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 click Start Playlist Radio, or right-click on a playlist then select Playlist Radio.
Starts a new “radio station” based on the tracks in a playlist. Much like the Artist radio (and indeed echofi), the radio session plays a song and displays the album art with a big Skip button next to it to jump to the next song. The selection of songs is determined by The Echo Nest, a highly-regarded 3rd-party music intelligence system. It will occasionally play a song that’s already in the playlist or a song by an artist who’s already in the playlist, but mostly you’ll hear all-new tracks with a similar vibe.
Playlist Radio, showing previously played tracks in a coverflow. You can click each cover to jump to that album, or click the Skip button to play the next track.
Spotify Social: Share to Tumblr, In-App Twitter Sharing
Click the Share button when viewing a track, artist, album or playlist, or right-click then select Share To.
Spotify Social has been updating with a few new features. Sharing to Windows Messenger has been replaced with an option to share to Tumblr (no doubt in exchange for Tumblr adding Spotify buttons to their own platform), and you can now share to Twitter without jumping out to a web page. The Share popup has a new configure button now for you to set up your account logins for Twitter and Tumblr, and the sharing to Spotify friends has been moved to its own tab. Best of all though, you can now enable or disable the Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr buttons to share to all three networks at the same time.
The new Share popup with options to share to multiple networks at the same time.
Music Announcements
Appear on the main What’s New page during a promotional campaign. Disable by clicking the off button top-right on the campaign banner, or select Edit > Preferences > Music Announcements: Hide on What’s New Page.
Music Announcements arrived a few weeks ago with the release of the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Similar to the homepage takeover ads seen by Spotify’s free users, these “announcements” seem to be feature-rich interactive commercials. If you like the band being promoted they’re great: the Chili Peppers one was more like a Spotify App for the band, with a playable discography, detail on the new album and embedded music videos (although unfortunately these were blocked for external play by the record label – duh!)
I’m slightly concerned by commercials like this creeping into my paid-for Spotify Premium, but Spotify have made them easy to turn off and the interactive nature of these “announcements” make them more like apps than ads.
Enable/disable from the Preferences menu.