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!

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!

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!

I’ve received quite a lot of feedback on Spotiseek so far. It seems like people in general really like the idea of finding new Spotify music, which is a good step in the right direction.

One of the most requested features is the possibility to add more tracks to the generated mixtape/playlist, i.e. more of the same artists or more tracks from other similar artists. I’m working on improving the list management, in order to meet your requirements and hope to have an updated version out soon.

As usual, any feedback is more than welcome!

And we’re off!

I felt that the possibilities to find new Spotify music were a bit limited, and can’t really say that the existing playlist sites match my needs. So I figured I’d give it a stab myself!

We’re now live with the first version of Spotiseek, a tool that helps you find new Spotify music. The basic idea is to let you search by music that you already know of, and get suggestions of new artists and tracks, that you might or might not know of.

How it works

Here’s a short description how it works:

1. Go to www.spotiseek.com
2. Type the name of an artist you like, e.g. Coldplay
3. A playlist is generated by picking tracks from artist similar to the one you searched
4. Drag the image on the playlist’s top right to one of your playlists in Spotify (or to the “New playlist” item)
5. Enjoy your new music!

“But what about this.. and that!”

Bear in mind that this is an all new product, and that there still are some technical limitations on the behalf of Spotify API, e.g. easier creation of playlists and the allowed number of simultaneous users of the search. I’m sure this’ll improve further on, though.

Spotiseek will be improved and more functionality will be added continuously. These are some of the ideas that have come up this far:

• share playlist with others via Facebook or such
• more control of the playlist, i.e. remove certain artists, tracks etc
• possibility to like or dislike artists/tracks
• uploading/sharing of other playlists
• improved and extended toplist features
• more info and details about artists, tracks and albums
• Swedish language support

You’re welcome to share any other thoughts, comments or suggest new/improved features – feel free to drop a comment or two!