Spotify's related artists

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Spotify have been in the news a lot this week. From founder Daniel E's news that Twitter is their biggest traffic source, to the announcement today about a newly rolled out related artist feature.

According to an article on Tech Crunch, Spotify have been working on a recommendation engine to let you discover new music while listening to your favourite acts. This would act as a replacement for the short, rather static list of related artists that appeared on the artist page. According to Tech Crunch, the recommendation engine is "powered by an algorithm that cross-references data collected over millions of user listening hours, not dissimilar it seems to Last.fm’s ’scrobbling’ of tracks".

Whether the feature will spur you to on to discover any amazing new finds is still up for debate. A quick perusal of the new system finds me on the Pet Shop Boys page contemplating listening to their related artist Brummie metal Gods "Judas Priest" (maybe it's the gay connection they're going for).

Clearly, though, there's still quite a bit of work to do before I'm actually discovering new RELEVANT music using this feature.

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• Spotify 0.3.23 - Related Artists (spotify.com)

Spotify update

I was reading with interest about Spotify's new handling of playlists yesterday. Now you can see how many tracks are in a playlist, how long the playlist is and whether or not you can edit it.

Upon opening Spotify, I realised I didn't have these cool features. For those of you who haven't upgraded, version 0.3.17 has quietly been released.

The software, still in Beta, doesn't have a live update and you won't find the version update on the site. However, upon downloading it, the installer will feature the new version.

Not sure what other extras are in the new release, as again, Spotify.com have no mention of an update. The playing time / track count for playlists is handy though. Got my 16 hour Factory records sampler going on at the moment.