by Silva Payne

Created on: July 19, 2010   Last Updated: August 19, 2011

Spotify.com is an on-line jukebox absolutely stuffed full of music from all genres. Spotify is available as an invite-only free version with short adverts every 3 songs, or as a paid subscription service with no adverts. It is an excellent way to listen to music on-line and create playlists.

Most of us have songs that we love and want to hear regularly. Using Spotify to organise a playlist means you can listen to your favourite songs for free any time you want. This can be particularly useful if your favourite songs are rarely heard on radio or are so old that not even a specialist music store stocks them.

To set up a playlist on Spotify, open the application and look for the “+ new playlist” feature in the top left corner of the viewing pane, underneath your username. Click on the words “new playlist” and type in the name you want to call it. Don't worry if you want to change the name later, as you can click on any playlist name and retype it.

You might want to start by calling your first playlist “Favourites”. The next step is to select the songs you want to hear. To do this, type either the name of the song, or the name of a band or artist into the search tab above your username. Click the little green and white arrow and in the main viewing pane you should get a list of any search matches. If you want to listen to any of the songs, double left click on the title.

Once you have found the version of the song you want, right click on the title and select “save to”. This should bring up your “Favouires” playlist to the right of the menu. Click your playlist and the song will be added to it.

When you have a selection of songs in your playlist, you may want to rearrange their playing order. To do this, left click on the song and drag it to the point in the playlist where you want to hear it. Alternatively, you can use the shuffle option on Spotify, which will play all of the songs in a playlist in a random order.

As your playlist grows, you may see that some songs you have chosen are good for particular times. These may be party songs, club anthems, sad songs for relationship break-ups, or positive life affirming feel-good songs. You can create a playlist for each of your moods with Spotify in the same way that you built your original playlist.

Go to “+ new playlist” and create a new title, such as “Party List”. If you want to leave your original playlist as it is, you can still copy songs from it to your new Party playlist. Simply right click on the song title and select “save to”, and then choose the new playlist title.

If you are using the free version of Spotify, you will only have a limited number of hours play time per month. You will also be restricted in the number of times you can listen to a specific song. With the subscription services, there is no restriction on the play time or the number of times you can listen to a particular song.

In just a short time you can create several different playlists on Spotify for any kind of mood or atmosphere.

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