The following five Spotify apps are the ones which I strongly urge all Spotify users to install immediately because they’re highly addictive. If you dislike one or find you don’t use it all that much then removing it from the sidebar is as simple as selecting ‘Remove from sidebar‘ when you right-click on the app in question. But I don’t think you’ll need to use that option with these five ingenious Spotify apps.

Last.fm

Last.fm is a service you’ve probably heard of already. It’s a social network for music lovers that has inconceivably been around since 2002. Rather than falling out of use or usefulness as the Web has moved on, Last.fm has benefited from the recent explosion in music streaming services.

To squeeze the most of the Last.fm Spotify app users will need a free Last.fm account. Once set up, every track you play will be logged (or scrobbled). You can then get recommendations based on the artists and genres you like, and connect with people who share similar tastes in music.

Addictive Quality: Building up a list of the tracks you’ve listened to and then seeing how that influences recommendations.

Soundrop

Soundrop is a social jukebox, a little like Turntable.fm, but without the competitiveness and chances of being humiliated. There is no voting down skipping of tracks, just the chance to build a collaborative playlist of songs which will be played in order of the number of up-votes.

There are default rooms organized by genre, or you can start your own room based on one of your own playlists. The URL of your Soundrop can then be shared with friends via social networking sites in order to start your own virtual party.

Addictive Quality: Everyone wants to be a DJ, as Soulwax once sang. Soundrop offers the chance for us all to achieve that dream.

ShareMyPlaylists

ShareMyPlaylists is a website that does exactly what its name suggests. It gives users the opportunity to share their Spotify playlists with others, and also lets them listen to other people’s playlists. You can sign up for an account using Facebook or Twitter, but this isn’t a necessity to use the Spotify app.

The app shows your curated playlists handpicked by the site and the Top 50 playlists as determined by the number of times they have each been played. You can listen or subscribe to a playlist from right within the app itself. You can also generate a playlist based on the name of an artist or (if signed in) submit your own playlist.

Addictive Quality: Building playlists for others to judge. Discovering playlists and, consequently, new music.

Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone magazine is an extremely well-known source for music news, reviews, and opinion. That trustworthiness and focus on quality has extended beyond the print and Web versions and through to the Spotify app.

There are playlists from the magazine’s editors and established artists. Mick Jagger’s Top Reggae Songs is a current example. The latest albums and songs, complete with reviews, are also listed. All of the above can be played directly in Spotify with a single click.

Addictive Quality: Music discovery, pure and simply. The Rolling Stone app will likely set you off on a voyage of new music discovery.

We Are Hunted

We Are Hunted prides itself on pushing new and established artists, ranking them by how much buzz they’re builiding online across P2P networks, social networks, and blogs. The app is a sensible extension to this mission statement.

Artists are listed under ‘Emerging Chart’, ‘Mainstream Chart’, and genre-specific charts such as ‘Pop’ and ‘Folk’. A clever ‘Instant Playlist’ option which builds a set of tracks from a particular artist of your choosing adds to the innate usability of the We Are Hunted Spotify app.

Addictive Quality: Even more so than Rolling Stone, the We Are Hunted app will introduce you to new music and help shape your musical tastes.

Conclusion

Spotify was a fantastic music streaming service prior to the inclusion of apps. Now it’s absolute genius – and very addictive. Unfortunately, free users will find the monthly listening limits and lifetime track limits….limiting. At least after the grace period ends. The apps are another reason to subscribe, but that’s between you and your bank balance.

Are you a Spotify user? Have the new apps increased your usage/enjoyment of the service? What kind of apps would prompt you to switch from being a free user to a paid user?

In addition to the predictive search feature, they have also added a new playlist search. This will allow users to find publicly available playlists from users all around the world. This is handy if you want to broaden your music horizons. As part of this, they have rolled out a buddy list feature, which allows you to see what any of your friends are listening to in real time. This is another way for users to find some new music based on what their friends like.

They have also tweaked the “Whats New” page with some cool new features. Spotify claims it is “more intuitive and a whole lot prettier.”

The last part of this new update only applies to Mac users. They have added full screen support for users with OSX Lion.

The update is not available yet, but you can download the preview build and check out all the cool new features for yourself.

Source: TheNextWeb

Playlistify was made by music geeks who were obviously sick of putting a lot of effort into a particular online music service only to find they liked another one better. Now you can preserve all that time you used to make awesome playlists in Last.fm, YouTube and other places and bring them into Spotify for your enjoyment now.

