Spotify

Remember the mixtape? Hours and hours hovering over that record button so that you could capture that perfect song and share it with your friends and maybe a little hidden message. Well the mixtape is alive and well and right in the middle of social media thanks to Spotify. Let’s check it out! Life is crazy. I mean who has time to keep up with the latest in social networking. I’m Carly Knoblach and if you stick with me I’ll show you all the tech tools you need to get socially connected. Spotify is a streaming music service and there a lot of reasons why millions of people are flocking to it. Number one it’s free as long as you’re willing to put up with some ads. Number two it gives you access to millions of songs whenever you want them and three it helps you share music with friends in a fast and easy way. To get started go to the website and download the Spotify app for windows or mac. When you run the app for the first time you’ll notice that it’s asking you to log in with your facebook account. Pros: you log in one click and it’s really easy to start sharing with your facebook friends. Cons: if you don’t have a facebook account or if you don’t like facebook all up in your music business then unfortunately there’s no way around it. Once you’re in it will look a lot like iTunes or other music players you’re familiar with. The basics are pretty simple. You can use the ‘What’s New’ feature to find albums or artists that are topping the charts or do a search for albums or artists that you like. When you find a song you want to hear just select it and hit play and you’re rocking! Oh, I love this song. Spotify lets you share music a few different ways in fact just by playing a song you’re sharing it with all your facebook followers and they’re sharing it right back. This is your official warning about listening to boy band music. People will know. If you just don’t want to share your music selections at all you can make that a permenant selection too. But if you are the sharing type your friends can see all the songs that you’re listening to and you can follow your friends in Spotify to see what they’re listening to as well. Click the people link and you’ll see your facebook friends. You can narrow the selection down to those who appear on Spotify only. Now you can add certain friends by clicking them and you’ll see what they’re listening to. Which leads to another way to share music in Spotify – to send song selections directly to friends. Hear something amazing that you’ve just got to share? Just drag and drop the song onto the person you want to share it with. You can even send a message. Ok now back to the mixtape idea which Spotify calls a playlist and a playlist is just allows you to take the large, large catalogue of Spotify music and whittle it down to just your personal favorites. To create a new one simply click the icon here and give the new playlist a name. Now when you come across a song you want to keep or share simply drag it over to that list. Once you’ve got all your favorites in you can share your playlists on social networks like facebook, twitter, or tumblr. Or you can send it directly to a friend just like when you’d make a cassette in the old days. Just click the send to friend tab, enter a friends name or more than on, add a message, then click send. Have I mentioned that all this is completely free? It’s amazing, right? So why would you want to upgrade to the nine ninety five a month premium plan? Aside from having an ad free experience you’ll be able to load Spotify onto your mobile devices and stream your playlists and all those millions of songs from wherever you are. Plus, and this is the killer feature, you’ll be able to download as much music as fits on those devices and listen to it offline. Millions of songs that I can listen to, wherever and whenever I want?! Wow, this mixtape idea is lot easier than it was in the old days. I hope you check it out but before you do make sure you like us on facebook, check us out on twitter, and come back for more tutorials at eHow Tech. Bye!