Spotify


 * Radio ads
 * Pop-up banners when you move your mouse over menu items on the right and bottom of the screen
 * Region restricted to: Finland, France, UK, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Spain, US, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland and Sweden.
 * Users can send tracks to each other or subscribe to their playlists
 * Fifteen million tracks in its library
 * Maximum number of tracks per playlist 10000
 * Free accounts outside of the US are limited to 20 hours of streaming per week and a lifetime maximum of 5 plays per track (although not in the US/UK).

Focus
Spotify focuses on playing on-demand music tracks, either after search or from a playlist, these can come from the listeners local tracks or from Spotify's library. Note that a track played from a local library doesn't get counted as a stream so these will get no ad interruptions and no payment goes toward the artist from the banner ads.

The static playlists on Spotify work very well now that they've introduced (nested-)playlist folders. Tracks within a playlist also export quite easily by either Spotify's URI or an HTTP-link. With a maximum of 10,000 tracks per playlist Spotify supports the longest playlists of all streaming services, the length of a playlist does not slow down the opening of the list in neither the desktop- or web-player (unlike Rdio).

Strangely Spotify (unlike for example iTunes) doesn't support the creation of Smart playlists that can create dynamic playlists based on multiple listener preferences like: only local files + from specific genres + sorted randomly.

Spotify works less well with albums, especially compilations since these will get split up by artist even in the Library. Although Spotify can show when an album has been added it has no information about how many times it was played or the date last played (or even the playlist that contains the album). This makes Spotify work less well as a means to build up a profile (let alone showing it to others as a means for discovery).

Apps
There are a lot of 3rd party apps available from companies like Billboard, Last.fm, WeAreHunted and ShareMyPlaylists due to the popularity of Spotify's API. There are also apps from labels but these are mostly playlists showcasing their artists. For some reason it isn't possible to collapse this section even after adding (too) many apps.

Followers/Following
Spotify recently overhauled their subscribing-system (where listeners could subscribe to playlists made by others) into a follower/following system for listeners and artists (like Rdio and Deezer have) making it possible to see listener profiles, albeit limited to their playlists and people following/being followed. Artist profiles will show the number of people following that artists but that list can't be opened to discover listeners with similar tastes. Following other listeners, for now, doesn't generate any significant information for a follower like it does on Deezer and Rdio.

Radio
Artist radio isn't really that great and neither is the user play history (use Last.fm for that). This is a bit odd since Spotify does use The Echo Nest for its radio but it doesn't seem to use any of the advanced options. Related artists is great since you can play these directly (unlike Last.fm).

The site is a bit sparse on information regarding the use of the player. A good place to find further and new information is The Pansentient League.

Web-version
Unlike Pandora and Last.fm, Spotify has relied on desktop apps to deliver music to its listeners. However, this doesn't always work if you're using a computer that isn't yours, or you detest adding yet another app to your devices.

As an extra streaming option, Spotify is rolling out its Web player to user accounts. The Web player is located at http://play.spotify.com, but if you don't have access, you might still be able to get it without waiting. All you'll need to do is link your Facebook to your Spotify account. Follow these steps to enable the web version if you can't access it yet. When done correctly you can use this link for the web interface.

There are some differences between the desktop-app and the web-version:
 * You can block the ads on the web page with ABP, Spotify will pop-up a message that it works better without but so far nothing is broken whit ABP switched on.
 * Scrobbling on the webpage doesn't work, not sure if it connects to Facebook either.
 * On the webpage you no longer have access to the 3rd party apps.
 * The desktop-app is a bit of a memory/bandwidth-hogg, this (Flash-)version uses less memory and you're no longer part of Spotify's P2P-network, instead it streams directly from the servers.
 * On the webpage there don't seem to be radio-ads?
 * It's not possible to send tracks to other people or to see their profile.
 * Playlists can't be sorted by their columns.

(Web-)Tools

 * If you've already played a number of tracks through last.fm you can set-up an account on Shikaka. Besides all the information on your playing statistics on Last.fm there's the option to get top tracks you've never played from another user's playhistory and have them played in Spotify.
 * FindTheBand It uses the last.fm similar artists feature to find music in Spotify.
 * New on Spotify a selection of new-release albums and singles added to Spotify over the last 7 days. The country codes indicate which territory the album is available in (GB = Britain, SE = Sweden etc.)
 * Playlistify Create your own playlists from different sources (Last.FM, YouTube) that can be imported in Spotify. Or search other users playlists and import them into Spotify
 * Moretrackslikethis Get more Spotify music recommendations, based on your favourite tracks. Results are drawn from the listening habits of 40 million active last.fm subscribers.
 * Pitchify collects reviews from the two excellent webzines Pitchfork and Drowned In Sound on a daily basis, then checks if the reviewed albums are available on Spotify. Only albums that have received a rating of 8 or more (out of 10) will be included on Pitchify. Lots of albums are reviewed every day, and thousands of tracks added to Spotify every week. Pitchify tries to sort through the pile, throw away the Gagas and the Nickelbacks and present you with the very best that Spotify has to offer. Albums that are not immediately available on Spotify will be added to Pitchify's queue, and presented on Pitchify when they become available.
 * SpNotify is a service that updates you on your favourite artists and songs on Spotify. Simply tell us what you want to keep track on and you’ll receive a notification as soon as it’s available.
 * Spo.fm Gets new releases on Spotify based on your listening on Last.fm. When I tried it on my account it got blocked when I set the count to "All" and had to limit it to 350 before I got results.
 * Spotibot Create playlists based on your (or someone else's) music recommendations on last.fm.
 * Spotify forum (unofficial) a forum dedicated to Spotify, and run by Spotify users. They are not associated with Spotify, though represented in their membership. They aim to help users of Spotify make the most of this innovative application, and to help provide information to potential "Spotifiers", to win them over to the world of Spotify.
 * Spotify + Last.fm is a Greasemonkey script that adds a little link next to every artist's name in the form of a green music icon on last.fm-pages to directly search for that artist on Spotify. This also works for tracks and albums. Very handy, it saves on typing and binds Last.fm and Spotify together nicely.
 * Spotify Hunted The 99 hottest songs in the world streamed live from Spotify.

