A couple of weeks ago we talked about the excitement of getting music recommendations and inspiration from our friends and our ongoing search for delicious things.

I found myself making a kick-ass playlist with house music and sent it to my friend Eric, since he’s my great source of inspiration when it comes to music. I believed the playlist would haven been even better if he could have helped me by adding a few favorites and edit the playlist. The more the merrier, right?

Anyway, here at Spotify we believe that sharing is the golden path. Therefore we released collaborative playlists today. That means that not only are you able to share playlists with others, you can let them edit the shared playlists as well. We would love your input on it so try it out and let us know what you think!

In order to turn on collaboration for a playlist, right-click (or Ctrl-click on the Mac) the list and select Collaborative Playlist. Then copy the link to the playlist and send it to a friend.

When your friend clicks on the link, it opens in Spotify and your collaborative playlist is added. Now you can both make changes, which will appear on both of your screens instantly. You can identify a collaborative playlist by the unlocked padlock icon next to it.

You can share the playlist with any number of people, but remember that anyone who gets the link will be able to alter your playlist, as well as pass the link on to others. There is currently no way to give only specific users the right to alter a collaborative playlist, other than by controlling the access to the link. The link is the key to the playlist.

You can, however, turn off the collaborativity of the playlist the same way you turned it on. Then only you will be able to alter the playlist, but everyone who has got the link will still be able to view and play the list.

Inspired by Peter Saint-Andre’s blog post, we decided to patch MediaWiki to make it recognize the spotify: URI scheme. (And we threw xmpp: in there as well, because we use it internally for instant messaging.)

First we added spotify: and xmpp: lines to the $wgUrlProtocols array in LocalSettings.php:

$wgUrlProtocols = array(
        ’http://’,
        ’https://’,
        ’spotify:’,
        ’xmpp:’,
        ’ftp://’,
        ’irc://’,
        ’gopher://’,
        ’telnet://’, // Well if we’re going to support the above.. -Ævar
        ’nntp://’, // @bug 3808 RFC 1738
        ’worldwind://’,
        ’mailto:’,
        ’news:’,
        ’file:’
);

See also the MediaWiki manual!

Then we added some styling to MediaWiki:Common.css to get the nice icons:

#bodyContent a[href ^="spotify:"],
.link-spotify {
    background: url(”spotify-external-link-tag-icon.png”) center right no-repeat;
    padding-right: 11px;
}

#bodyContent a[href ^="xmpp:"],
.link-xmpp {
    background: url(”xmpp-external-link-tag-icon.png”) center right no-repeat;
    padding-right: 11px;
}

And we uploaded these icons:   

This is the result:

Nice, huh? Well, it’s Friday after all.

Since our last party there is a lost little Spotify sign somewhere out there. I hope it’s in good hands and is handled with love. If the new foster parent sees this, I would be truly happy to see a picture of it’s new home, just to ensure it’s not been harmed… :)

One of the core features of Spotify is searching. You just type the name of an artist or a song into the search bar and off you go. Normally that’s all you need to get the Spotify experience: you know, when you think of some music and literally seconds later you’re listening to it.

There are cases, though, when you need to refine your queries. Perhaps you don’t want to search for “madonna“, because you’re not looking for the artist Madonna, but rather songs whose titles include the word “madonna”. Then you can search for “title:madonna“.

Similarly, you can search for “album:madonna” and “artist:madonna” to find only matching albums and artists, respectively.

To further refine your searches (or to indulge in some nostalgia or browse through a new musical genre), you can search for a year, a range of years or a genre: “year:1969“, “year:1994-1996” or “genre:soul“.

Logically, you can use combinations to search for techno from the early 90s or Grateful Dead songs from the late 60s: “genre:techno year:1990-95” or “artist:”grateful dead” year:1965-1970“. In the latter example, you see how you can use quotes to control to what parts of the search string a keyword applies.