The past few months have seen some great new sites and webapps arrive to help you get more out of Spotify. Sites like SpNotify and Gigero offer unique features and free services you won’t find anywhere else. Here’s a look at three more of my favourite new Spotify-themed sites.

.

Stalkify

The wonderfully-named Stalkify is a mash-up site that can stream whatever a Last.fm user is listening to in real-time. All you do is enter a Last.fm user name (a friend, a band, a random) then Stalkify returns a page with options to listen in live, listen to the user’s all-time favourites, or listen to their top tracks from past seven days, 3 months, 6 months or from the past year. Click a link for Stalkify to automatically open Spotify and populate it with a custom playlist. You can then start listening or hit the subscribe link to save the playlist. The live playlist option is especially cool: as the user you’re “stalking” listens to music (and note it doesn’t matter whether they use Spotify or not), new tracks are automatically added to the bottom of the playlist (provided they’re available in Spotify of course).

If you use Spotify I strongly recommend you set up a Last.fm account and enable scrobbling. What this does is take a note of every song you listen to in Spotify, iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player etc.

Stalkify isn’t perfect: it sometimes gets stuck reading in a user’s tracks and the live update seems to be a bit hit-and-miss. But this clever app is an excellent showcase for what’s possible with Spotify’s programmer tools.

.

Spotirama

Spotirama is a blog from cabal, a blogger who confesses to having a “Nick-Hornbian obsession for lists and charts“. The blog specializes in making Spotify playlist versions of published lists. For example, the Guardian’s New Bands of the Day, the complete Now That’s What I Call Music series, and Pitchfork’s Top 100 Albums of the 70s. For each list, cabal posts an overview and a list of all the original tracks. He’ll also indicate which songs are currently missing from Spotify, striking them out in the list and giving the overall availability score. For example, the list “Gibson.com Top 50 Guitarists of All Time” scores 47 out of 50, 94%, about 3 hours.

I love the theme of this blog and it’s always interesting to see how many tracks are on Spotify for any given list.

.

Yoctomusic

Yoctomusic is a weekly guide to new releases on Spotify. Each post is in the form of a mini-newsletter, with a write-up on the week’s featured artist (the “Yoctomusic Choice“), a list of some select new releases, and a section with other recommended listens. The New Releases section includes album art thumbnails, a short description  taken from a reputable source (such as The Guardian, The Music Fix, Sputnik Music) and a useful indication of the release’s genre. You can also subscribe to updates by email.

I’m always on the lookout for new music, so yoctomusic is instantly one of my go-to sites. It’s well-written, cleanly presented, and has already put me on to some great new sounds.