow behind the now-playing image.

How to install Spicetify

It's a five-minute install, if even

Installing Spicetify depends on what platform you're on, but it supports Windows, macOS, and Linux (yes, even your Steam Deck). I use it on my Mac, but to install it on Windows with PowerShell you just run the following command. Keep in mind that on Windows, you need to use the official Spotify client from Spotify's website, not the one installed from the Microsoft Store.

iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/cli/main/install.ps1 | iex

On macOS and Linux, Spicetify can be installed with Brew, but you can also run the following command.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spicetify/cli/main/install.sh | sh

It will then install for you, and all you need to do is type "spicetify" in your terminal on any of those platforms to get instructions on how to inject it into your Spotify client. It may differ depending on the Spotify version you have installed, but it's not a difficult process and it will guide you through what you need to do.

The only difficulty you might face with Spicetify is dealing with Spotify updates. Sometimes, Spotify will push an update to the client that Spicetify won't support, so you'll need to wait before it can start working again. Other times, Spicetify might work, but an extension or theme might not. If the extension or theme is actively supported then it won't be an issue, but you may need to search for alternatives if the developer doesn't keep it up to date.

Otherwise, you're ready to go! It's a five-minute installation process, and you'll wonder why you ever used Spotify without it. The level of customization you get is immense, and I'm really glad that it's been maintained for all of these years and still works just as well as when I first used it back in 2021.