What Is Playlistify?

Playlistify acts as a converter for your playlists, but then doubles as a database of awesome playlists converted by people. So, once you’re done converting all your favourite playlists you can search around for more that you might like. If you like a playlist you can import it into Spotify, embed it in a website or watch video clips.

As well as converting from multiple formats into Spotify playlists, Playlistify can also back up your Spotify playlists.

Bake A Playlist

For starters, baking a playlist can be done by anyone without the need for a login for Playlistify. All it does is act as a converter for you and keep the playlist information in its database.

There are an incredible amount of options available when it comes to baking a playlist in Playlistify. You can export an iTunes playlist and import it, drag and drop a Spotify playlist for embedding, use all sorts of Last.fm data to create playlists, bake any YouTube Playlist, use XSPF files, copy and paste text files of track data, or get lists from Winamp, WeAreTheHunted, Rhapsody, SoundCloud, Grooveshark, MixCloud and turn them into an embeddable, playable Spotify list. It’s pretty versatile!

The Last.fm options are incredibly useful. You can generate a similar artists playlist, a list from tags/genres, a list from a user’s loved tracks, a list of a user’s top tracks or top artists, or a playlist based on an event or a group. There’s a lot of scope for awesome playlists using these options!

Looking at the YouTube baking options, you can enter any username and make playlists from their YouTube playlists. For both Last.fm and YouTube, the user doesn’t have to be yourself, so you can use lists made by anyone with great music taste.

Playlistify Anything

While you’re browsing around online you’ll often find great lists of tunes. Use the Playlistify Anything bookmarklet to get these into Playlistify easily.

Browsing The Playlists

If you’re uninspired or just want to explore someone else’s music taste, take a wander around the Playlistify Directory. See hand-picked featured lists, popular lists, popular tags and browse or search through whatever music style takes your fancy. You can even search according to your mood, location or activity, meaning you could add an awesome jogging playlist to Spotify in no time.

Once you find something you like, you can play it in Spotify or embed it as a widget somewhere.

So, what will you use Playlistify for?  Let us know all about your cool playlists!

One service that has risen to the forefront of this movement is Spotify. One of the great things about Spotify is the sheer amount of music it gives you access to. Every artist, song, and album is pretty much at your fingertips, and all you have to do in most instances is type in the name of what you want to listen to. Since there is so much, however, sometimes it can be difficult finding songs you might be interested in, especially if you’re looking for something new. But what if you could find quality music that has been pre-rated for you?

What Is Metafy?

Metafy is a service that helps you discover critically acclaimed new music while you’re on the go. It searches Metacritic for songs you might like, then cross-references them with Spotify to build a quick list of albums you might want to listen to. It’s a music discovery app for iOS that uses data to rank Spotify songs according to a variety of criteria.

You can think of Metafy as a rating system for Spotify tracks. You can use it to browse the latest releases based on what is most current or most popular, as well as see tracks based on their all-time score. If you’re looking to stay up on all the latest music that is currently circulating the interwebs, then you’ll appreciate Metafy’s timeline browsing capabilities. You can view all the high scores, which will give you some insight into which tracks were the most popular during a given period of time.

All songs on Spotify are fair game and all of the information comes from Metacritic.

What Is Metacritic?

Metacritic is a well-known website that rates music based on the opinions of some of the most respected critics writing online and in print. It takes all of the ratings given to a particular song or album and compiles them into a single score, allowing you to view the best songs in a given year or all-time.

Metacritic is pretty precise, and takes into account the opinions of all of its users, constantly tweaking the voting process and fine tuning the scoring system.

With Metacritic, you’re sure to find songs you will like based on the criteria from which you search for them.

Conclusion

One thing to note is that Metafy requires a Spotify Premium subscription, which may come as no surprise if you’re a hardcore Spotify user. Use it to find great music to listen to and you won’t be disappointed. And once you’ve discovered some great music for all of your Spotify usage, you can also Explore and Share Awesome Spotify Playlists With ShareMyPlaylists. You will become the person that all of your friends turn to in order to find out what new music is out there that they should be listening to.

I’ve been using Spotify a lot lately and I can honestly say I understand why it’s been so popular. It has a lot of the characteristics that made Pandora such a hit and it seems to function well as a lightweight version of iTunes. And again, the Facebook integration.

At any rate, we’re bound to start seeing some cool and useful apps and websites built around the idea of increasing the functionality of Spotify, and in this article, I’m going to show you one site that already has.

