Who wants to meet the hottest DJ and producer in the world?

Superstar DJ, David Guetta, released his latest album, Nothing But The Beat, yesterday. This fantastic album includes the smash hit, Little Bad Girl.

To celebrate, we’re offering you and a friend the chance to win a VIP trip to meet David as he performs his final Ibiza show on September 15th. Like the sound of that? We’ll pick up the tab for your flights, accommodation and tickets.

Spotify listeners are also be treated to an exclusive version of the new album with track-by-track audio commentary from David.

To enter the competition, just click over to David’s personal Spotify page. There’s also exclusive video footage to enjoy, as well as his impressive discography. Good luck!

Here at Spotify we believe that sharing is a fundamental aspect of enjoying and discovering music. With this in mind, we’ve developed collaborative playlists to help you spread the love. This means that not only are you able to share playlists with others, you can also open them up to collective compiling and editing!

How to Collaborate

In order to turn on collaboration for a playlist, right-click (or Ctrl-click on the Mac) the list and select the “Collaborative Playlist” option. Next, copy the HTTP link or Spotify URI of the playlist and send it to a friend.

When your friend clicks on the link, it opens in Spotify and your collaborative playlist is added. Now you can both make changes, which will appear on both of your screens instantly. Collaborative playlists appear with a green icon and text, and sync automatically between the different users managing that playlist.

Sharing the Playlist

You can share the playlist with any number of people. Anyone who gets the link will be able to alter your playlist, as well as pass the link onto others. There is currently no way to give only specific users the right to alter a collaborative playlist, other than by controlling the access to the link. The link is the key to the playlist. You can, however, turn off the ‘collaborativity’ of the playlist the same way you turned it on. Everyone who has got the link will still be able to view and play the list but only you will be able to alter it.

Collaborate with us to perfect this “Mid-Week Mania” playlist!

We have a small, yet important, update to our Android app available for download in our Preview section now.

This update adds language support for French and Spanish. Head over to the preview page and follow the installation instructions. Once we’ve tested this preview a little bit more we’ll release it for all users in the Android Marketplace.

Did you know that Spotify has built-in support for music recommendation service, Last.fm? To get the music flowing, just go to the Preferences menu and plug in your Last.fm account details.

Once you’re connected, all the music you listen to on Spotify will be automatically scrobbled to Last.fm.

Based on your taste, Last.fm will recommend you more music and even local events. You’ll also be able to explore what songs you play most often, how much you’ve played an artist over a certain amount of time, and even discover which of your friends have similar tastes. If you don’t have a Last.fm account yet, sign up here.

Today we want to put a spotlight on drop down arrows. You’ll usually find them in two places; either when searching for tracks or in the Artists view. When searching for music we combine different versions of the same track name and display the most popular one. If you’re looking for a different version you can click the drop down arrow to the right of the track name to reveal all the versions available.

There are also drop down arrows next to some album names. If an album has a censored version or a radio edit we combine them and add the drop down arrow.

Clicking on the arrow will serve up all versions of that album in our catalogue.

Ever curious to see what track or artist you listen to the most? We’ve got a top list feature built-in that shows you what you currently can’t enough of! You can view your top twenty tracks, albums and artists as well as discover the top tunes playing in various different countries.

To check out the Top Lists, head to “What’s New” and then click on the “Top Lists” tab. Interact with the drop down menus here to explore the different views by track, artist, album and region!

New Releases – August 2011

Each and every month we’re creating a playlist dedicated to the very latest Spotify releases. Updated weekly – or any other time we discover tracks we think you’ll like – this is the best place to check out the best new music around. Currently ready and waiting for you on this month’s edition are tracks from Blink 182, Ed Sheeran, Among Brothers, Yuck; a killer Serban Ghenea remix of Björk’s Cosmogony and the new, incredible Balearic-indebted release from Paul Weller.

