Get To Know Spotify

Streaming music is here to stay and is the absolute future of the music industry. Folks enjoy speaking on their love of vinyl records, but they aren't buying them in huge volumes across the board. Rather, they are streaming more music through a variety of mobile devices allowing for quick and easy access. Have a read over all things Spotify to insure you can find those rare and notable tracks that you need at every social occasion.

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"Digital music might not have the same allure as sitting down to listen to a record on your turntable, but what it lacks in atmosphere, it makes up for in convenience — especially when you aren't home with your collection.

It's been five years since Spotify publicly launched and shifted the music industry's focus toward streaming as a way to combat illegal downloading. While the streaming business model is far from perfect, even the most casual music fan should test out streaming while it's still growing.

See also: How Spotify Engineered the New Music Economy

If you're just dipping your toe into the stream, follow our beginner's guide and soon you'll be listening to Spotify's massive library without the worry of losing precious hard drive space.

Signing Up

As with most services, you can register for Spotify by connecting your Facebook account for optimal social features, or create an account with your email address.

Pick the subscription that suits your music habits. The prices are in USD, but the tiers are the same internationally: No cost will get you desktop listening interrupted by ads; $4.99 per month allows for unlimited desktop streaming; users who pay the premium $9.99 per month can listen on all desktop (via desktop app or web player) and mobile devices with offline syncing privileges on mobile (Spotify Radio is the only free mobile feature.)

Users at the premium tier can also listen to music at a higher bit rate, which is essential for anyone who has quality headphones or earbuds.

Image: Spotify

Before you start listening, check your preferences and privacy settings to make sure you are sharing as much or as little with the world as you'd like. If you connected your Spotify to Facebook but don't want to broadcast your tunes on your News Feed, uncheck the Facebook sharing option. Leave the Spotify sharing section checked to show up in your followers' feeds — this amplifies Spotify's social music discovery potential.

This page is important because you can choose whether or not to make your playlists viewable to the public as soon as you start, or make it public on your own terms. Also, you can opt-out of Spotify showing your top artists and tracks on your public profile, if you aren't one to brag about such things. Plus, you can connect your Spotify account to Last.fm so your scrobbles stay representative.

Organizing Your Music

Library and Local Files

In the left sidebar, you will find your Collection. Here, you can access local files (go to Preferences to manage the folders from which Spotify can import files) and music saved to playlists. The Library section puts all of this music in one place. By accessing the files found on your hard drive, Spotify acts as a one-stop shop for listening to all your music, meaning you don't have to open iTunes or another player.

Playlists

Playlists are Spotify's main draw. You can create your own by clicking the New Playlist button, or following and subscribing to other users' playlists. Bookmark an album by saving it as a playlist, too.

Image: Spotify

You can also set up a collaborative playlist among friends to prep for that that perfect road trip or party. Right click on a playlist to check off the collaborative option and share the playlist with your friends. This alt-menu also shows the option to change the privacy settings to "Make Public" or "Make Secret," depending on your preferences.

Image: Spotify

If you want to stay up-to-date with a specific user's playlist, click the green "Follow" button on the bottom of the top title bar, and it will save to your side bar. You'll get a notification when songs are added to the playlist.

Play Queue

This option is ideal for when you aren't listening to an album, since queuing up a song via the right-click menu will place it after the track you are currently listening to, and will interrupt a record.
When listening to a playlist or playing music in the background, the queue is great for accommodating requests and spur of the moment sing-a-longs with friends.

Sharing and Discovering Tunes

In the last year, Spotify has significantly amped up its social and music discovery features to keep up with its competitor Rdio, which prioritizes social discovery.

Following

Image: Spotify

Spotify lets you follow friends, artists and organizations (follow Mashable's account here!) to see what your network is listening to. You will get a notification when artists you follow add music to their catalogues.

The social feed lives in the right sidebar, and at the top Spotify will make recommendations to follow, including Facebook friends or artists your friends enjoy. This feed will show what your friends are listening to right now, songs they've added to playlists, new playlists they've created, tracks they've starred, and playlists, songs and albums they've shared on Spotify.


If you didn't register your Spotify account through Facebook, you can still search for friends and organizations via the search bar.

Sending and Sharing Music

Image: Spotify

You can highlight your favorite music in Spotify's social feed by sharing via the button on artist, album or playlist pages, or the right-click menu. Write a message and check your connected social networks if you want to share to Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, too.
The Send tab on the right of the box allows you to send music to individual users in a private message.

Discover

The Discover section is filled with custom recommendations based on your music history. If you are stuck picking out something new to listen to, you can get lost scrolling down this page.

Image: Spotify

In addition to suggestions of new artists deemed algorithmically similar to ones you already love, Spotify will remind you of albums and songs you haven't listened to in a while. Sometimes the recommendations don't feel right, but the algorithm can only improve the more you use it. Unfortunately, there is no option to reject or modify suggestions at this time.


If you are unsure you might like one of Spotify's suggestions, hover over the album art until a play button appears. Then click it and hold down to preview the song.

This will interrupt whatever you are currently listening to, but once you let go of the play button, your song will resume. It is not the smoothest listening feature, but it can come in handy, especially when browsing to make a playlist.

Apps

Spotify's unique apps can also help you find music when you aren't feeling inspired, or you'd like a change of scenery. Some apps will tell you the lyrics of the song you're listening to, others will provide you with a review, and a few will show you what is trending on the charts, web and social media.
We recommended the following apps: Pitchfork, This Is My Jam, Domino, Twitter #Music (formerly We Are Hunted), Any Decent Music?, Blue Note, TuneWiki and Billboard.

Radio

Spotify Radio functions like a typical Internet radio service. You can create stations by artist, song, album and genre, and upvote or downvote songs you love or hate. Spotify Radio is free to use on the mobile app, even if you aren't a Spotify Premium user.

Mobile

Image: Spotify

Spotify's mobile app is a pared-down version of the web player (tablet apps more closely resemble the web player), from which you can select playlists to download for offline listening, to save your data usage. This is only available for Premium users.

Another feature exclusive to the mobile app is Browse. This saves you the trouble of coming up with a playlist yourself, which is helpful when you're out and about while using Spotify on your smartphone.
Now that you've completed your crash course on Spotify, get streaming!

Mashable composite image: iStockphoto, akindo