Digital music might not have the same allure as sitting down to listen to a record on your turntable, but what it lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in convenience — especially when you aren't home with your collection.
Spotify Kids - an app packed with singalongs, soundtracks, and playlists made just for kids. Family Mix - a playlist based on the tastes of everyone on the plan. Explicit filter - the plan’s manager can choose if members get explicit music. Start a Premium Family plan. The person who wants to manage the plan signs up. Spotify Finally Allows You to Add as Many Songs to Your Library as You Want. Which lets you and other people control the same playlist, similar to the TouchTunes jukebox app. It’s also adding. Mobile and tablet. Note: Your Spotify account must be connected to Facebook to find your friends in this list. Tap View Profile. Tap FIND FRIENDS. Tap FOLLOW ALL or next to someone specific. Tip: Tap again to stop following. Or, ask your friends to share their profile with you.
It's been five years since Spotify publicly launched and shifted the music industry's focus toward streaming as a way to combat illegal downloading. While the streaming business model is far from perfect, even the most casual music fan should test out streaming while it's still growing.
See also: How Spotify Engineered the New Music Economy
Adding People On Spotify App Download
If you're just dipping your toe into the stream, follow our beginner's guide and soon you'll be listening to Spotify's massive library without the worry of losing precious hard drive space.
Signing Up
As with most services, you can register for Spotify by connecting your Facebook account for optimal social features, or create an account with your email address.
Pick the subscription that suits your music habits. The prices are in USD, but the tiers are the same internationally: No cost will get you desktop listening interrupted by ads; $4.99 per month allows for unlimited desktop streaming; users who pay the premium $9.99 per month can listen on all desktop (via desktop app or web player) and mobile devices with offline syncing privileges on mobile (Spotify Radio is the only free mobile feature.)
Users at the premium tier can also listen to music at a higher bit rate, which is essential for anyone who has quality headphones or earbuds.
Image: Spotify
Before you start listening, check your preferences and privacy settings to make sure you are sharing as much or as little with the world as you'd like. If you connected your Spotify to Facebook but don't want to broadcast your tunes on your News Feed, uncheck the Facebook sharing option. Leave the Spotify sharing section checked to show up in your followers' feeds — this amplifies Spotify's social music discovery potential.
This page is important because you can choose whether or not to make your playlists viewable to the public as soon as you start, or make it public on your own terms. Also, you can opt-out of Spotify showing your top artists and tracks on your public profile, if you aren't one to brag about such things. Plus, you can connect your Spotify account to Last.fm so your scrobbles stay representative.
Organizing Your Music
Library and Local Files
In the left sidebar, you will find your Collection. Here, you can access local files (go to Preferences to manage the folders from which Spotify can import files) and music saved to playlists. The Library section puts all of this music in one place. By accessing the files found on your hard drive, Spotify acts as a one-stop shop for listening to all your music, meaning you don't have to open iTunes or another player.
Playlists
Playlists are Spotify's main draw. You can create your own by clicking the New Playlist button, or following and subscribing to other users' playlists. Bookmark an album by saving it as a playlist, too.
Image: Spotify
You can also set up a collaborative playlist among friends to prep for that that perfect road trip or party. Right click on a playlist to check off the collaborative option and share the playlist with your friends. This alt-menu also shows the option to change the privacy settings to 'Make Public' or 'Make Secret,' depending on your preferences.
See also: 11 Tips and Tricks for Spotify Power Users
Image: Spotify
Adding People On Spotify App Subscription
If you want to stay up-to-date with a specific user's playlist, click the green 'Follow' button on the bottom of the top title bar, and it will save to your side bar. You'll get a notification when songs are added to the playlist.
Free Spotify App
Play Queue
This option is ideal for when you aren't listening to an album, since queuing up a song via the right-click menu will place it after the track you are currently listening to, and will interrupt a record.
When listening to a playlist or playing music in the background, the queue is great for accommodating requests and spur of the moment sing-a-longs with friends.
Sharing and Discovering Tunes
In the last year, Spotify has significantly amped up its social and music discovery features to keep up with its competitor Rdio, which prioritizes social discovery.
See also: 7 Music Discovery Tools to Find New Tunes
Following
Image: Spotify
Spotify lets you follow friends, artists and organizations (follow Mashable's account here!) to see what your network is listening to. You will get a notification when artists you follow add music to their catalogues.
The social feed lives in the right sidebar, and at the top Spotify will make recommendations to follow, including Facebook friends or artists your friends enjoy. This feed will show what your friends are listening to right now, songs they've added to playlists, new playlists they've created, tracks they've starred, and playlists, songs and albums they've shared on Spotify.
