Spotify launches slew of new features: Radio stations based on playlists, embed buttons & more

Spotify has announced a slew of new features to its Windows and Mac OS desktop apps, with version 0.8.3 rolling out today. The music-streaming service will be launching four key main updates to the platform:

You may remember back in December, Spotify Radio got a major makeover, and now, when you’re on any album or playlist, you can click ‘Start Playlist Radio’ or ‘Start Album Radio’ to listen to radio stations of a similar ilk:

Instant Search will let you hover over results in the search suggestion drop-down menu, or use the arrow keys to navigate, they’ll then automatically render in the main view:

Now, you’ll be able to get Play Button codes directly from Spotify – to do so, right-click on any album, playlist or song and select Copy Embed Code to get embeddable HTML codes for you to post Spotify Play Buttons to your site.

We first reported on this feature last month, at a time when you needed to head to its developer website to get the embed link. We later wrote that whilst this button was an awesome idea, it wasn’t as good as it should’ve been, because the listener has to have the Spotify desktop app installed on their machine to play it.

The final big update is new sharing options, which we first reported on last week, so when you select to share any piece of content from Spotify, you can post directly to your Tumblr blog, and get a shortened spoti.fi link for Twitter too:

Spotify has been going from strength to strength since it launched in the US last summer, and is available in fourteen territories – Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

Last month, Facebook became a better place for musicians to share their music, as it launched a ‘Listen’ button with prominent placement on musician pages, then the long-awaited iPad app finally hit the market last week.

These latest updates are rolling out gradually to all users from today, but if you want it now, you can download it from here.