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Coldwave is minimal post-punk analog synth music that’s seen a huge resurgence in the past couple of years. While I knew and loved the likes of Fad Gadget, Hard Corps, Joy Division and The Future, I had little knowledge of the many lesser-known bands who’d self-released a vast amount of this chilled, sparse synth music on the back of the first wave of synthpop and industrial music in the early 1980s. Now several new labels have [...]

The new Spotify for Android app has been widely praised (not least by me) but there were some features from the previous version that were either dropped completely or hidden away. Fear not though as there are some workarounds you can try: read on to find out how!   How to Play Local Music Files Spotify on Android used to have a Local Files area that listed all the MP3s and other non-Spotify music files stored on your phone. You could [...]

The Spotify update for Ice Cream Sandwich came out of preview today – get the update (0.5.0) from the Play store. It’s a huge improvement over the previous released version, so you’ll definitely want to upgrade (no matter what version of Android you use). I reviewed the preview version of this update already, so here’s a look at what’s changed since then.   Playlist Folders The biggest new feature for me is Playlist Folders [...]

Here’s an interactive list of my favorite electronic record labels with music on Spotify. Click a link to start a new search on Spotify: it’s a quick and easy way to check what the label has released so far in 2013!   Synthpop / Electropop A Different Drum Boredomproduct Conzoom Records Electric Fantastic Sound Megahype Records Songs I Wish I Had Written Subterrane Wonderland Records Progress Productions Coldwave and Minimal [...]

After a rather slow and mediocre start to the year, some great new electronic albums have finally started to appear. Here’s a quick look at some of my favorites.   Digits – Death and Desire I featured Digits’ single Lost Dream on my Synthpop 2011 playlist last year: an excellent track, but it only hinted at the quality of this Digits album. Moody and brooding, there’s something intoxicatingly late-night about the tracks [...]

Spotify have been in overdrive this week, releasing the much-anticipated iPad app (I don’t have an iPad so can’t review it for you – sorry!) as well as an iPhone app update that adds gapless streaming and crossfading and details on a half-price offer for students in the UK. And on top of all that, they also found time to add a few new features and tweaks to the desktop app too.   Playlist Radio View a playlist then [...]

Spotify finally released an update to their Android app this week and boy did they come up with something special! Released as a “preview” version (so it’s not yet available in the Google Play store), this beta app is a complete rewrite that brings a host of features to Spotify on Android for the first time. It’s also fully compatible with Ice Cream Sandwich, making this the first Spotify tablet app. The web is full of press release [...]

So you know about the music of course. You may have also noticed audio dramas, plays, poetry, sound effect albums as well as TV, film, and videogame soundtracks on Spotify too. Another category you might not be aware of are music documentaries and artist interviews. Spotify has a good selection of artist interviews, especially from “hall of fame” rock stars and heavyweights such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Frank Zappa (ironically [...]

Among the many album-based playlists I make, I’ve also created several “concept” playlists which all have a bit of back-story, inclusion dilemma, structuring precisions and multiple viewpoints. So here’s a list of 5 Concept Spotify Playlists that I’m especially pleased with. They’re not my most subscribed (this Drive soundtrack playlist has nearly 4,000 23,000 subscribers!) but these five I consider [...]

UPDATE: try the new Spotify Preview for Android – a complete rewrite of the app and ICS-compatible! Who remembers the Android release called Gingerbread? This was version 2.3 released in December 2010 so it’s now over a year old, but unfortunately it remains the most-recent version of Android supported by Spotify. Honeycomb (v3.x) is not supported and neither is the version currently rolling out to millions of handsets and tablets [...]