Music streaming service Spotify has garnered huge amounts of praise over the past few months. While it’s great for listening to music you already know about, Spotify has been no good at discovering new artists… until now.
UK-based developer Andy Smith has created Spotibot, a service that fills in this gap in Spotify’s functionality. Simply enter the name of an artist on the site and Spotibot will auto-generate a playlist of similar tracks using Last.fm’s database. This can then be dragged and dropped straight into a new Spotify playlist to be streamed right away.
The service is just a work in progress and might not work perfectly for everyone right away but when I tried it I got favourable results, giving me a playlist of similar songs to listen to instantly.
Spotibot also offers a music recommendation service via Twitter. Tweet “@spotibot similar to” followed by the name of an artist and after a few minutes you’ll get a reply giving you the name of a similar song. If you’re shy about your taste, the service also works via Direct Message.
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For the future Smith plans to provide a tighter integration with users’ Last.fm accounts, allowing for more personal recommendations. He also plans to develop the mobile side of his service further. At present he has a mobile site at m.spotibot.com that allows you to discover similar music and then open it straight into the Spotify mobile app. This works brilliantly, although only with the Android app – iPhone and Symbian users are out in the cold for now.
Spotibot is a fantastic resource for Spotify users but its existence will make people in countries where Spotify isn’t yet available (hello, USA) even more frustrated than they already were.
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