Yeah, Jim's knack for searching is uncanny.

Here's something:

One of the core features of Spotify is searching. You just type the name of an artist or a song into the search bar and off you go. Normally that's all you need to get the Spotify experience: you know, when you think of some music and literally seconds later you're listening to it.

There are cases, though, when you need to refine your queries. Perhaps you don't want to search for "madonna", because you're not looking for the artist Madonna, but rather songs whose titles include the word "madonna". Then you can search for "title:madonna".

Similarly, you can search for "album:madonna" and "artist:madonna" to find only matching albums and artists, respectively.

To further refine your searches (or to indulge in some nostalgia or browse through a new musical genre), you can search for a year, a range of years or a genre: "year:1969", "year:1994-1996" or "genre:soul".

Logically, you can use combinations to search for techno from the early 90s or Grateful Dead songs from the late 60s: "genre:techno year:1990-1995" or "artist:"grateful dead" year:1965-1970". In the latter example, you see how you can use quotes to control to what parts of the search string a keyword applies.

https://news.spotify.com/us/2008/01/22/searching-spotify/