Examining the origins of Spotify websites

You can have a lot of fun discovering all the

Spotify-friendly websites and tools out there.

I’ve found that many of them started off in order

to fill a certain need.

For instance, Kieron Donoghue developed

ShareMyPlaylists.com after he discovered

there was no easy way to get other people

to check out his songs (this was way before

Spotify introduced social features; you can

read an interview with Kieron in the sidebar

“Behind the scenes at ShareMyPlaylists.com,”

in this chapter).

And Gigero, featured in the section “Gigero,” in

this chapter, started off as a university assign-

ment to create a web service, according to

co-creator Filip Engberg. He and his former

classmate Robert Åberg, both from Sweden,

created Gigero after realizing there was no

service that showed upcoming festivals in an

intuitive way. To make it easy for people to dis-

cover new music, they also decided to insert

Spotify links to all artists attending an event.

Shi Lei’s Spotify Classical blog, described in

the section “Spotify Classical,” in this chap-

ter, was born after Lei discovered that not

many people were listening to classical music

on Spotify, despite its huge classical library.

There’s certainly a growing interest in classi-

cal music: Traffic on his site tripled in the days

following Spotify’s U.S. launch, with people

looking for where to find classical music on

Spotify. His carefully crafted playlists based on

themes, such as Classical Music Inspired by

the Sea, help make classical music on Spotify

more accessible and open it up to a broader

audience.

Popular posts from this blog

 How Get Satisfaction works Whenever there’s a bug you want fixed or a missing feature you’re after — or you just get stuck trying to do something — simply go to the Get Satisfaction forums and submit a question. You can also submit an idea for Spotify’s devel- opers to consider, and other people can vote for whether they like your idea. For example, at the time of writing, close to 1,000 people want gapless playback in Spotify (where there’s no pause between songs), and almost 500 people are wishing for an easy way to report problems with the music (such as instances when bands that have the same name appear in the same artist stream). People can follow threads, or posts related to a particular topic, to keep up to date — replies to a topic can go straight to your e-mail so that you don’t need to keep checking the site for the answers. Oh, and if you absolutely love Spotify, you can choose to flatter everyone working there by clicking the Give Praise button and typing a f...
Read more
 The Idea Behind Panel Layers You can think of a panel layer in Manga Studio as a page within a page. Each panel layer acts as its own page file, with the ability for multiple image layers, just like the main page. Rulers, guides, and other tools that you would use on the main page can all be used within a panel layer. Only the section of the page covered in the panel layer can be shown at any time. This helps focus your attention on the one part of the page. What’s more, each panel layer is independent of other panel layers. So, anything you work on can overlap onto a different panel layer, and the other panel layer isn’t affected by it. You may see the scribblings from the other panel layer, but the art on the current one is untouched. The idea here is to give you the freedom to really go crazy with your drawing. Need to draw the entire body of a character in a scene to make sure the half that will be seen looks correct? No problem. Anything you draw that you don’t want to show c...
Read more