A heck of a lot has been written about Spotify recently, but since Shiny Media’s office soundtrack is currently being provided by the application it’s only fair I give it a mention as well.
Spotify is an application you download, and then it provides you with free access to stream thousands of tracks and full albums. The interface is really easy to use and you don’t need to wait for tracks to load up - they just play. Then, if you want, you can drag and drop them into a playlist which you can send to other Spotify users as a URL. You can also make your playlist collaborative, so other users can add tracks remotely.
That’s what we’ve been doing in the office, meaning the music we work to can vary wildly and, as you’d expect, lead to witch-hunts where we try and root out the person who put on “Cotton-Eye Joe” (actually, that was me). The one catch is that every 20 minutes or so you’ll hear a short advert, which seems a small price to pay for such a wide selection of free music.

One of the things I like is that you can search for a particular word and you’ll get a quick list of related songs, albums and artists - rather like iTunes. So, if you’re making a playlist about parrots (click image to enlarge):

Or, a playlist about carrots (click image to enlarge):

Or, a playlist about popular high street shoe shop Barratts (click image to enlarge):

Well why do you want to make a playlist about Barratts anyway, weirdo?
So anyway, the general consensus is that Spotify is pretty darn good even though it might not have the latest blog-hype types (The Lipster investigated this). It seems that up-and-coming acts show up eventually; for instance, White Lies’ debut album appeared on there on the day of its official release.
Being a new, funky young company Spotify kindly allows us to see behind the scenes at their thrusting new media headquarters (click image to enlarge):

I’m sure she doesn’t walk around barefoot all the time.

One can only guess at the intra-team tensions being suppressed at this luncheon.

New office! If you wondered whether Swedish people shopped at Ikea, here’s your answer (click image to enlarge).

This is Martin Lorentzon, one of the company’s founders. If it looks like he’s got waves of cleverness emanating from his head, it’s because he has.
Sign up for Spotify here
[Office images courtesy Rsms' Flickr]

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday January 21st, 2009 at 11:50 am