Standard tools for exporting Loved Tracks

 * Spotibot (only loved tracks)
 * Playlistify

These two sites offer an easy way of finding loved tracks based on giving them a username. Playlistify has had some outages but normally they're really stable. I've tested both sites to see what results they give and it turned out that Playlistify gave more results back than Spotibot (20 tracks more of my Loved-list).

Playlistify also has an option for adding the url of an xspf-file but no option to upload one, not that handy since you can only download the file from Last.fm but not link to it. The downside of using Playlistify however is that they have sound effects while searching that are really annoying if you're listening to music. There is an option to turn this off.

Both services have a problem with searching for tracks if the number of loved-tracks is fairly large. So far anything under a thousand tracks on Last.fm gives good results, but when I tried a user with 5064 tracks loved and another with 7455 both came back as either not a valid username or zero results. It turned out that because I had enabled AdBlockPlus both sites somehow couldn't trigger the export from Last.fm. The strange thing is that after I had disabled ABP both sites could only "see" the first 700 tracks from large lists.

Ivyshere
A better solution for long lists is to not export the list in Last.fm as a xspf-file but to choose for TSV as the format in the drop-down menu (it's right underneath where it says XSPF). The export takes some time (tested it on a list with 7455 tracks) but after that you have your list in a format that can be read by Calc (part of the free OpenOffice-suite) or in Excel. Make sure that you're importing the data as UTF-8 otherwise artist and track names get maimed when they have characters like ë, é or ô.

The file will contain one column with the track name, one with the artist and one with the Last.fm-URL for that track.

Open your spreadsheet application of choice and import the data in the file (usually something like "Data" and then "Import"). While importing tell the application that the data is deliminated (split) by a tab (make sure that any option for comma is not selected) and click import. After that you have all your tracks information in front of you, make sure you see the three columns. Now you have your data in Excel you need switch the order (tracks and then artists) to artists first, before copying.

Now select the first track name at the top left, scroll all the way down to the last artist names and shift-click that name. Copy those to the clipboard (ctrl+v).

Next, open the following url in your browser: http://www.ivyishere.org/ and click on "import your playlist now", go to the copy+paste section. Click the field and paste (ctrl+v) the list. You can adjust the results so they only return the original versions (the reason why anyone would want the covers is beyond me) and the option to only return tracks that are available in your country (meh). Next click on upload and the site looks through the list if it can recognize the format. You then get asked whether you want it to look for them in the available tracks on Spotify, click yes (obviously) and it goes to work. After some time you get to see a picture with underneath it a text with "Click to paste to clipboard", do so.

Next, go to the Spotify application, open a new playlist, go to Edit and click on Paste. Now you have playlist with all your loved-tracks in Spotify.

An alternative for ivyishere.com is http://spotmysongs.com/ but that one is a bit more work. I'll test it later to see if it gets more results.

Finetuning: I've solved most of the issues with importing Last.fm's tsv-files into OpenOffice (rename extension to .csv => open in Calc => set character set to UTF-8 => set both artist and track column to "text" => good import) I'll write it out tonight in a journal with some screenshots.

Finetuning 3: Ivy gives different results depending on the time of day|how busy Spotify's servers are.

Exporting your complete Playhistory
Go to http://cs.joensuu.fi/~pviktor/lastscrape/ and download + install LastScrape (windows only). Unzip the file and start the program, enter your username and let it scrape Last.fm for your playhistory. This will take a lot of time if you've played a lot of music. When it's done you can close the program since you're not going to upload the data to libre.fm. Important: I've tested this with six other accounts and with half of them (including mine T__T) the scraping got stuck somewhere. Inside the folder/directory where LastScrape is unzipped you'll find a text-file called "listens.txt".

Finding the tracks on Spotify
Follow these steps:
 * Open the textfile and select everything that's in it.
 * Open a spreadsheet program like Excel or Calc and choose for "paste special", in the dialogue-box choose for "paste as unicode". That way the data will be pasted in three separate columns.
 * Now you can choose to let the data be as is but you can also have it searched by historical order. You can do this by selecting the third column and change the order (make sure you let it expand the range so the artists and tracks are also re-ordered).
 * Next, select the artists and the tracks. Keep in mind that Spotify has a limit of 10000 tracks per playlist, so it's best to select them in batches of 10K.
 * Go to http://ivishere.org, click on "import your playlist now" => "copy+paste-section" => paste the tracks there. Let that search for the tracks on Spotify.
 * After a while it has found the tracks that are available on Spotify, click on the button and they're copied to the clipboard.
 * Go to a new playlist in Spotify and choose paste in the menu bar (don't know why you can't do that directly in the list, but oh well)
 * Rinse and repeat for the other tracks.

Assorted playlists

 * _Buffer - +8000 tracks
 * Originals that are less famous... then their covers.
 * Indie Now
 * WeAreHunted - new music

Company blurb
''Any track you like, any time you like. Just search for it in Spotify, then play it. Any artist, any album, any genre - all available instantly. With Spotify, there are no limits to the amount of music you could listen to. Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want it.''