If you didn't register your Spotify account through Facebook, you can still search for friends and organizations via the search bar.
Sending and Sharing Music
Image: Spotify
You can highlight your favorite music in Spotify's social feed by sharing via the button on artist, album or playlist pages, or the right-click menu. Write a message and check your connected social networks if you want to share to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, too.
The Send tab on the right of the box allows you to send music to individual users in a private message.
Discover
The Discover section is filled with custom recommendations based on your music history. If you are stuck picking out something new to listen to, you can get lost scrolling down this page.
Image: Spotify
In addition to suggestions of new artists deemed algorithmically similar to ones you already love, Spotify will remind you of albums and songs you haven't listened to in a while. Sometimes the recommendations don't feel right, but the algorithm can only improve the more you use it. Unfortunately, there is no option to reject or modify suggestions at this time.
If you are unsure you might like one of Spotify's suggestions, hover over the album art until a play button appears. Then click it and hold down to preview the song.
This will interrupt whatever you are currently listening to, but once you let go of the play button, your song will resume. It is not the smoothest listening feature, but it can come in handy, especially when browsing to make a playlist.
Apps
Spotify's unique apps can also help you find music when you aren't feeling inspired, or you'd like a change of scenery. Some apps will tell you the lyrics of the song you're listening to, others will provide you with a review, and a few will show you what is trending on the charts, web and social media.
We recommended the following apps: Pitchfork, This Is My Jam, Domino, Twitter #Music (formerly We Are Hunted), Any Decent Music?, Blue Note, TuneWiki and Billboard.
Radio
Spotify Radio functions like a typical Internet radio service. You can create stations by artist, song, album and genre, and upvote or downvote songs you love or hate. Spotify Radio is free to use on the mobile app, even if you aren't a Spotify Premium user.
Mobile
Image: Spotify
Music Spotify App
Spotify's mobile app is a pared-down version of the web player (tablet apps more closely resemble the web player), from which you can select playlists to download for offline listening, to save your data usage. This is only available for Premium users.
Another feature exclusive to the mobile app is Browse. This saves you the trouble of coming up with a playlist yourself, which is helpful when you're out and about while using Spotify on your smartphone.
Now that you've completed your crash course on Spotify, get streaming!
Mashable composite image: iStockphoto, akindo
Spotify is one most popular online music streaming services. There are number of factors which make Spotify a better service to try. Now, there are number of free Spotify plugins / add-ons / apps available on Internet which would make this online music streaming service a far more better thing to try.
These Spotify plugins / add-ons / app makes Spotify more fun more by letting you see lyrics while listening to songs, check out the details of the song being played, offering you with hotkeys for actions like pause, play, next, previous and many more.
Here are 6 best freeSpotify Plugins / add-ons / app:
LYRIFY
Lyrify is the best Spotify plugin for the users looking for an easier way to get the lyrics of the songs being played. This Spotify app will automatically search and fine the lyrics and will display them on another window. but it is compatible with Windows OS only. If you are looking for a similar add on on Mac, you should try LYRICSPOT.
SPOTIFY 2 SKYPE
This is an interesting Spotify add-on as it lets you display the current Spotify song as your status on Skype. Its just like letting the world know what you are listening to. This plugin for Spotify integrates well with Skype. It is compatible on Windows only.
SPOTIFYDJ
SpotifyDJ is an interesting Spotify plugin which required Adobe AIR. This app lets you broadcast your live DJ sessions to other users on Windows and Mac. If you are into DJ-ing, I bet you would love this add-on as its worth trying. It is compatible on Mac and Windows OS.
SPOTIFY REMOTE
This little Spotify app can prove to be very handy as it lets you control Spotify using your mobile phone. Isn’t it interesting? This plugin deserves a chance if were looking for a way to control Spotify remotely.
SPOTIFY TWEAKS
Spotify Tweaks is the best Spotify plugin available on Internet which is a one stop solution for your need of Spotify add-ons like Lyric Search to search and find lyrics on Spotify, Spotify RSS to find latest happenings on Spotify, Advanced Spotify Search to do custom search for albums, artists, songs and there are many more functionalities that this all in one Spotify plugin would offer.
TOASTIFY
Toastify is the another Spotify plugin available on Internet which completes it with respect to functionality. This add-on is compatible on Windows which lets you use shortcuts / hotkeys for Spotify actions like Play, Pause, Previous, Next.
Related posts: