Spotify this week unveiled apps that integrate directly into the music streaming service, but this isn’t quite FarmVille for music lovers. Instead, the apps are, for the most part, geared at helping listeners find music — the system offers 15 million tracks at last count, so figuring out which ones you want to actually hear can be a challenge.

At the moment, the 11 apps are all free, and available to those on free subscriptions, and it’s hard to see that changing any time soon. For the most part, the apps are generally reviews and playlists — hardly something many people will shell out for. Moving the service to handsets might make apps chargeable, but even then, these are little more than curated content.

However, when it comes to music, that’s no bad thing. Billboard, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone magazines all have slick-looking charts, offering playlists of their most popular songs. Well, most of the top songs, at least. Billboard’s top ten chart is not alone in being blighted by a greyed-out track, meaning it’s not available via Spotify.

I’ve been a whisker away from signing up to Spotify Premium in the past, with the promise of all-you-can-eat music enough to lure me to the Spotify home page – but never quite enough to persuade me to part with £10 per month.

But this morning’s announcement – a cut-down version for £4.99 per month that brings music to your PC but not to your phone – has finally brought my dust-ridden credit card out of retirement.

This is a watershed moment: it marks the point where I officially stop buying CDs and move to a brave new download-only age. Although if I’m entirely honest, the past year hasn’t seen many CDs added to my collection (five if you must know, and all of those were Christmas presents).

Fifteen years ago, when I was but a fresh-faced university graduate, things couldn’t have been more different. I spent hours each week in the local HMV, listening to the new CD singles and pondering which to buy. My shelves still heave with the weight of discs sitting there, unlistened to for a decade.

How much more convenient to have music on demand. If I want to listen to the new album by The National, I can. Or a friend tells me about a band I’ve never heard of; all I need to do is head over to Spotify and type in their name. Or I can flip back to my youth and swoon to the sounds of The Cure (still the best band in history, just for the record).

So yes, I’m persuaded. And I’ll be fascinated to see what everyone else thinks. Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a poll on the website gently ticking away, asking whether or not PC Pro visitors would ever sign up to Spotify Premium for £10 a month.

You can see the resounding answer above: 82% said no, 12% yes, and a paltry 6% already do. Will that change? That’s up to you, so head over to the home page and take part in the new poll – which asks the same question but this time the price is £5.

If you don’t want to be responsible for cluttering up your friends’ Facebook pages with inane announcements, or let the world know about your Barbara Streisand Greatest Hits playlist, here’s how to protect your privacy:

Once you’ve installed the Spotify 0.4.3 software, you’ll be presented with a wizard that first asks whether you want to access your local music collection through Spotify and will then ask whether you want to connect to Facebook. Log in to your Facebook account, and then when it asks if you want to change your sharing options, click the Edit button.

You’ll see a screen something like the one below:

You’ll notice that everything is conveniently ticked to go public, including your lists of “top artists” and “top tracks”, which is seemingly nothing more than a list of recently played tracks and, in my case, rather embarrassingly includes Donovan and The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Thanks Spotify. If you don’t want to spend the next six months living down your choice of music, flick the switches to the “off” position on the desired lists and they won’t be shared with your pals.

However, Spotify will still continue to spit out alerts to your Facebook friends every time you do something like subscribing to a friend’s playlist. To stop this irritating nonsense, you need to track down an option that’s rather tucked away. In the People Pane on the right-hand side of the screen, click the little cog icon and select Disable Posting to Facebook.

If you decide the whole Facebook integration is just too intrusive, you can turn the whole thing off by clicking File | Disconnect From Facebook.

The question is how long it’s going to last. More than one voice in the babbling din of the internet has openly wondered how the likes of Spotify can ever hope to turn a profit, and for good reason. The vast server farms, all that bandwidth swallowed by hungry cheapskates – not to mention having to pay all those pesky musicians – it must cost an absolute fortune.

And I really do wonder where all the money is coming from, because Spotify’s advertising is  clearly about as effective as getting semi-conscious students to thrust leaflets into the path of psychotic rush-hour commuters. The phrase ‘doomed to failure’ springs to mind.