The Soundtrack to July 2011

The beginning of the month is always a particularly exciting time here at SMP Towers, as our favourite monthly mixtapes make their way from your brains to our hompage. The granddaddy of all of our regular playlists is The Soundtrack to…, by Phil Wilce. The best of a brilliant collection of new music, as far as we’re concerned, comes in the shape of Maverick Sabre, The Horrors, The Chemical Brothers, Toddla T, Sbtrkt and Tom Vek.

August 2011 - Acid Jazz Hispano

The Acid Jazz Hispano series seems to get better and better each month, turning in the coolest cuts of funky, jazzy, soulful, housey, hip-hop beats. This month is no exception. Featured here: Mark Ronson feat. Kasabian, Los Amigos Invisibles, Prince, Roy Ayers… need we go on? We will anyway: Gladys Knight & The Pips, Marvin Gaye, Alabama 3, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Joe Smooth, Amy Winehouse and tons more. If you only listen to one playlist today – don’t, listen to loads! – make it this one.

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One of the most popular Spotify features is the ability to create and share playlists - it’s a great way to discover new music and organize your old favorites.

Part of the fun of creating these lists is sharing them with others and since we launched, we’ve seen a number of really cool resources pop up that make it easier for you to explore and share compilations.

Here’s a small selection of the awesome sites we often use:

• Digster.fm
• ShareMyPlaylists
• Specifyspot
• Spotiseek.com
• Spotylist
• Topsify
• SpotMyList
• Share Playlists
• My Spotify Playlist is Better Than Yours
• Xpandify
• Listen Spotify
• Spotify List

These sites have been created by users that really love Spotify and want to make it easy for you to find new playlists and share the ones you’ve lovingly compiled.

We’re so excited to see more and more playlist resources cropping up every week! We’d like to hear from you if you’ve got a site to share so please leave a comment here!

One of the core features of Spotify is searching. You just type the name of an artist or a song into the search bar and off you go. Normally that’s all you need to get the Spotify experience: you know, when you think of some music and literally seconds later you’re listening to it.

There are cases, though, when you need to refine your queries. Perhaps you don’t want to search for “madonna”, because you’re not looking for the artist Madonna, but rather songs whose titles include the word “madonna”. Then you can search for “title:madonna”.

Similarly, you can search for “album:madonna” and “artist:madonna” to find only matching albums and artists, respectively.

Refining your Searches

To further refine your searches (or to indulge in some nostalgia or browse through a new musical genre), you can search for a year, a range of years, or a genre - ie: “year:1969″, “year:1994-1996″ or “genre:soul”.

Logically, you can use combinations to search for techno from the early ’90s or Grateful Dead songs from the late ’60s. Simply type in “genre:techno year:1990-1995″ or “artist:”grateful dead” year:1965-1970″. In the latter example, you see how you can use quotes to control to what parts of the search string a keyword applies.

Searching by Genre

Searching by genre, such as “genre:jazz”, is very popular but a lot of people are unaware of what genres they can search for. To help you get more out of your searches we’ve put together a list of all the genres in Spotify. Some of the genres contain two words in which case you need to add quotation marks to the search for it to work properly. For example to find Appalachian Folk music you need to search for “genre:”Appalachian Folk”".

Have a look at this Google Doc to see all 944 genres listed. Not all of them may be available since we may not have all genres of music yet but you should be able to find the majority of them.

Searching by Record Label

Searching for a label is just as easy; just type “label:” before the label name in the search box. An example would be label:warp. If the label you’re searching for contains a space, you must enclose it in quotation marks, like in label:”rough trade”.

With Spotify, you can share anything with anybody. A track you love, or a whole playlist. It’s incredibly easy to do as everything has a link that is shareable. Simply right click on what you want to share and select “Copy HTTP Link”. This link can be emailed, posted across your social networks and even pasted into your IM conversations.

On Facebook? You can share music with your Facebook friends inside Spotify, and also view their published playlists. All you need to do is connect to your Facebook account within Spotify and any of your Facebook friends who are also connected will appear in your People list.

Keeping it seamless and simple, the playlists you’ve decided to share will be updated instantly when you add, remove or re-order songs. Here’s a playlist of staff favorites to get you inspired for the week ahead!