So, the voting in the Spotify Community Awards is over and the winners have been announced. Spotiseek landed on a 3rd place in the category “Best Playlist Generator or Converter”, which is truly honouring after such a short period of time online.

Huge thanks to all of you out there who voted for me, and congratulations to the winners!

More to come

Spotiseek was launched in December and we’ve come quite a long way since then! But it will keep developing over time and I’m aiming for that glorious 1st place in the next year’s Spotties!

I’m currently working on some new features (duh) which I believe will help you greatly in the search for new Spotify music. I can’t tell you what it is just yet, but I’ll keep you posted!

Another happy announcement: Spotiseek has been nominated in two categories in “The Spotties: Spotify Community Site Awards 2010“!

Spotiseek nominated in two categories

The Spotties are set up by the hard-working Afront from Pansentient League and is divided into a set of various categories:

• Best Playlist Sharing site
• Best News or Music Finder Site
• Best Playlist Generator or Converter (Spotiseek nominated)
• Best Other Site or App
• Best Remote Control App
• Best URL Tool
• Best Overall (Spotiseek nominated)

Win 3 months of Spotify Premium

Voting gives you a chance to win a 3-month Spotify Premium subscription, so there’s enough reason to spend a minute or two and put down your vote. And, of course, you should vote for Spotiseek as “Best Playlist Generator or Converter” and “Best Overall“…

Now get in there and vote!

I’m very pleased to announce the new design of Spotiseek, your favorite Spotify mixtape generator!

Even since I started off with Spotiseek, the goal has been to provide users with great ways of finding new music for Spotify. The main feature has always been the “mixtape generator”, allowing you to create mixtapes of new music based on an artist you know of.
Along the way, I’ve tried both simple Charts and Album reviews, but I feel that none of them are really suitable for Spotiseek, at least not in their current design.

Better focus on what it does best

I’ve come to the conclusion that the main focus of Spotiseek should remain the mixtape generator, but with additional features allowing you to create new and even more exciting mixtapes!

So there are a few major changes with the new design:

Metacritics’ reviews

As I mentioned, the album reviews weren’t really right for Spotiseek. Instead of the plain reviews, I’m using Metacritics‘ awesome Metascore to provide rated artists from which you can create exciting mixtapes with a single click!
The most recently rated artists (available in your country) are displayed on the front page, with even more Rated Artists available from the menu.

Better design of front page

The front-page design has been pretty much the same since day one. I’ve felt for a while that it’s not really doing its best in providing you the info you need to find more music. So there’s been a few changes, with a more prominent search area, as well as the most popular searched artists listed on the right and the Metacritic Rated Artists below.

Charts are out the window… for now.

The charts didn’t really do much in its previous format, so they’ve been dropped for now. They might return in the future, but in a better and more helpful format.

Design puts more focus on the task

I’ve done a few slight changes to the visual experience, in order to put more focus on the tasks and the more important content of Spotiseek.

More good stuff to come

But this isn’t the end! I’ll keep improving Spotiseek and a few of the changes to come are:

• easier use of the mixtape interface, and adding of tracks to Spotify
• even better design and layout
• possibly a more extensive Rated Artists section (should you want it)
• … and even more!

Get what you want

As always, I’m very interested in hearing your thoughts on the redesign. Do you like it? Are you missing something? What do you want more? Please do leave feedback, no matter if it’s praises or criticism.

Thank you for using Spotiseek and I hope you’ll enjoy the new and improved version!

I’m always looking for new ways of helping you find new music for Spotify. There are of course a number ways of doing this, where the ‘similar artists mixtape’ and the top lists were my first attempts.

Enter, album reviews

Yesterday, I added the first set of album reviews to Spotiseek. The reviews are collected from the great review site Metacritic.
Metacritic use up to 45 sources for their music reviews, such as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and Billboard. All these sources make up to a rating called Metascore (0-100) of the album, giving you a good understanding of what the critics thought of it.

More improvements to come

The album review section at Spotiseek is – as you might notice – an early version, and only displays reviews added the past few days. There will be a lot of improvements made on this area, such as improving the style and layout of the reviews (e.g. add album cover) and presenting more reviews from the past.

(Please note that you can only see reviews of albums available in Spotify in your country.)

Do you like the idea?

I hope you’ll like the idea of album reviews on Spotiseek – I’m as usual very interested in hearing your thoughts on this.

Keep your eyes open for more Spotiseek improvements ahead!

Thank you for all your feedback!

After getting a bunch of feedback as comments to the blog Feedback page, I noticed that it was kind of tricky to keep track of and answer all suggestions. So I opened a support community for Spotiseek over at Get Satisfaction instead.

Feedback form added

I’ve also added a feedback form to the new feedback page, where you can post Ideas, Questions, Problems or Praises. The most popular ideas are also displayed on the feedback page.

Of course, you could visit the Get Satisfaction community pages and post comments over there, should you like.

Signing up is easy!

You need to sign up in order to post comments at Get Satisfaction, but this is no challenge as you can connect it to your Facebook, Google, Twitter, Windows Live or OpenID account. Easy, right?

Please keep giving feedback, no matter if it’s positive or negative. Thank you!

A happy announcement is that yesterday, Spotiseek managed to be named as “Website of the Day” over at the great site Pocket-lint.

I’m of course very happy that Spotiseek has caught so many peoples’ attention this fast. I could never have imagined this when starting off about a month ago!

Thank you for using Spotiseek – you’re surely in for a great ride with lots of more improvements to come!

I’ve just uploaded a new version of Spotiseek, including a few nice changes:

• now possible to replace single mixtape tracks with a new one from another artist
• added information messages when something’s gone wrong with the mixtape (instead of it just doing nothing)
• some general interface improvements

More to come

More things are to come, of course, such as:

• more refined search results excluding duplicates
• better support for many simultaneous users
• more interface improvements to the mixtape interface

As always, feedback is highly appreciated.

Enjoy!

There previously was a possibility to prioritize popular tracks when generating mixtapes. I had to remove it for a few days as I didn’t have enough time to implement it into the new interface.

Anyway: it’s back! You can now create mixtapes based on your favourite artists, and make sure you’ll get the most popular tracks picked by default.

Enjoy!

The new version of the mixtape interface is now live. My main goals with the new interface is to 1) provide a stable foundation for me to keep improving and 2) make the interface easier and more powerful to manage.

What’s changed in the new version

You might notice that the layout has changed, as well as the addition of a few new features:

• the mixtape now consists of 16 tracks by default
• possibility to add more artists (“New artists” button on the right)
• possibility to reload all tracks from the chosen set of artists (“Get new tracks” button on the right)
• artists can be removed one by one

The possibility to prioritize popular tracks is temporarily disabled, due to technical reasons. I’ll be looking to restore it as soon as possible…

Also make sure to try out the Spotiseek search engine plugin, allowing you to create mixtapes on the fly by using your browser’s search input.

More feedback wanted

I will of course keep improving the service all the time and your feedback is still wanted. Please leave feedback, be it criticism, suggestions or praises. I’m all ears!

I’m happy to announce that I’ve created a browser search plugin for Spotiseek, allowing you to quickly create new mixtapes with Spotify music!

The browser plugin is available for:

• Firefox 2+
• Internet Explorer 7+

Install the plugin now, why don’t you!

More about browser search plugins

• Learn to Manage Your Search Engines in Firefox (FirefoxFacts)
• Using the powerful Search Engine keywords (Firefox Facts)

Enjoy!