On January 7th the Grammis are being handed out in Stockholm and you can be a part of it. The Grammis are Sweden’s biggest music awards event of the year and Spotify has 5 pairs of tickets to hand out to our users for the gala ceremony. The awards are being held at Hovet and all you need to do to enter is send your Spotify username along with your address and phone number to contest@spotify.com and we will notify the winners with instructions on how they can get their tickets by the 6th of January.

To get a taste of who’s up for this year’s big awards check out these playlists on Spotify:
Årets album
Årets låt
Årets grupp
Årets kvinnliga artist
Årets manliga artist

This week we have a special pre-release for Spotify Premium users in Sweden. Starting today and going until January 7th premium users can listen to Emmon’s new album, Closet Wanderings, plus 4 remixes which are exclusive to Spotify. On January 8th the album will be available for pre-listen to all Spotify users until the 31st of January and will be released in stores on February 19th.

Merry Christmas!

This week’s pre-release for premium users in Sweden is courtesy of Danny. In a follow-up to his successful debut Heart Beats he’s recorded a new album, Set My Body Free, which will be released to the public next week. So Just Like That you can pre-listen to the new Danny album, only with Spotify Premium.

Almost immediately after launch we started getting heaps of requests from people who wanted to be able to scrobble the music they were playing on Spotify to Last.fm (Last.fm is a cool music recommendation site for those of you who don’t know). The demand was so high that people started creating their own solutions to scrobble, which were cool but a little hard to install and run for the average user.

So today we are really excited to announce that we’ve added scobbling support directly into Spotify, no more need to install any other software. To setup scrobbling just open the user preferences in Spotify and enter your Last.fm username and password and you’re ready to scrobble.

And there’s more! One of our developers also came up with a neat Greasemonkey script for Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari that works with Last.fm. What is does is it adds a little green music icon next to all the tracks, albums and artists on Last.fm’s website. When you click the icon it will search through Spotify for that artist or track and you can start listening to it right away. To get the add-on you need to download Greasemonkey for your browser (or Greasekit if you use Safari) and then the script, which you can find here.

So for everyone who was waiting for this feature, enjoy!

Christmas is a time for family, friends, good food and music! There’s nothing quite as nice as cozying up by the fireplace with a nice mug of glögg and some great tunes. At Spotify we put together a playlist of some of our favorite holiday songs, the list is a little eclectic but it matches the spirit of our office and we thought we’d share it with our readers, click here to add the playlist to Spotify

There’s endless amounts of Christmas music on Spotify so if you have a favorite holiday album or have created your own holiday playlist let us know, we’d love to hear it.

This weekend we have a soulful pre-release for our Spotify Premium users in Sweden. Anthony Hamilton is releasing his latest album, The Point of It All, next week but you can listen to it first with Spotify Premium. Be sure to check out this Diamond In The Rough.

Earlier this week we introduced gift cards for 6 months of Spotify Premium service. Today we’ve got a little present for two lucky readers. We’re giving away two gift cards to anyone in Sweden, all you need to do is send an email to contest@spotify.com and include your name and postal address where we can mail the gift card.

So if you are still missing a holiday gift for a friend or family member or you’re just looking to upgrade yourself to Spotify Premium, send an email by December 18th and enter yourself in the contest.

Our friends over at Wonderland records are holding their winter party this Saturday night in Göteborg.

Five lucky Spotify Premium users can get a place on the guest list plus receive a five-CD Wonderland goodie bag at the event. If you are interested in attending the party leave a comment and we’ll contact the winners tomorrow afternoon.

West coast rocks!

As we’ve said before, we’re constantly adding more music to Spotify. This means uploading the hot new music from major labels, as well as getting more and more from the back catalogs of smaller labels and hip indies.

You can get a small preview of the most popular new music by clicking the “Home” link in the upper left corner of Spotify and then selecting the “What’s new” tab. Or get it all by simply searching for everything that was released in 2008. (We’ve told you about how to make the most of Spotify searches before.)

Best thing is, even though we have lots and lots of music, there’s still a huge amount of music to add. We won’t stop until we have it all.

For the past little while we’ve been working with Bredbandsbolaget, our very first partner, to provide their customers with Spotify accounts. We’re really excited to be extending this deal and let you know that they have an amazing 500,000 invites to Spotify, which they are distributing to their users so that they can share them with family or friends.

Bredbandsbolaget has been great to work with, they’ve also been incredibly enthusiastic users of Spotify themselves. Their CEO, Georgi Ganev, has been nice enough to post his personal playlist, which we thought we’d share with you.

So if you’re an existing Bredbandsbolaget customer or you are looking to switch ISPs why not head over to Bredbandsbolaget and get Spotify as well!