Major update from Spotify introduces new social features


Music streaming startup Spotify is going social. Today it unveils new features under the unpronouncable title of ‘Spotify Music Pro@ile’. Essentially it’s creating a true social network inside the Spotify service, but at the same time integrating Facebook Connect features. It is wil also now synchonise your existing music collection with your Spotify account. The update will roll out to Free and Premium users from 9am GMT today. Update: Rasmus Andersson, lead creative & designer at Spotify, says “Spotify will automatically update itself and restart.”

This update from Spotify is a major one. The trouble is what we really want to know is, having launched in several European markets and talked for the last five or six months about launching in the US… when will it launch in the US? No news on that front yet.

Meanwhile, the main new feature is the ability to share playlists and musical tastes outside Facebook. This will be good news for Spotify users, but for the startups which have been building out services around sharing playlists it’s going to be a potential new problem.

So the news features are as follows:

Users can now build their own profile and add friends via searching under their username. They will be able to publish a widget containing their Spotify profile on the web which will display such things as musical tastes, top artists and favourite tracks. These can also be published to your Facebook page, blog, etc.

There will also be a new Inbox-style messaging system to suggest to eachother tracks or albums, via a drag and drop interface over a friend’s name. Music which friends have posted to Facebook will appear in a new Facebook-like newsfeed. Posted playlists will display how many times they’ve been added by friends.

‘Library’ function

A new ‘Library’ function means you can start managing your existing library with Spotify’s. Users can import the names of the music files on their computer. Thus local files can be shared as part of a playlist, if matched with tracks in the Spotify catalogue. Tracks can be starred or tagged letting you bookmark favourites into folders.

Finally, Wireless Sync means tracks are saved to playlists, but in truth this exists already in Offline mode.