Okay, okay. The number of people signed up for the £10 a month Premium service must be, at least, into double figures by now, all lured by the promise of high-quality 320Kbits/sec music and the removal of all those ads, but I’m willing to bet that most are still perfectly happy to put up with listening to the same Crucial memory advert 48 times a day in exchange for free music. Would Sir care for a free lunch, or would he care to pay for a very slightly nicer one? The answer isn’t blowing in the wind, it’s scrawled in big red letters on a placard waving right in front of your face.

So, where does this leave the musicians, the life blood of Spotify? Well, to put it in Spotify’s own, cuddly prose:

“We respect creativity and believe in fairly compensating artists for their work. We’ve cleared the rights to use the music you’ll listen to in Spotify.”

Ah, great. Well, that’s my conscience salved. All those ‘fairly compensated” artists are probably off sniffing up their profits on a 300ft yacht moored somewhere off the coast of Barbados. Hurrah for Spotify, saviour of music.

Back in the real world, it seems the artists earnings aren’t in such great shape. Indeed,  going by the postings of one Norwegian artist, Stein Tore, over at Gearslutz.com, the haunt of musicians and producers worldwide, Spotify’s definition of fair compensation is debatable:

“I have some minor releases available on both Spotify and iTunes. Here are the numbers for a given period, you decide what is best. BTW, I’m both the artist and record company, so there is no-one besides my digital distributor who gets a cut before I do.

Spotify: 1,793 plays = approx $1

iTunes: 2 complete albums, 14 individual songs: $21″

You read that right. Nearly 2,000 plays of a track on Spotify earn the artist around a dollar. Yes, a whole dollar. Going by the fact that even Coldplay’s Myspace page racks up little more than 8,000 plays per day, then my sub-GCSE maths tells me they’d, ooh, barely make $1,400  a year. Just think, after a year, Chris would have just enough to buy Gwyneth a couple of pairs of designer shoes and an extra large bag of lentils. Thank you, Spotify.

Guerilla advertising

Lady Gaga is another artist who, on the face of it, seems equally unlikely to be sending a Christmas card Spotify’s way. Spotify’s guerilla advertising regularly interrupted my favourite albums to herald the release of her track, Poker Face, and up to that point I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. But months later, and despite the successful marketing campaign leading to over a million plays of said hit track, Spotify allegedly sent her a cheque for around $167.

There’s a fatal flaw in this line of thinking, however, and that’s because Spotify is essentially radio evolved. Artists aren’t ever going to turn a profit from radio play alone, but it’s more than worth it for the valuable advertising it provides. Lady Gaga is a good example. A no-name wannabe one minute, and adorning the charts worldwide the next – services such as Spotify serve a useful purpose for big labels wishing to push their latest cash cow into the limelight.

But while the big labels don’t seem too bothered – after all, any publicity is good publicity – the smaller record labels and bands are seemingly abandoning Spotify, mere months after uploading their catalogue of releases. Indeed, for the last couple of months or so, the PC Pro labs have been vibrating to the tune of Burial, Zomby, Kode 9, Flying Lotus and a whole host of others thanks to the presence of Hyperdub, a small but beautifully formed London-based record label. As of a couple of weeks ago, the Labs lay silent. Hyperdub had, presumably, withdrawn its entire catalogue.

Marcus Scott of Hyperdub told a different story however:

“We asked not to go on Spotify but we got put on there anyway. It took ages for us to get the music off… Spotify isn’t something we want to be part of, and the idea that new is better is a fallacy really, we prefer autonomy to pointless overexposure.”

It isn’t just smaller labels who’ve found themselves consumed by Spotify either. Robert Fripp, guitarist with the cult band King Crimson gave a withering rebuttal to Spotify’s claims of legitimacy:

“Spotify put up KC music without asking us; ie without clearing the rights (and later withdrawn). Spotify has yet to explain to us who gave them rights in the first place (this is simple for us as I own / control all of them); or why it assumed it might have had rights.”

