The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
Here’s a little feature that you may not know about. You can link directly to a specific time in a track by adding, for example "#1:31″ to the end of a URI, where 1:31 is the time you want to link to. Just a note that this feature only works with Spotify URIs, HTTP links do not support it.
The Metadata API may be used to explore Spotify’s music catalogue. Please refer to the following instructions.
This morning we’re really excited to announce a major evolution of Spotify. Today we begin rolling out Spotify version 0.4.3 which includes the largest feature upgrade since our launch in late 2008. To kick it off we’ve added a number of social features, centered on a fully editable Spotify music profile, with the ability to publish playlists, top artists and top tracks for public view. Discovering these profiles is simple as we’ve connected with Facebook so that you can instantly add your friends’ profiles.
New licensing model for Spotify
To create a playlist folder, simply go to the File -> New playlist folder or click the "+" symbol near the top left side of your screen. Once you’ve created a folder you can just drag and drop existing playlists into it and even create folders within folders to better organise your music.
So it’s with a sense of real pride and excitement that we can announce a new milestone today, having welcomed our millionth paying subscriber to the service. It’s a testament to our fantastic users who continue to support us and spread the Spotify word, either by telling friends or sharing some of the 200 million playlists that you’ve put together so far.
You’ll now start seeing new music posts and play buttons all over your newsfeeds. Hit a play button and the music starts. Right there. Spotify fires up to give you a new soundtrack to your social life. Check out your new Music Dashboard and your real-time ticker to discover the music that’s trending with your friends.
At Spotify we take these types of incidents seriously. Our mission when dealing with outages is to avoid having the same incident twice. We want to be able to learn something new with each incident. However, sometimes we fail.
Spotify supports unicode usernames which we are a bit proud of (not many services allow you to have ☃, the unicode snowman, as a username). However, it has also been a reliable source of pain over the years. This is the story of one time when it bit us pretty badly and how we spent Easter dealing with it.
We believe being able to grow, learn new skills and achieving mastery is a big part of what motivates a person. Those things are also important in our fast-paced world where our surroundings (market, competitors, technology) and Spotify itself changes all the time. We need employees that are eager to learn, that are open to change and that want to take on bigger challenges as they and the company grow.
Service discovery is a fairly large subject but in essence it boils down to answering the question: what servers run this service (given some description or name of a service)? At Spotify we have solved this problem with DNS for a long time. Specifically, we use so called SRV records. A DNS SRV record is a canonical name, typically of the form _name._protocol.site, mapped to a list of hostnames with weight, priority and port number.
In order for us to learn more effectively from programs of such size, here’s what we are doing for retro at scale, designed by Henrik Kniberg, and refined through couple executions!