8.31.2011

Listmania! Spotify Edition!

Hey!  

Do you Spotify yet?  How can you be a fan of music and not know what spotify is?  Better yet, how can you read this blog and not spotify?

Herc puts a spotify playlist on all of his music monday posts and any of them that he thinks are worthy of a playlist.  Even my brownie post has a playlist.  You are missing out of half of the experience of his posts by not using the spotify links.

So, for those of you losers who aren't spotify-ing Herc has put together this Listmania! on all things spotify. Who's not on it, what to listen to, if its right for you, etc.  Join spotify, ya'll.  You'll thank us later.  For the rest of the post, I give you, Herc himself:


Image borrowed from here.


7 Questions To Help You Decide If Spotify Is Right For You
1)  Do you enjoy waiting to hear the music you want to hear, when and where you want to hear it rather than typing in a song title and hearing it immediately, anywhere within cell or wi-fi range?(Dev says: Think of it as try before you buy!)
2)  Do you enjoy trying to navigate buggy, difficult to use, resource intensive software rather than intuitive, familiar and easy to use programs and applications?(Your grandma could figure it out...)
3)  Do you prefer a limited selection of songs to listen to rather than a mammoth 15 million song library that adds another 15,000 songs each and every day?(Its almost too much music, I have maxed out my allotted time more than once...)
4)  Do you have an infinite amount of storage for your digital music collection rather than just a hard drive or smart phone?(No, Mr. Herc, I do not.  You have a valid point here.)
5)  Do you think the best way to share the music you are listening to is to drive down the street with your windows rolled down and the volume turned up rather than sending a simple link to an entire playlist?(My neighbors do!)
6)  Do you prefer to listen to music chosen by other people or computers rather than actively participating in your listening experience?(Don't encourage the machine takeover...)
7)  Do you think listening to music should be a complicated, mind-numbing hassle rather than a joyful, never-ending journey?(Music should not be work...)
If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, Spotify may not be for you.  [Full disclosure: Herc answered “yes” to number 5 and he’s so Spotify.]  

7 Artists Not on Spotify...Yet
The Beatles
John Lennon
AC/DC
Metallica
Bob Seger
Led Zeppelin
Pink Floyd has only a live album so it doesn’t count

7 Reasons Spotify Sucks (Not)
  • The commercials are jarring and disorienting. (It’s a choice you make - let the ads support Spotify or you support Spotify.)
  • Your favorite artist isn’t on there. (Yet. But you own the CDs.) 
  • There is no music discovery feature.  (There is no guided discovery.  If you can’t discover new music in a library of over 15 million songs, that’s on you.) 
  • Difficult to use search. (Until you learn how.) 
  • The artists don’t get paid enough.  (That’s between them and their label - Spotify pays the label.) 
  • Free mobile app is useless unless you pay for Premium service.  (But it is pretty cool once you do.) 
  • It’s not Pandora/Slacker/Mog/Rdio/Rhapsody/iTunes or some other program you’ve grown accustomed to using.  (It’s actually a little bit of all those and so much, much more.)

7 Spotify Tips, Tricks, Hints, Hacks and Add-Ons
  • Press Ctrl+G when listening to a multi-album or multi-artist playlist to display album art for each album. 
  • When someone shares a playlist with you or when you import a playlist from outside Spotify and you want to keep it in your library for future listens, just press the Subscribe button.  And because the playlists are dynamic and eternal, all future additions will automagically appear as well. 
  • Press Page Down one or more times after performing a search to fetch more results. 
  • Go HERE to see how many tracks there are on Spotify.  As I type this, Spotify’s population is 15,643,093 which is roughly 16,000 more than yesterday. 
  • Unhappy with the sound of your Spotify stream?  And a ten-band graphic equalizer and tweakify it.  Equalify. 
  • Because listening to Spotify is best done with a playlist, find and listen to thousands of playlists at sharemyplaylists.com 
  • Add your music, the music already on your hard drive, to Spotify by pressing Ctrl+P and selecting or adding sources under Local Files (when you first launch Spotify after installing, it attempts to do this for you automatically but it only looks in predetermined places)

7 Super Sweet Spotify Playlists
Listening to Spotify is not like listening to Slacker, Pandora or any other radio station because you choose the music, you make the playlist, it’s all you - no scientific, demographic or robotic help.  And, after all, who knows what you like better than you?  No one.  Still interested but at a loss as to what you want to listen to?  Here are seven playlists made by others (Herc included) to get you started.  Don’t say Herc never did anyhting for you.  There may come a day, some day, when Herc may reach out to you for a favor.

7 Artists [You Might Not Heard Of Yet] To Check Out On Spotify
Herc’s not gonna try to paint you a pretty picture here, with facts and anecdotes.  He’s just gonna give you a playlist for each artist, let you wade in and see if you sink or swim.  Herc swims in the music of these artists.  He hopes you find something you can use as an audio floatation device.

7 MORE Spotify Tips, Tricks, Hints, Hacks and Add-Ons
  • Clicking on an artist’s name in Spotify takes you the Overview screen.  Most of them feature an Artist Radio tab.  What sets Spotify’s Radio apart from other services?  It always starts with songs by your chosen artist AND you can skip an unlimited number of tracks to find something you like, either forward or backward.  (Try that on Pandora.) 
  • Playlistify allows to convert your iTunes, winamp, YouTube and other playlists into Spotify playlists. 
  • Bringing up a shared playlist in Spotify gives you access to the list curator’s user name.  If you click on it, all of their published playlists will appear and you can subscribe to those as well. 
  • To create a collaborative playlist, right-click on any playlist you’ve created (it won’t work on playlists others have created) and select Collaborative Playlist.  Then share the link with whoever (as many as you want) you want to collaborate with and watch the changes happen in real time.  Keep in mind that songs can be added AND deleted. 
  • In Play Que view there’s a History tab.  This shows everything you’ve played in your current Spotify session which is helpful for those of us with short memories.  Similarly, in What’s New view, there is a Top List tab which you can view in a variety of configurations such as everywhere, a specific country or “for me”, your personal Top List. 
  • “Starring” a song or an album automatically puts in the Starred playlist, which you can then review and create other playlists from.  You can easily unstar as well. 
  • Library is basically the whole enchilada: all your imported Local Files, every song you’ve ever added to a playlist and all your Starred music.


There you have Herc's Listmania on Spotify!  Hopefully now you are signed up for Spotify and eagerly awaiting your invitation to join!  Any questions on Spotify?  Herc is the master and will answer them.  Ask away in the comments!

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous8:46:00 AM

    Good to know...must go get Spotify...thx herc...

    ReplyDelete

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