Collaborative playlists and how to make them

For a while now I have been thinking about editable playlists- more accurately, playlists that you have shared with people to edit, like on Spotify.

But these shared playlists seem a bit lacking to me. I mean, having a playlist that you and your friends can change is cool and all, but it could be so much more, which got me thinking even further into this.

What if we had playlists that were easily embeddable on a website or blog, that the general populous could rearrange and edit? It would become much more than a playlist, or even user interaction. It would allow you to get to know your readers- get involved with them on a deeper lever. It could also provide an easily viewable, always changing view into the social consciousness and current musical trends.

So- how to do this? Spotify is an easy choice for this, as it is used currently by millions of people, is free to download and use, and is linked socially.

To do this, you need the Spotify App, as well as an account with spotify or Facebook.

Once you have downloaded and installed the app, you should come up to the main screen, which looks like this:

Since I have been using Spotify for a while now, I already have a few playlists loaded...

Now- click on the "New Playlist" Button on the left sidebar. Create and name it whatever you'd like! I'll name mine "Social" for now :)

Click on the new playlist, and it should take you to a blank screen

This is where the fun starts!

Right click on the playlist and select "Collaborative Playlist". This is crucial, as it allows free editing of the playlist by others.

The playlist icon should turn green and have a little tic next to it.

Next, we need to get this thing shared. Right click on the playlist, and select "Copy Spotify URI". This will copy a URL into your clipboard, which links to the playlist. Paste this into a location on your website, and when a user clicks on it (and has the Spotify App installed), it will open spotify and the playlist. Of course, since this requires the Spotify app to be installed, how are people supposed to edit it? Well, simply placing a link and a short message noting the requirement of spotify, it can be handled easily. But we can make this even easier.

If we right click on the link, and select "copy embed code"- we can take this playlist, and display it publicly on a web site by posting the embed code on a webpage. So even someone who does not have spotify can see what songs exactly are in the playlist, and even play them themselves! 

Finally, we take all these and post them online. Sometimes this takes a bit of HTML finagling to get it right!  

So feel free to edit my playlist, and discover new artists, new genres, and new songs that you otherwise would not know!

Edit my Social Playlist!!