What Is ShareMyPlaylists?

ShareMyPlaylists (directory post) is a resource for Spotify users to share and explore Spotify playlists.

The playlists featured on the site are comprised of many different genres and collections. Whether it’s music from a certain year or other time period, a collection around a certain genre, or the best of a particular artist, you’ll find all that and more on ShareMyPlaylists.

The site was created so that music lovers everywhere could upload, share, and discover new music with one another. If you’re an avid Spotify user, it’s definitely something you should check out.

ShareMyPlaylists Features

When you first visit ShareMyPlaylists, you will be greeted with a welcome box that prompts you to sign up or register using either your Facebook or Twitter account. There is also an option to do neither if you prefer to browse around the site for a bit before making your decision whether to join or not.

Once you’re on the site, simply click the Submit Your Playlist! button to begin. There are three short steps involved with this process. First, you are to upload any artwork that is to be associated with the playlist you’re about to create, along with the playlist’s title and Spotify URL.

Next, you can enter a description for your playlist, so others will have a bit of context around why you picked the songs you did or what the list is comprised of.

Lastly, you will pick the genre of your playlist. Everything from Rock to Compilation will be listed here. When you’re done, just click the submit button and your playlist will become a part of the community.

You can also have ShareMyPlaylists generate a playlist for you if you visit the ‘Playlist Generator‘ tab at the top. From there, you can enter the name of a band or artist you’re interested in hearing, select the number of tracks you want, and choose from ‘Popular‘ or ‘Obscure‘ tracks.

Mobile Apps

If you aren’t pumped about ShareMyPlaylists already, you will be once you discover the mobile apps. ShareMyPlaylists is available on the iPhone/iPad and for Android devices. It can be used alongside the Spotify app to discover new music and ready made playlists from ShareMyPlaylists’ members.

On the iPad (where I prefer to use this app), you can get access to tens of thousands of Spotify playlists, which you can search by artist, track title, and playlist title. Simply choose your playlist with just one click and the app will automatically open the Spotify app and play your choice.

The mobile app is also set up so you can quickly and easily browse featured playlists from ShareMyPlaylists’ homepage, as well as see the latest playlists by genre.

Conclusion

I found this site to be very useful as a complement to my recent Spotify listening. I like how simple it is and it helps me discover new and – more importantly – good music based on other users’ tastes. Direct integration with Spotify via the mobile apps was certainly a deal maker for me as well.

Give this app a spin and let us know in the comments what you think of it.  Or maybe you have another Spotify-based app that you would like to share with us?

But do you know what the problem is with YouTube as a music-listening platform? It wasn’t really built for that, and because it wasn’t, it lacks a few key things that a typical music platform would have, like the ability to save music playlists. Okay, so YouTube does technically have a playlist feature for music, but you still have to wait for the video to load in order to listen to your song, and sometimes that can be a pain. I’ve found a simpler way to do things, and it’s called SongSprite.

What Is SongSprite?

SongSprite (directory app) pulls the audio from YouTube videos and lets you make your favorite tracks into a playable playlist that you can share with others. You simply get the URLs of the YouTube videos you’d like to play or share, paste them into SongSprite and then you will be able to listen to them or send a link to your newly created playlist to whoever you like.

SongSprite allows you to connect, collaborate and share playlists on YouTube in real time with your friends.

The process of creating a playlist is SongSprite is extremely simple.

How Do I Use SongSprite?

The first place you need to go is YouTube and start browsing for music you would like to add to your new playlist.

Once you find a song that you like, just go up and copy the URL for it. Shortened links won’t work, so make sure the URL you grab is of normal length. Paste the link into the box on SongSprite and click the Add button to the right. If you’re using Google Chrome as your browser, the Split Screen extension would be great for this. Check it out.

You’ll know you entered the information correctly because it will place the name of the song into your list below. You can keep adding songs in this way until you are happy with the playlist you’ve created.

To share your playlist once it is done, just copy the URL below the player and paste it in an email or IM, or click the Share icon to send the link to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or StumbleUpon.

Conclusion

While having the ability to take content from YouTube and listen to it via a site like SongSprite is extremely convenient for all of us, I doubt that YouTube would really take kindly to this type of “extension”, seeing as none of YouTube’s ads or copyright permissions seem to come with the music you’re getting with the service. Having said that, I do think SongSprite is a great resource and a site that I could see myself using again and again. I invite you all to check it out and let me know what you think.