If you didn't already get in on the US launch of Spotify, the dominant freemium music streaming service in Europe, head over here and get an account. Once you're done with that, come back, because you're gonna need these tools to get the most out of Spotify.


Spotify's pretty decent out of the box. It has 15 million songs—which I think is the most of any streaming service right now—and a wide userbase, so you have a higher chance of finding friends who are on it. But it's also missing a lot of things.


Spotify doesn't let you see what your friends are listening to right now—instead, it offloads that capability onto Last.fm, a free service that you have to sign up separately for. It doesn't alert you when your favorite artists put out new music, and it doesn't really have a good music discovery engine. It also, surprisingly, has a puny section for new releases, when in fact it gets a ton of new releases in every week that they dump into a separate playlist. (Not sure why this isn't more of a core feature, to be honest.) So here are a bunch of utilities to help you get more out of Spotify, whether you're a paying user or just a free one.

Useful Websites

Here are some sites that alert you of new releases, because Spotify's own new releases section is paltry, and doesn't distinguish between this week's releases and ones from a month ago. You could also subscribe to the playlists Spotify (the user) made to keep track of these new albums and new singles. But these seem like they're not as comprehensive as the websites. Also useful are the playlist importers and Spotify link cleaner-uppers.

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Music Discovery

It's great that you have 15 million tracks to listen to, but how are you going to find them when the music discovery part of Spotify is so mediocre? External websites! Put in stuff you like, out comes stuff you (probably) like.


Social Features (Last.fm)

Spotify seems to be playlist oriented, meaning, you can only really see what people are listening to by their playlists—which takes effort on their part. But, if you and your friends enable Last.fm scrobbling—letting Last.fm keep track of your music playing history—you can get a lot of social features that way. And because Spotify inexplicably doesn't keep track of your play history as a core feature, like Rdio does, Last.fm is the only way can know what you listened to earlier today, yesterday or a week ago. Still, Last.fm isn't integrated well into the Spotify app in any cohesive way, so it's a kludge at best.



Playlist Utilities

There seem to be a lot of playlist sharing services connected to Spotify, and because the quality of them really depends on what type of music you want, here's a giant list of them to explore. Otherwise, you can convert current playlists into Spotify-formatted ones.


Browser Extensions

Remotes

Remote apps are useful when you're using a computer as a Spotify streaming device. For example, you could hook up an old machine to your sound system, run Spotify on it, and control your playback from anywhere in the house with a smartphone.



Hardware support

You can also pipe Spotify music to various devices around the house as well. Some are official (which are easy, because you just play back Spotify as you would any other music source), but some require a little software setup first.


Tools and Integration with other apps/services

(Windows)

If you're a long time Spotify user with some services you can't live without, let us know in the comments and we can check it out.