While many of our friends around the world have had Spotify for a while now, those of us here in the U.S. are just starting to get access to it.
Thanks to the oh-so-appealing invite-only roll out strategy and the existing global popularity, Spotify USA invites have been hot ticket items!
I got my invite as a Klout Perk, and was eager to share my invite code with friends. Aside from the huge music collection I now had access to, one of the first things I noticed was the “People list” made up of my Facebook friends in the far right panel–and the very small number of them showing up. Granted, it was still early so I knew it wasn’t realistic to think all my friends A. knew about Spotify, and B. had access to it… Just another one of those things that makes you realize that the tech world — and even more specifically: the Bay Area/Silicon Valley tech world — is like living in a bubble and the WHOLE world just isn’t clamoring for new private beta invites!
Anyway, over the last two weeks or so, I’ve seen my list of friends (who have connected their accounts to Facebook) just about double. It started out filling about half the length of the column, and now has just enough people to make me scroll once.
So now that more friends are joining the party, I want to see what they’re listening to! The problem is, not all of them are sharing playlists (boo). Then I realized that I’m only sharing one…given, it’s a great one, but I’m not sure I’d be terribly helpful to a friend who wanted to discover new music. So why aren’t I sharing more? I think part of it is a “testing the waters” effect. I want to see how things work around here before I go and share too much or anything like that. Additionally, when I first set everything up there weren’t many people to share with! (Ok fine, the other big reason is that some of the music I like could maybe, possibly be kind of embarrassing. Judge me for listening to Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” and the Duck Tales theme song… You know you have some “awesome” songs of your own!)
So my questions are these: what kinds of playlists are you sharing with friends? Have you found friends’ playlists helpful for music discovery? Will Spotify USA take off and become a significant source of sharing and discovery?