In a statement sent to PC Pro, Spotify said:

“We ensure that all music on Spotify is licensed via labels, aggregators and publishers who guarantee that they have the rights to the content. In an age of piracy where music is available illegally online, all music on Spotify is legitimately and legally obtained and made available to users. With regards payments made to artists through the various rights holders (labels, aggregators, publishers), we aren’t able to comment on confidential agreements.”

Long-term future?

It’s not that I personally don’t want Spotify to endure, I do. Its survival is very much in my interests as a consumer, and particularly as an avid consumer of all things free. But although Spotify has been lauded as combating piracy and steering those evil file-sharers onto the straight and narrow, I can’t help feeling that Spotify’s intentions aren’t entirely altruistic.

The glaring issue is that the Big Four have a vested interest in Spotify’ success. For reportedly measly sums, Sony BMG, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI bought themselves a 5.8%, 4.8%, 3.8% and a  1.9% stake in the streaming service. No-one knows what the terms of the deal between Spotify and the Big Four actually is, but it’s reasonable to assume that reduced or non-existent royalty rates are probably part of it.

Crippling Spotify with obscene royalty payments might be the last thing on their mind, but it’s a dormant threat nonetheless. Should the music companies finally decide that Spotify isn’t the future of online music, they could beat it to death with a frighteningly large royalty stick in next to no time at all.

And while the music industry objects to the idea that piracy boosts  music sales, its collusion with Spotify seems to covertly admit as much. After all, what could be better than something that offers most of the benefits of piracy – free music – and takes away the downsides – having to faff with frequently virus-laden torrents which take anything from minutes to days to complete?

Spotify seems a prime candidate to fill the void left by quitting the high seas of piracy: easy, instant access to the music you want, for free, and with all the music you want, not just those which are popular enough to be uploaded.

I know that, for my sins, I haven’t illegally downloaded a single track since Spotify was released. I’ve bought a handful of CDs, downloaded the odd album  in lossless FLAC format from Bleep.com, and lovingly assembled a sizable pile of bizarre, eosteric charity shop vinyl, but the thought of stealing music just hasn’t crossed my mind. And perhaps that’s the point. The music industry was never opposed to the idea of trying before you buy, but it simply wanted to wrest control from the pirates. Now, with Spotify’s user base reaching into the millions, maybe it’s got its wish.

1. Paint.NET

Windows 7 may now include a version of Paint complete with a fancy Ribbon interface, but it still doesn’t offer the features I need to quickly enhance photos and mould screenshots to my whims. Paint.NET does, and it also supports plug-ins for RAW files (and more), making it my top photo-editing choice.

2. Mozilla Firefox

Sorry Internet Explorer 8, but you’re too slow (as Microsoft’s own engineers accidentally admitted by saying they’d focus on performance with Internet Explorer 9). And frankly, I don’t use all those fancy right-click shortcuts that Microsoft has built in. I far prefer the faster Firefox, complete with all the Extensions such as Echofon for Twitter.

3. Windows Live Writer

I know it’s basic compared to some blogging tools out there, but Windows Live Writer is the perfect partner to our WordPress-powered blog. It’s easy to use while still offering all the power and features I need, such as retaining my favoured settings for photo formatting and links. To download it, type “live essentials” into the Windows 7 or Vista search box.

4. Adobe Reader

I’ve tried to like alternatives to Adobe Reader, such as FoxIt Reader, but against all my best instincts I keep on coming back to the bloated and comparatively slow Adobe offering. And that’s despite the fact I hate the way its install routine tries to sneak in a Yahoo toolbar and those annoying updates. The best thing that can be said about this program is that it works.

5. FileZilla

There may well be better FTP utilities than FileZilla, but as far as I’m concerned everyone can halt development right now: FileZilla is free, it works, and the interface – while doing for good looks what Bob Hoskins does for swimsuit modelling – is plain and functional. As far as I’m concerned, this is the poster child for open-source software.

6. VLC media player

I haven’t actually needed to use this tiny application since rebuilding my PC, but it won’t be long before a media file comes along in a form that Windows Media Player can’t recognise (one obvious example being FLV files). VLC media player, on the other hand, is fantastic at handling pretty much anything that’s thrown at it.

