Right then!
We’re launching a new online feature here at scandipop.co.uk. We’re getting Spotified! As you all probably well know by now, Spotify is a totally free, online music streaming service. We’ve been using it for quite some time now, but have started using it more and more recently, and since this is a music website, it makes sense to share our account with you, our readers. And by that, we mean our playlists and favourite music.
- If you’re not currently using Spotify, you can get an account here. Like we said, it’s free, or you can choose a paid subscription version of the service to eliminate annoying adverts, or to enable you to listen via your mobile ‘on the go’.
- Once you’ve done that, you can find our account ‘scandipop.co.uk’ here.
- And you’re in!
The purpose of all of this is simple – it’s an added way, on top of this website, to bring you the music that we’re listening to and loving. This is done via creating playlists, which you can choose to subscribe to (at no cost of course). These playlists will be separated into three categories;
1. Archive of each month’s website posts…
There’s more and more great music coming out of Scandinavia than ever these days, and so we find that we’re writing about much more than we used to when we first started. So at the end of every month, by way of cataloguing everything that we’ve written about, we’ll create a new playlist containing all of the music that’s been discussed on scandipop that month. Not only is that a good way of keeping track of what’s happening on here, it’s also a great feature that means you can go back and dip into previous months playlists, to rediscover some gems you might have forgotten about, or to have a listen of a certain ‘freeze frame’ of time – captured in music! Right now we’ve got playlists for January, February, March, and April this year. At the end of the month we’ll create one for May. And then we’ll probably start going back further and further too.
For now, you can browse the playlist of April’s archive here.
2. Celebrity guest playlisters…
This one’s quite exciting! We’re going to be getting a different Scandinavian pop celebrity EVERY WEEK to submit a playlist for the website. We’ll also be allowing them to choose their own theme each time, so it’s entirely up to them what they submit. And it doesn’t have to be Scandinavian pop music, it can be music from anywhere in the world. So one week we might have a singer submitting a playlist of their favourite up and coming new artists, another week we might have a famous songwriter give us a list of their favourite songs to work out in the gym to, and then another week there might be an artist presenting their favourite UK dance songs of the 90’s! Or anything in between. The only restriction is that each playlist needs to be between 10 and 20 tracks, around the size of a standard album.
To kick things off this week, we’ve got Alexander Bard of Gravitonas, and formerly of BWO and Army of Lovers, to submit a playlist of his choice to us. He’s chosen to make a list of ‘scandipop classics’ – milestones in the creation of modern Scandinavian pop, both artists and songwriters. You can have a listen to that playlist here.
3. Our own random playlists…
These will be created by us, and can be pretty much anything really, although only ever related to Scandinavian pop. We’re not sure yet how often we’ll be making new ones, but we’ll aim towards creating a few every month. They could be anything from top 20 Max Martin, to songs that sound like they could have been recorded by Abba, to our favourite dansband songs!
To start off with, here’s a playlist that we’ve created of music by the nominees of the 2011 scandipop awards. It also serves as a great reminder of a lot of the great tunes that came out last of Scandinavia last year! You can listen to that playlist here.
One flaw in all of this unfortunately, is that Spotify operate territory restrictions, imposed on it by record labels. So it’s very likely that some, if not a great deal of the music that we post in these playlists, won’t be available for you to listen to unless you’re a Swedish Spotify user. Our account is based in Sweden, so it’s only Swedish accounts that will be able to listen to 100% of the music that makes up our playlists. HOWEVER, even if you’re not able to stream the music, the playlist and all of the songs on it will be visible to you, so you can then go about copying the playlist onto your own iTunes, LastFM, youtube, or whatever it is you use, should you wish. And the website monthly archive playlists, will still serve as a quick reference catalogue of new music each month. Also, the celebrity playlist mostly won’t be a problem either, as they won’t be restricted to only Scandinavian music. So it’s all good! And we expect record labels to start getting looser with their territory restriction rules on Spotify soon anyway.
Spotify really is one of the most incredible things to ever happen to music, as far as we’re concerned. It’s a Swedish based company (of course) and it’s already completely changed the way Sweden consumes music nowadays – so much so, that Spotify streaming data is now incorporated into the official chart. And best of all of course, is that it’s unbelievably, totally free, should you prefer.
