Spot Duty

Wired reports: Spotify revamped its widely-acclaimed on-demand music software on Tuesday with the biggest upgrade since its European launch over a year ago. Its new focus is on integration with your other musical and non-musical platforms, including your hard drive, Facebook account and a simple Spotify social network for connecting users directly.

This new “beta” version (0.4.3), rolling out to existing users starting today, looks to be an attempt to replace rather than augment iTunes. Users can now have Spotify search their hard drives for all the un-DRMed music they’ve accumulated over the years in iTunes or elsewhere, and add it to Spotify alongside the millions of songs in the Spotify catalog. And unlike iTunes, Spotify can wirelessly sync your playlists to your iPhone or other supported smartphone, either via wifi (for cached playlists) or the cloud (for streamed playlists).

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs and company cling to their precious USB cables, with those proprietary dock connectors, possibly until Apple is ready to roll out an Apple cloud-based music service incorporating the Lala service it acquired late last year.

In a neat intermingling of the cloud and local hard drives, Spotify now allows users to create playlists from a mix of songs from their own hard drives and Spotify’s catalog. If you share such a playlist, the service will attempt to replace the tracks on your local hard drive with tracks from the service. (The next step would be to use something like Playdar to replace those tracks with locally-stored tracks on the recipient’s computer.)

Spotify has long allowed playlist sharing and even collaboration, and still does; these new features grease the wheels for that sharing to happen, because you no longer need to copy a URL into an e-mail or Facebook message; all of that happens within Spotify now.

Other sharing features include a new Inbox for sending and receiving tracks to or from friends, the ability to “like” anything to add it to a new Favorites list, Facebook integration to help you add friends from there, and a standalone Spotify social network that lets you publish a profile through the service and add friends using their e-mail addresses. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told Wired.com on a couple of occasions that his company would not launch a social network, but it appears to have done so anyway (with good reason — Facebook’s already taking over enough of the net as it is).

A Spotify spokesman said the new version would be available for manual downloading in advance of the automatic rollout by 9am GMT, which was over four hours ago at this writing, but we still can’t download it to put it through its paces. When we do, one of our chief concerns will be whether Spotify managed to add all this stuff without compromising the simplicity and speed of operation that helped make it such a big hit where it is available, because we’ve certainly seen that happen before. (Remember when Firefox used to run quickly, without crashing, or when iTunes used to load in under 30 seconds?)

These improvements are nice for people who can access them, which the majority of people reading this likely cannot, because Spotify is only available in a handful of European countries. One clue about that has emerged, for those looking for a sign that it might soon roll out in their areas. Visitors to Spotify.com from unsupported regions used to be notified that it wasn’t available there yet; now, they’re asked to enter their e-mail addresses for when the rollout happens in their countries.

Insiders have speculated for months whether Spotify will be able to offer in the United States the same freemium version it offers in Europe, where users enjoy unlimited on-demand listening on an ad-supported basis. We don’t have any solid clues about that, but if licensing rates force Spotify to launch with a 14-day free trial similar to the one offered by Rhapsody rather than the free unlimited version, these new social and local playback features could give people a reason to use the free version of Spotify—even if it doesn’t allow unlimited on-demand listening, which would require a $10/month or so subscription.