7. Spotify

While I still can’t bring myself to pay £10 per month for music I can’t keep, Spotify is my first port of call when it comes to distraction in the office. After all, a man needs to listen to something to drown out Stuart Turton’s whines about Liverpool’s latest failure (this weekend excepted), Jon Bray muttering to himself as he tests mobile phones, and Barry Collins ranting about various watchdog authorities.

8. BBC iPlayer

Travelling home by a train, sometimes I can’t quite force myself to do anything useful. Luckily those kind people at the BBC have built the iPlayer. With HD shows available for download as well, I’m in the odd situation where TV is better while travelling than at home. Note: this service is only available in the UK. If it’s any consolation, our weather’s awful.

9. Skype

I’ve moaned about Skype’s habit of grabbing my credit unless I use its pay-as-you-go service every six months, but this remains an essential tool in my foreign-trip armoury: much as I love my children, I’m not making 30-minute calls home on mobile roaming rates! With Skype, it’s free to call other Skype users and just 1.7 Euro cents to UK numbers.

10. Windows Live Mesh

I approach Live Mesh with a certain amount of trepidation: press Delete at the wrong time and it has the capability to permanently lose files with almost as much as speed as it allows you to share them. But if you, like me, flitter between different machines at a whim, then having one always-accessible copy of vital files can’t be underestimated.

I’ve had my week reviewing Spotify’s Premium account and the iPhone app, I’ve listened to an uneclectic mix of playlists that mostly consisted of the song Africa by Toto, and I’ve used it in central London and out in Kent, with all the public transport in between.

And the verdict? I almost, nearly, don’t quite want to pay for it.

It’s not that it’s not brilliant. It is. I’ve grown tired of eulogising to friends and family, trying to convince a younger relative who’s part of the free music generation that paying £10 a month for any track, anywhere is infinitely better than a BitTorrent account.

I’ve had people wanting to buy an iPhone after ten minutes playing with the app. I’ve used it in conjunction with Shazam in the pub to find new artists to enjoy. I’ve even rediscovered my embarrassing teenage addiction to Kriss Kross’s Totally Krossed Out. (I was young. Backward jeans were cool. Still are.)

But, now that my guest subscription has expired, I’m just not sure I want to shell out my own money – and even I’m a bit surprised by that. A few niggling little issues have grown into show-stoppers as the week’s drawn to a close.

Not quite perfect

Connection has, on the whole, been pretty good. On wide roads in London the 3G signal held strong, but walking down back roads with imposing buildings on either side the drop-outs became quite frequent. Obviously, the offline playlists solve the problem, but then you’re tying yourself into the Spotify Premium account.

I know it’s a huge library of music but I’m still not 100% convinced about spending a year building up playlists and downloading new tracks in the knowledge that cancelling the subscription means losing the lot. I don’t download or buy a massive amount of music, so the £10 a month I’d be spending wouldn’t be far away from the amount I’d spend anyway – on physical products that are mine to keep.

Then there’s the library itself. Yes, it’s impressive, but at the moment the albums I’d actually be willing to spend my money on are the new releases – yet they’re a bit of a grey area. Looking at yesterday’s releases in the UK the results are mixed.

Jay-Z’s The Blueprint 3, David Gray’s Draw The Line and Mark Knopfler’s Get Lucky were all in there ready for streaming first thing.

Muse’s The Resistance wasn’t but has today appeared; Peter Andre’s Revelation, Porcupine Tree’s The Incident and Megadeth’s Endgame were nowhere to be seen

Pixie Lott’s Turn It Up – surely the most teen-friendly of those – was initially a Premium-only release.

Now, I completely understand the use of Premium exclusives such as this, and I have no problem with it at all. Being able to get a new release for free on the day it’s out does seem like taking the Spotify ad-supported model to its extreme.

But that only works as a draw to the Premium account if every major release is included. What about the others in that list that didn’t make it to Spotify at all on release day? Here’s Spotify’s response:

“How fast we add a new release depends on the artist management and their label.  Some new releases we get on release date (like Muse and Jay-Z this week) and others might take a little while longer or not appear at all if we don’t have the rights.  We don’t set the actual release dates so it’s up to the labels to decide when we get it.”

