Playlists

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 subscribers!) but these five I consider proper [...]

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 [...]

Summoned from the depths of The Spotify Catalog using special powers, mixed into a sonical Potion of Awesome by my bare hands then cast as the finest Electro-Witch House, Haunted Pop, Dark Dubstep and Goth-Electronica – Here’s my bewitching (and slightly creepy) playlist of Hauntronica! Featuring The Weird Sisters of: Fever Ray, The Knife, Austra, Emika, Gazelle Twin, The Horn The Hunt, Zola Jesus, Labyrinth Ear, White [...]

We both heard the same beat in the beginning, but where did you go from there? Perhaps you discovered one or two favorite styles then settled back to explore similar bands. Some of my friends have stayed  hovering around one genre since the day I met them, never venturing out to try something different or perhaps checking out a track or two but then scurrying back to the familiarity of the soundtrack of their youth. I’m a bit [...]

Tubufy and SpotMyVideo are two new webapps that create YouTube-powered music video channels from your Spotify playlists. Whereas sites like Playlistify.org can convert a YouTube playlist into a Spotify one, Tubufy and SpotMyVideo do the reverse: feed them a Spotify link to generate your own custom music video playlist on YouTube.   SpotMyVideo SpotMyVideo is ideal if you only have a few songs to check out. Go to the site then paste [...]

Spotify’s Related Artists tab may act as a basic music recommendation service, but it’s left to the 3rd-party webapps to provide a more personal experience. Sites like Spotibot, Spotiseek and even ShareMyPlaylists all offer a way to generate a playlist for you, either based on an artist name or by checking what you’ve been listening to via Last.fm. A cool new service - truShuffle – has just launched that raises [...]

ShareMyPlaylists.com is the top Spotify playlist-sharing site. With close to 45 thousand playlists, no other playlist sharing site comes close in terms of catalog or features. SMP has just launched a free mobile app on two new platforms: the iPhone version has been out for a while now, but this week saw their arrival on both iPad and Android. TechCrunch have covered the iPad version, so here’s a look at ShareMyPlaylists on Android. ShareMyPlaylists [...]

Towards the end of 1980, His Majesty’s Starship Derbyshire, the pride of the British Space Agency fleet, blasted off into Outer Space on a mission of imperial urgency. The Derbyshire was crewed by six of Britain’s finest astronauts, hastily trained to prepare for a task of extraordinary circumstance. Jodrell Bank had detected an alien spacecraft briefly entering the inner solar system before retreating to an orbit around 90377 [...]

Featuring over four hours of this year’s best synthpop and electropop singles, 2010: The Year We Made Synthpop is a carefully crafted and sequenced playlist that includes over 60 artists to give you a taste of what’s been happening this year in this ever-evolving, always exciting electronic music scene. With new singles from the synthpop old-guard (Human League, OMD, Devo, John Foxx, Erasure) through to electro tunes from the [...]

Although Spotify has over 10 million songs, there are sometimes bands I’d like to listen who aren’t on there yet: The Beatles, Rammstein, Arcade Fire, Oasis and some of these bands too. Spotify also lacks audiobooks and audio-drama (such as the excellent Big Finish Doctor Who range), so there are occasions when you’re forced to listen to those things your grandparents talk about: MP3 files. Since I listen to music on my [...]