Two excellent new Spotify sites have arrived in the past week: Social Spotify, which offers a novel way to share your playlists with friends, and Spotify Collection: a site that may well solve the playlist management problem once and for all with its iTunes-like navigation of album art and genres.
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Social Spotify
Social Spotify (socialspoty.com) is a new website from Rodrigo Perez. It’s aim is to let you easily share your Spotify playlists with friends. There’s no login required: all you do is go to the site and paste in your playlist URL. You can then set the genre, give it a title, and upload some album art. Once done, click one of the share buttons to either share on facebook or share on blog or website. Sharing on Facebook posts a wall comment with the playlist details and album art. The second share link displays some widget code for you to copy and paste into a blog post or webpage. Here’s one I made earlier:
Social Spotify’s Facebook sharing is better than Spotify’s own in-built options (which doesn’t even include the playlist’s name) as it shows the playlist art, name, number of tracks and genre. The widget clicks-thru to show you the playlist’s track-listing too: very cool!
Spotify Collection
The other week I was sitting in a French cafe with a software developer discussing what we thought was missing from all the Spotify community sites: there are hundreds of custom-playlist sharing sites but what we wanted was some kind of webtool to manage your own personal collection of albums on Spotify. We wanted an app that used album art for visual navigation and would let you sort and place albums into multiple genres. My Firefox Bookmarks workaround was OK, but it lacked the album art and multiple genres. The Spotify client itself was woefully inadequate once you have more than a couple dozen albums to track. As we sipped our espressos, we discussed the coding challenges and soon realized is was quite a big task. A few days later however, and completely out of the blue, Per Jonsson got in touch to tell me about his new webapp called Spotify Collection (spotifycollection.com) – I quickly realized that this was almost exactly the site we’d been imagining!
Spotify Collection (not to be confused with the similarly named Spotify Collections) is a web-based app that lets you build a collection of favourite albums on Spotify. To use, you create an account then start to add albums by pasting in the Spotify URLs. Spotify Collection will locate the album art (usually) then add it to a navigation area. You can then assign one or several genres to the album, based on genres you define (for example, I created a genre called Trance and another called Psybient. Most of my trance albums will be in one genre or the other, but I might want some in both. Spotify Collection lets me do that easily). Once you’ve added a few albums the benefits of this app become apparent. There are three Sort tabs to sort by artist, album, or date added and you can also use the Genre and Artist pulldown menus on the left to sort and filter your collection. Clicking on an album cover either launches the album in Spotify or lets you edit the details (assign genres, modify the album’s name or artist and change the cover picture). You can easily share you collection too, as each has its own unique URL. Mine is at:
http://www.spotifycollection.com/afront
There are of course a few areas for improvement: you can’t assign a genre to multiple albums at the same time, for example, and the album art fetch isn’t perfect. But Spotify Collection is a super-slick professional-looking webapp that’s free to use, and it could well be the site to finally solve all your playlist management problems (or at least until Spotify themselves deliver something better). The site has some rudimentary sharing options (Facebook, Twitter, Pusha) and developer Per Jonsson seems keen to respond to user suggestions (for example, the ability to edit or delete genres is a recent update). All-in-all, this app comes highly recommended!