Earlier this year, in February, we started testing advertising within Spotify for a few of our beta testers. As we get closer to launch we’re expanding this advertising test to include almost all Spotify users. As from today you’ll notice that we’re testing a number of different models and formats, including audio spots and banners. As always we’d appreciate any ideas or input.

Throughout the summer we’ll research how the ads are received and hope you’ll be up for helping us with feedback. Spotify will be launched in two flavours: a free version with advertising, and a premium version without. More details on the product launch will follow!

Music can be a powerful messenger. We’ve put together a list of songs that probably will make you think about a specific brand or message. Can you match the right song with the right brand? Send me your guess and the first one coming up with the correct answers will get five extra invites!

A shout goes out to our friends here in Sweden at the media agencies Bizkit, Carat, MindShare, OMD, Starcom and Wisely for providing us with the creatives. Last but not least our continued thanks to all of our beta testers! You rock!

We have just released a new version of Spotify.

For this release:

• More country top lists have been added
• Browsing on Various Artists (which is not a real artist after all) has been disabled
• A warning has been added, informing the user that he needs to complete the information in his profile
• Links have been added to error messages where appropriate
• A new class of info messages has been added and the look of all info messages has been updated

At Spotify we spend most of our our waking hours online, so it’s very hard to imagine a world without the web.

It’s an exciting time in history and there is a bunch of interesting people behind it that we’re grateful to. Read more about our heroes in the July issue of Vanity Fair.

Spending all day trying to index all music in the world you tend to think about this sort of question.

A friend sent us this really interesting podcast from Radio Lab in which they are trying to discover the main ingredients of music and understand why it touches us so intimately.

So what exactly is music? My best guess it’s in the ear of the beholder and could either be described by exact mathematical formulas, a picture like the one below or a quote like this one “Music is what feelings sound like” by a unknown wise person.

What do you think? Why not leave a comment below with your thoughts?

Thanks Delorean for the recommendation and for being so generous with your music expertise.

We have just released a version of Spotify with an entirely new streaming protocol. This will allow us to build an efficient distribution system that we can scale to a much larger number of users, eventually letting you share Spotify with all your friends. While introducing the new streaming protocol, we have also switched to the Ogg Vorbis codec, giving you higher-quality music without using more bandwidth.

This is a big step for us, but since this is relatively untested code, please bear with us (and let us know!) if there are any issues, such as increased latency, missing songs or lost connections.

There is also a few visible changes:

• We have turned off fuzzy matching when searching, and instead suggest alternative spellings if your search query didn’t return any results
• Links to iTunes have been added for some tracks and albums. Through the context menu it is easy to buy your favourite tracks from the iTunes Store
• The dashes that appear in automatically generated playlist names have been replaced by the typographically more correct en dashes
• A bug that caused Spotify to crash when trying to play empty playlists has been fixed