Spotify goes social with 'massive' revamp

Popular online music service Spotify has announced a significant update to its services, with the integration of social networking options.

In a roll-out starting today and continuing throughout the coming weeks, Spotify will be making version 0.4.3 available to its 7 million European users. The new version will feature not one but two big new features, the first of which is integration with social networking platform Facebook.  This will allow users to connect with other Facebook-using friends via a profile page which shows information on what each contact is listening to, their favourites, and so on. Users can publish and share playlists, favourite artists and tracks to Facebook, send song recommendations to friends; and view a feed of who's listening to what. To share tracks, users simply drag and drop the song into a friend's profile, which will cause it to appear in their inbox.

The second big update is that the Service can now be used as an iTunes-style music library and player. On opening the new version, users can choose to import their entire MP3 music library into Spotify, and use it to maintain, sort and update their collection, as well as wirelessly syncing to mobile devices.

Commenting on the updates, which Spotify's engineers have been working on for the last six months, founder and CEO Daniel Ek said: "We're marrying the best bits of Facebook and we're marrying the best bits of iTunes and we've moved them in to Spotify."

Spotify users can download the new version from www.spotify.com