Huge announcement today as Spotify unveils their so-called ‘ Next Generation’. It’s all about social interaction. We may share our songs with friends and our facebook pages without exiting the program. The number of news features is huge . Here is a brief list of the most important ones.

Social:

It’s all about your friends and yourself. You can like or share a tracklist, a song, an album… You can also send those to friends as there is an inbox for that. Beware that all your playlists and favourite songs will be shared on your Facebook wall so you should check what you want to appear public or not.

Library:

From now on, Spotify will check local files and add them to your stream, comparing those to their own database so you can access the artist info online. Spotify wants to become your only source of music from now, it seems. The one feature I probably love is ‘Gracenote’ wich lets you modify your own music metadata comparing it with Spotify’s info. Also, for Premium users, their own music can be transfered directly to their mobile Spotify applicacation, wich is a huge bonus (no more cables!)

Check this video for a quick look at the newest features:

I believe this is going to be a key moment in the success of Spotify and his bussiness model. They are going social all the way, wich will let them advertise their platform with minimal costs. If they succeed and also the get to pull their american adventure (when it comes), this may change the music industry once and for all.

Spotify’s new update will come automatically to users in the next days, but you can download it now yourself here.

(source: The Spotify Blog)

(UPDATE) Related links:

- Major update from Spotify introduces new social features (TechCrunch)
- Spotify TNG (The Pansentient League)
- 11 things to know about the next-gen Spotify (techradar.com)
- Spotify goes all socual media with spanky relaunch (Fast Company)
- Shiny Review: the new Spotify features – do we like them? (Shiny Shiny)