How to Save with Spotify and Not Get Embarrassed

This is a guest post by Alvina Lopez. You can also write on how to protect your privacy.

What is Spotify?

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve probably heard of Spotify, a music streaming service with surprisingly good quality and enviable library. It’s a lot like Grooveshark, except has no repeat tracks per album, has better organization, has higher quality, and also interrupts you with ads every couple songs (yes, there had to be a catch somewhere). For those internet dinosaurs who aren’t familiar with either service, think Pandora but you can create your own playlists from extensive libraries.

What's New with the Music Service

Anyway, try Spotify. It’s free and convenient and has a lot of music that you probably haven’t heard. All you need is a computer and internet connection. At least, that’s what I used to tell people before these types of things started happening. Essentially, Spotify is forcing new users to create Spotify accounts through their Facebook accounts, thus automatically associating your Spotify data with your Facebook. Needless to say, this angered a good amount of people, particularly those who don’t have a Facebook and those who try to stay away from the Big-Brother-like social network in general.

The Reason for Privacy

This in itself doesn’t really bother me. I like the idea of easily sharing what you’re listening to with your friends … to an extent. Until I’m in a Taylor Swift mood. Or when I have to bear my friends jokes as to why I was listening to Peaches at 2 am on a Thursday. If people are going to use Spotify for most of their music needs, they don’t want to have to find another music player when they want to hear their guilty pleasures.

How to Disable Sharing

Luckily, Spotify is allegedly “rolling out a new client … where you can temporarily hide your guilty pleasures” with a private listening setting. In the meantime, however, there are other ways to take your music privacy into your own hands. The steps are quite simple too:

• Open Spotify.
• Go the Edit -> Prerences
• Uncheck the box labeled “Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to Facebook’s Open Graph.”
• You can also uncheck “Automatically publish new playlists” as well as “Top Tracks” and “Top Artists”

You can also share the music you listen to on Spotify with only a select few friends on Facebook in a slightly more complicated process by doing the following:

• Go the Facebook Privacy Settings
• Click Edit Settings for “Apps and Websites”
• Find Spotify on your list of Apps and select it.
  • Go to “App activity privacy” in the settings page for Spotify.
  • Click on the default “Public” setting and change it to whichever setting you’d like, including specific people or lists under “Customize”

Alvina Lopez is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: alvina.lopez@gmail.com.

If you'd also like to contribute, you can post a guest article.