Today sees the publication of Spotify for Dummies, a new book that details the ins and outs of Spotify and many of the  related third-party apps and websites. I spoke to author Kim Gilmour and asked her to tell us a little more about the book: read on for this exclusive interview!       Who is Spotify for Dummies aimed at? Anyone who uses Spotify can benefit, but beginners and occasional users will get the most out of it. [...]

Synthpop and electronic music website The Electricity Club (TEC) hosted their first ever live event at the weekend. Situated on New Oxford Street, The Bowery was the ideal venue for an extended night of English electropop. Featuring a team of TEC DJs and live performances from CURXES and VILE ELECTRODES, this was an essential event for anyone interested in new synth music. TEC writer Steve Gray kicked off the night the with first DJ set, [...]

Back in August we looked at Jamcast, a 3rd-party PC app that lets you listen to Spotify on a PlayStation or Xbox. This general-purpose DNLA app showed a lot of promise for coupling with Spotify, and while not the only solution it’s by far the easiest. The developers at Jamcast obviously saw the mutual benefit of their app working with Spotify, and now that Spotify finally allow their API to be used commercially (subject to Spotify [...]

An EP is a curious musical item: too short to be called an album, too long to be a single, in my pre-Spotify days I used to see them as a good way to buy “half an album” to see whether I liked a band or not. Anyway, here are four new electronic EPs I’d be happy to spend money on!   Tenek – EP2 Regular readers on this blog will know I love Tenek, whose album On The Wire featured in our Top 10 Synthpop Albums of 2010 (although [...]

A reader of this blog sent me an email recently to ask how to search for an artist or song in playlists on Spotify Mobile. This would seem like a simple question with a simple answer. Unfortunately Spotify have made it rather difficult to do this, but there is a way to kind of get what you want. Read on for the solution! Reader Joe asked the following: “I’ve recently upgraded to Spotify Premium and am having trouble with it [...]

Several Spotify-related sites combine album reviews from multiple sources with links to listen in Spotify. Biblify is one, along with Pitchify and Spotimy. New site TheBlend is the latest, combining reviews from eight different resources with Last.fm genre tags to create a slick and easy-to-use website. TheBlend aggregates reviews from across the web and adds links to Last.fm, Spotify, and Grooveshark. Developer Nick Langridge created TheBlend [...]

On the outer edges of the electronic music scene lives a strange cargo of bands, geographically distant but all sharing a love of spaced-out retro electronica. Many in this expanding synth-wave have remodeled styles of early 80s sci-fi and VHS horror movie soundtracks to suit their post-Internet lives, while others re-imagine Krautrock and synthpop into new forms of music yet to be properly classified. Here are five new electronic albums [...]

Love it or hate it, Spotify is now firmly embedded within social network behemoth Facebook. The integration is so deep that new Spotify users are required to have a Facebook login to access Spotify. This upset a lot of people but for me it’s not really a problem: I already have a Spotify account (and I’ve not been forced to switch this to a Facebook one), I already have a Facebook account, There are many other services I subscribe [...]

I use Spotify on my Samsung Galaxy S II Android phone every day, and its limitations are really starting to grate. I’ve already posted at length about how Spotify’s Android app pales in comparison to its iPhone counterpart (see the Spotify Mobile Faceoff: iPhone vs. Android), but there are some problems that I’ve gotten so used to that I wanted to step back and list a few things that really ought to be in there.   I’m [...]

As Spotify’s Facebook love blooms, several other minor (and not so minor) changes were sneaked into Spotify at the same time. We’ll come back to the new Facebook + Spotify features shortly, but for now here’s a look at all those other tweaks and improvements.   Playlist Sharing to People List – You can now share an entire playlist in one go to friends in your people list (previously you could only share single [...]