Spotify community and playlist sharing site Playlists.net (formerly ShareMyPlaylists) is continuing its drive to put music discovery at the heart of its proposition.
Following a redesigned Spotify app, today the UK startup unveiled an entirely revamped version of its iOS offering in a bid to make it the go-to app for discovering Spotify-powered playlists on Apple’s mobile devices.
New features include the ability to upload playlists, including adding custom artwork, from within iOS — a much requested option, we’re told. But most interesting is a new feature that enables users to “pin” playlists to a location or venue and, in turn, discover music based on their current whereabouts.
So, for example, says the company, you could add your favourite workout playlist to your local gym for other Spotify users to work up a sweat to. Or coffee shop staff could pin a playlist of the music they play in-store for their best hipster customers to enjoy.
In fact, when Playlists.net founder and CEO Kieron Donoghue first pitched me the new location feature, I lazily described it as Foursquare for playlists, not knowing that it is actually powered by Foursquare’s API. “Yes the playlist pinning is just like Foursquare,” he told me in an email. “So when you're using the app you select a playlist then select "Pin" which then brings up a list of nearby locations (we use the Fouraquare API for this) and you can choose to allocate a playlist to that location.”
Donoghue then went on to share a recent article in the WSJ where Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek is cited as describing a vision for location-based music discovery:
Mr. Ek thinks that the delivery of music will soon evolve to the point that we will not even have to decide what to listen to—our technology will simply know, depending on where we are. When we go to live concerts, our smartphones will pick up the set lists and create playlists of previously recorded versions of the songs we’re hearing live.
That’s strikingly similar to where Playlists.net appears to be heading with today’s iOS update. “So our playlist "Pins" are the first step towards this kind of future,” adds Donoghue. That, of course, begs the question: When will Spotify’s own mobile app introduce a similar feature, especially since the music streaming service has been actively upping its own mobile music discovery game.
Along with playlist upload capabilities and the new location feature, Playlists.net’s iOS app, which requires a Spotify premium subscription, also supports the following features: A library of 145,000 human curated playlists that can be filtered by “Featured”, “Most Played” and “Latest”; playlists based on “Mood”; Top 100 Playlists Charts updated each Monday; New Release Albums updated weekly with the latest new releases; and Playlist Reviews written by Playlist.net’s editorial staff.
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