Since launching in October 2008, Spotify has been used by over 7m people across Europe. It was a revelation when it was first started almost a year and a half ago; giving free access to an online database of almost every song imaginable.
Today, the invite-only site has got a waiting list for free membership, music streaming with added adverts, but if you’re feeling impatient there’s always the option of digging deep and paying for the ad-free premium version. For uninterrupted tunes it’ll set you back £9.99 a month.
Spotify's latest social media extras will see users getting Facebook and Twitter integration on their Spotify accounts. We'll be able to see our connected friends in the Spotify browser and publish music profiles and top tracks to blogs and personal websites. Playlists can be subscribed in one click from within Spotify, or from Facebook, and there will be a link to let us share music choices on Twitter, through the 'Spotify Music Pro@ile', to organise our music collections.
Not only are Spotify encouraging us to use their music (that’s a given) but they’re also getting us to manage and stream it, like agents of advertising, out to the rest of the social networking platforms.
They were definitely missing a trick by not having initial search and share functionality on the original Spotify site and looking back at the service you can see that it would be such a simple thing to have a "search for playlist/user" function to improve the user experience.
But hey, that all doesn’t matter now. They've gone one better and become all web 2.0-y on us and, in the process, made recommending music a swift drag and drop affair.
The new feature is up and running, as of 9am this morning, and will be available to both free and premium users.