I have a 5$ per month subscription on Spotify. The magnitude of the music collection available to me is so overwhelming that at times I don't even know where to start. This is an overview of the ways I found that work for me.

All my activity gets published on Facebook and on Last.fm. I did not close down any privacy settings. Good taste, bad taste, it is all up there for you to see, if you're interested. I wonder if people do not get annoyed by continuously seeing "Kristof is now listening to..." messages, but so far I have not received any complaints. On the contrary: people recommend me related artists or start commenting and discussing music with me. That is great. I discovered Mark Hollis like that, after listening to a classic album of Talk Talk.

In Spotify I keep a set of albums that I listen to frequently. I usually listen to full albums, and you can star all songs of a full album with one click in some of the views. Spotify does not mess up the current playlist like iTunes does after browsing for other music. That is a huge plus. You can also play your local iTunes library from Spotify, so iTunes basically is on its way out. Good riddance!

Within Spotify are various sub-applications that allow me to get more out of Spotify than I can get from anywhere else on the internet. For instance Pitchfork magazine has a simple, yet splendid app. I go over its list of reviews from time to time and try to find something that might be interesting. Rolling Stone and The Guardian have similar offerings. Giving a new album a quick listen is usually just a matter of clicking the play button. Sometimes, however, you get the message "this album is not yet available in your country". I never got these territorial divide and conquer tactiques and I don't think I ever will. It basically ends up that you have to download it from the torrent-network (I did this for the new Cloud Nothings album).

Another thing I love is listening to the better radio shows' playlists without the commercials or all the in between talks. The ultimate tool for Belgian radio is dominiek's radiofy but it is not perfect yet. Probably most radio stations are not very particular about releasing their playlist data in a formalized way. The data is available to the copyright holders of the music, but making it transparently available to the public seems still a stretch too far for the music industry powers.

Luckily there are users that contribute on an individual basis. One of my favorite radio shows is called Rock Ahoy. They don't publish anything of their playlists, but through ShareMyPlaylists I was able to find a user that at least made lists for the last five episodes. The mailing list of ShareMyPlaylists often gives good recommendations as well, like this The Evolution of the Hipster list that I just love.

I make playlists myself once in a while, and as they get shared automatically they are visible to anyone, even though some of them should be considered as "under construction" or "just a vague idea". One thing I did was dig up an old magazine with a list of 100 classic albums in music history and make a little list of the albums I did not know yet, but the result is incomplete and probably only interesting to me. I am sure music blogs with more ambition than me, like spotirama will offer a nice selection of spotify playlists soon enough.

Another good source are the end years list. I archived playlists with the best albums of the year 2011 according to Q, Uncut, Stereogum, Pitchfork, NME, Spin and various others, so that remains a source of inspiration for when I don't know which album to play.

There are playful in-Spotify applications like Fuse, that attempts to create playlists based on actuality (but fail to publish a playlist with Whitney Houston songs at the time of writing) and the collaborative, voting based application called Soundrop where you can listen jointly with a bunch of people to a dynamic playlist, contribute songs and get them played when enough people vote for them. That's been fun from time to time.

And then I should mention that there is a karaoke app. The lyrics are copyrighted, however, and last time I checked a lot of the songs were already taken down. Also here, the music industry will only cooperate to a certain extent. They still do change slowly.