via Gizmodo:
Spotify doesn’t let you see what your friends are listening to right now—instead, it offloads that capability onto Last.fm, a free service that you have to sign up separately for. It doesn’t alert you when your favorite artists put out new music, and it doesn’t really have a good music discovery engine. It also, surprisingly, has a puny section for new releases, when in fact it gets a ton of new releases in every week that they dump into a separate playlist. (Not sure why this isn’t more of a core feature, to be honest.) So here are a bunch of utilities to help you get more out of Spotify, whether you’re a paying user or just a free one.
Fantastic run-down. I’m already using a few of these. It’s great that the Europeans beta-tested Spotify for us over the past 3 years! There’s already a huge community of add-ons from people to make the experience better.