Music Ally

In the Web 2.0 world, an important mark of your popularity is how many external developers are monkeying about with your APIs, creating spin-off services and applications.

Spotify is no different. There is a thriving ecosystem of sites and tools based on the streaming music service. Here’s ten of the most interesting ones we’ve found.

Topsify
Topsify does one simple thing: it creates playlists based on the official music charts in the UK, US and Sweden, and updates them every week with the latest new entries. Spotify users can subscribe to the playlists, and then get the changes automatically when they’re made by Topsify. There’s also a widget that fans can share on their blogs.
www.topsify.com

Your Spotify
Plenty of users are too busy creating their own playlists to bother with the charts, of course. At this point, though, Spotify doesn’t really provide community features helping people to share them – other than the core functionality of being able to spread the links. Your Spotify aims to fill the gap: it’s a playlist-sharing site designed to highlight the best playlists, with links to fire them up in the Spotify client.
www.yourspotify.com

Xpandify
Another playlist-sharing site, Xpandify offers a number of ways to find interesting collections curated by Spotify users. There’s a tag cloud to click on genres (chill, disco, movie music, er, girls), as well as the ability to see the most popular and most recent playlists.Users can make comments and rate lists with ‘applause’ too. The site is still young, but you can argue these kinds of features would sit well within the Spotify service itself.
www.xpandify.com

SpotiChart
Spotify AND Twitter? Our buzzometer just exploded. SpotiChart is an interesting attempt to tap into the Twitter hivemind and identify popular songs on Spotify. It trawls the micro-blogging service for tweets that either mention Spotify, or have links to tracks, albums and playlists on the service. It then aggregates these, filters out duplicates from the same user, and compiles charts, tweeting back the most popular links to its followers.
www.spotichart.com

SpotifiTunes
More a tool than a service, SpotifiTunes lets users upload the XML file of their iTunes library, and get back a list of links to their favourite artists on Spotify. The list is saved as a simple URL which they can come back to, or share with friends. It covers artists, but also genres and albums. While it’s pretty basic, the service does tap into the increasing number of people thinking about migrating from iTunes to Spotify. We wonder how long it’ll be before there’s a tool to simply convert your iTunes library data into one massive playlist, though.
www.spotifitunes.com

Spotify Collection
Another collecting-focused spin-off from Spotify is Spotify Collection (you may have guessed this from the name, admittedly). It lets you add a bunch of albums that you like listening to, and then navigate them by artwork, with links through to play them. However, the real appeal is sharing these collections with friends, tagging albums using whatever phrases you like. Again, though, it’s the kind of thing that could easily be incorporated into Spotify itself at some point in the future, rendering the need for an external website rather redundant.
www.spotifycollection.com

Spotify.fm
It’s obligatory for any music service letting people tinker with its APIs to be mashed up with Last.fm. Thus: Spotify.fm. It gets people to plug in their Last.fm username, then serves up a list (with links) of the most recent releases by their favourite artists, sorted by the date they went live on Spotify. There are also links to find similar artists. It’s a useful tool, albeit only as useful as your Last.fm profile is an accurate representation of your tastes. If you haven’t scrobbled for a while, it’s less good.
www.spotifyfm.net

Fire Spot
If you’ve ever used the Songbird browser, its appeal was always turning links to music on websites into playable streams. Well, that’s sort of what Fire Spot does. It’s a plug-in for the Firefox web browser that roots out track lists from web pages, cross-references them against the Spotify catalogue, and inserts a small green logo next to any that can be played, allowing them to be launched in the Spotify client. It’s a work in progress (admittedly one that hasn’t progressed much since June), but is certainly an interesting approach.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12299

Spotibot
More Spotify-meets-Twitter Web 2.0 goodness. Spotibot is all about helping people discover music they might like on Spotify. It works by getting users to tweet it the names of artists they like, and it fires back a recommendation of a similar artist within five minutes. Meanwhile, its developer has also cooked up a way to jazz up the long Spotify links, adding in titles, artwork and descriptions to users know what they’ll get when they click on a link.
www.spotibot.com

Spotify Hunted
The final tool in this roundup comes from the same people who created innovative music discovery service We Are Hunted. Spotify Hunted focuses on the “99 hottest songs in the world streamed live from Spotify”. The tracks are presented in its trademark picture-grid format, with each acting as a direct link to a song in the Spotify client. There are options to pinpoint emerging artists only, or sort the chart by artists. While Spotify does have popularity charts within its app, this external site does a good job of highlighting the shooting stars on the service.
http://spotify.wearehunted.com/

This article was originally published in the fortnightly Music Ally Report, our premium research service. For a free two-week trial, click here.

Tags: spotify

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Digital Music News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.