Digital radios: Spotify: listen to free streamed music online Find and play your favourite music on Spotify
One of the main functions of Spotify is creating your own personal playlists containing only the tracks you want to hear.
Searching for music tracks on Spotify
It’s simple to find the tracks you want to listen to on Spotify. The ‘search’ bar is always visible at the top of the Spotify application window, so type your chosen music – artist, song title, album name or genre – into the bar and click Enter.
Advanced searches are also possible by entering something such as “Tina Turner year:1970-1980” if, for example, you’re not a huge fan of Ms Turner’s later work.
Or if you like Elvises in general, but don’t really like Elvis Presley, type “artist:Elvis –Presley”. The minus sign will remove all tracks containing 'Presley' from the search results.
Spotify music search results
Music search results are then displayed in the main panel, consisting of artist and album suggestions, plus a track listing of all the music that meets your search criteria. This shows the track name, artist name, track duration and popularity rating.
You can then filter the listing depending on what you’re looking for. Album cover art is displayed in the bottom left corner of the window.
Double clicking on any track will start it playing, or clicking with the right mouse button brings up a context-sensitive menu with various options.
Save to lets you add the track to a saved playlist, or Queue will line it up next in your playlist. For some tracks, you also have the option to Buy them online.
Sharing and recommending music with Spotify
If you want to share or recommend a specific track to a friend then right click, choose Copy Spotify URI which will create a link similar to this in your clipboard, ready to paste wherever you like – email, blog, IM or Twitter:
spotify:track:2z5FL3FpUI7AEMd8NIzPGl
Full playlists can also be shared, either via Spotify itself or on blogs or Twitter.
There are also the usual music player buttons enabling you to skip to the next or previous track, pause playback, shuffle and repeat functions, and a volume control.
Other websites also provide an index of shared Spotify playlists - these include ShareMyPlaylists.com
In April 2010, Spotify added social networking features to its music player, including Facebook integration, allowing Spotify users to share their playlists on their Facebook profile and wall.
For more on this and other things you can do online, see our book Internet Made Easy for the Over 50s.
