This is the best news coming from Sweden since Abba - Spotify has enabled scrobbling. Scrobbling means Spotify now supports integration to Last.fm. This is indeed very big news as Last.fm has a huge community of music lovers that have until lately been left out with using Spotify. I'm one of them and this move has made my iTunes usage totally obsolete.

To enable scrobbling, go to Spotify's preferences and add your last.fm details there. Just to make sure, close the program and launch it once more and you're set.

Why is this such a big deal? There are at least two reasons. Firstly, Last.fm has a huge music community that love Last.fm and want their listened music to be added to the service to find new music in the future, which is the second reason. One of the benefits of Last.fm is the possibility find new music through your peers by matching your musical taste to theirs and for this you need a relatively extensive list of listened songs.

However, there lies a larger possibility here for Spotify. By allowing the usage of third party applications or plugins in conjunction with Spotify, they are creating a healthy developer community that will take the service to new levels. This is one of the reasons why Twitter has been so popular as developers have been able to make use of the service exactly in the way they have wanted to, creating more traction for Twitter itself - something all web companies are looking for.

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Kristoffer Lawson December 29, 2008

With Spotify I can't:

* Listen to music offline

* Purchase music to burn on CDs or whatever

* Copy music over to my iPhone

* Find a large portion of the music I listen to

Until it can do all of these things, there is no way Spotify could be described as making iTunes obsolete. All of that before we even discuss the AppStore or iPhone/iPod synchronisation. Arguably both could, and probably should, be done with a separate application, but for now it's iTunes all the way.