David.R.Gilson

Website Review: Spotify Playlists

Feb 18

Reviews David 8 Comments
audio, playlists, social, spotify, streaming

Approximate reading time is 2 minutes

One of the most awesome features of Spotify is that every track, every album, and every playlist has a public URL. This means all you have to do to show something to someone is send them a link, which they then click, and their web browser automatically launches Spotify with the instruction to play whatever you sent to your friend. This is a truly fast way to share music amongst friends, and as far as we can tell, it’s stopping short of infringing anyone’s copyright.

The Spotify Playlists website

Well, I have discovered a website, with such a simple mission, if it didn’t exist, you’d really have to invent it. Spotify Playlists is a public directory of Spotify Playlists. With a simple design, custom built on top of a Wordpress back-end, you can easily browse by recently added, genre, most ratings, and highly rated. The ratings system is something I’m particularly pleased to see, since I recently said myself that ratings should be part of the Spotify application.

It’s also nice to see that the listings have album art included. The album art is something you have to upload yourself as part of making a submission to the site.

On the left you find a sidebar with collapsible lists of the recently added, highly rated and most rated. On the left, above the list of playlists, you’ll find a drop downlist of the genres.

Since selecting a genre can sometimes be less obvious than others, I am hoping that the backend code of the side will develop to either let visitors vote for what genre they think a play list should belong to, or allow playlists to have multiple genres.

Of course at this early stage, you might not find the selection you are looking for, but it is early days and the number of submissions can only increase. You can help yourself by submitting your own playlists, which is also the top widget in the sidebar too.

One thing that concerns me is that it is just as easy to submit a whole album as it is a custom playlist, perhaps this doesn’t matter, though. I think this site definitely fills a gap that even I didn’t think of in my blog post. The Spotify application doesn’t suggest things you might want to hear (that sites like Last.Fm does). While Spotify Playlists doesn’t take into account your listening patterns it does (potentially, subject to sustained user participation) provide a broader way to search than the Spotify application does natively.

Finally, in researching for this post, I have also come across another site that does the same thing, “Spotylists“. Although I have to say, SpotifyPlaylists definitely has the edge on a cleaner design, more genres, and just a generally less intimidating to get started with.