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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 [...]

German electronic music shaped my music tastes more than any other. As a young boy in Scotland in the early 1980s, hearing Kraftwerk for the first time had such a huge impact on me that I immediately archived all my Beatles and ABBA records and sought out anything I could find by Kraftwerk, Nena, Alphaville and the rest of the Neue Deutsche Welle. I even signed up to learn German at school for the sole reason of being able to understand [...]

There haven’t been too many great electronic albums so far this year, but that’s no problem: I’ve been going back to check out some releases from last year that I’d initially missed. Here’s a short selection – a late delivery – of electronica from 2011!   Asura – 360 Asura expertly mix in trance ambient and World Music elements into their sound. Sometimes I find pure ambient music a little [...]