By Catherine Nielsen, MT-BC

If you are looking for a way to expand your repertoire, enjoy more music, make your own playlists, and share music with friends, try Spotify. This new music sharing tool can benefit both you personally and your music therapy practice, and the best part is, it is free!

I started using Spotify over the summer to listen to music for exercise, for enjoyment, and for children’s literature and nursery rhymes, for my two small children. I was impressed with the variety of music you can easily search, create playlists, follow playlists or artists you like, share music, and save songs to your phone or desktop without having to purchase them.

We all know how critical music enjoyment and music listening is to our own self-care and to our music therapy practice. Spotify is a valuable tool to music therapists not only because of the variety of music that is available to listen for free for your own enjoyment, but the search options available when finding new music to learn or share in a session. You can search Spotify easily by genre, artist, theme, mood, song title, era, in order to find music that is most relevant and meaningful to our clients.

Below are some specific ways you can supercharge your MT practice with Spotify!

Benefits  of Spotify in Your MT Practice:

  • Listen to music for free

  • Create your own playlists or playlists for your clients (easy drag & drop!)

  • Share music with one click to other therapists, friends, or a playlist

  • Collaborate with others on custom playlists – we ove this one!

  • Follow friends, artists, or businesses Spotify playlists

  • Explore new music genres with unlimited music selections

  • Choose from multiple song versions to find the most authentic for your client

  • Make your own radio stations based on a song, artist, or genre you like

  • Search artists, band, style, mood, to expand your own repertoire, relate to clients who have different music preferences, and save songs for future sessions

  • Access spotify offline – any saved songs can be accessed offline on any of your devices (In a session, you can now use recorded music from Spotfiy for music listening, song choice. music for relaxation, lyric analysis)

 

Spotify for Anyone:

 

Click here to follow PBMTI on Spotify and view some of our top playlists for:

Top 100 Songs for Older Adults

Top 100 Children’s Nursery Rhymes

Top 100 Classical Favorites

Music for Relaxation

Music for Substance Abuse Recovery

PBMTI Staff Favorites

 

Get involved! Once you have set up your own Spotify account here are some ways you can get involved with PBMTI Spotify to collaborate on effective songs and music, and share your music with us as well.

  1. Add a few of your top songs to our playlists for the population you work in. We would love your contribtuion!

(all collaborative playlists are marked with a crowd icon)

  1. Create your own playlist for a poplulation you work with and we may add it to our profile. Create and share your playlist with our Spotify account or e-mail.

  2. Browse our playlists for songs we have found effective in therapy to get ideas for your practice and expand your reppertoire (see example below of our Top 100 Songs for Older Adults)

  3. Enjoy! make some personal play lists on your own free Spotify account to simply enjoy the music that is out there for yourself.

 

See you on Spotify!

 

IMAGES IN HEADER:

1.) Search by Genre 2.) Search by Mood 3.) PBMTI Playlist for Older Adults 4.) Spotify Homepage