It does seem a little harsh to take a library of millions of tracks and complain about the small minority of absentees, but offering new music on the day it’s released is a fundamental strength of services such as iTunes – which many analysts seem to think is what Spotify will become.

No more freebies?

My final worry is that Spotify is becoming a victim of its own success. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed – since I reverted to a free account, of course – that the service is extremely flaky at the moment. Some tracks aren’t loading at all on my desktop client, others just bring a notice that Spotify can’t be accessed right now.

With the move back to invite-only as well, the signs are all there that the service is struggling with the huge increase in traffic in recent weeks – and it’s the non-Premium listeners who are having their bandwidth cut. Which begs the question: will the ad-supported version still exist in six months?

So no, despite my initial enthusiasm last week, I won’t be getting my credit card out just yet. I’ll be going to a traditional shop and buying the Muse album on an old-school CD, ripping it to my hard disk and putting it on to my iPhone in the knowledge that it will still be there in a year’s time.

I genuinely love Spotify and want it to be a huge success. Plus, I already miss the freedom of that Premium account. But I just can’t bring myself to commit to £10 a month.

That said, I’ve already changed my mind about it once this week…

Over the course of a year that does seem like a lot of money – particularly as most users will already have huge music collections of their own – but the promise of millions of tracks available on the move is certainly tempting.

Starting up

Once logged in, you’ll be delighted to see all of your desktop playlists seamlessly synced with Spotify on your phone, and if that’s what you’re after you can just dive straight in.

Over Wi-Fi, tracks play immediately; on 3G we had pauses of anything up to ten seconds, and EDGE is even longer. But once the track is going we were only scuppered by the occasional drop-out for a few seconds – and our office is a notorious O2 blackspot.

When tracks are playing the screen looks similar to that of standard iPhone playback, with the usual controls, a CD cover if Spotify can find it, and an extra options button in the top-right corner.

Tap this for details of the album and artist, an option to add it to an existing playlist, and extra shuffle and repeat controls.

Offline playlists

Altering playlists on your desktop client brings a seamless update on the iPhone app too, in mere seconds if you’re on Wi-Fi. And you have the incredible option of turning them all into “Offline playlists”: next time you connect to Wi-Fi the entire playlist will download onto the phone for use at any time.

The limit is a rather odd 3,333 tracks, and all you have to do is connect once every 30 days to prove you’re still a Premium subscriber. That’s a pretty phenomenal amount of music at your fingertips, and conveniently sidesteps those obvious issues while on the tube or out in the wilderness.

Searching is simple enough, with three tabs to arrange results by Tracks, Albums and Artists. It’s not something you’ll want to do regularly with the iPhone keyboard – you’ll create a playlist in a fraction of the time using the desktop client – but it works well for finding that track you just heard in the pub.

That’s the real meat of the app, and the only other addition is a More… button on the homepage, with details of the app, a link to Spotify.com’s help page, and an option for forcing offline mode even in network areas. And that’s your lot. It all works remarkably smoothly and won’t be at all unfamiliar to users of the desktop app.

The caveats

There are a few key issues though. The first is Wi-Fi, which works fine in most cases but currently refuses to work over firewalled networks. So, no office Spotify just yet, and it also casts doubt over the app’s usefulness on public Wi-Fi networks. Spotify representatives have suggested opening port 4070, but in Starbucks that won’t be an option. Rest assured it’s high on the list of fixes being worked on.

Then there’s the iPhone’s annoying single-task way of working. The functionally identical Android app can play tracks in the background while you work, but on the iPhone you have to have Spotify open at all times. Nip out for a second to check your emails and playback will stop dead, although it will continue from that point when you next load it back up.

And finally there’s the issue of battery life. The iPhone’s music player isn’t exactly kind to the battery anyway, but when you’re adding data transfer on top of that too, it becomes greedy to the extreme. A mere half-hour of streaming over 3G has taken a good 25% of my battery bar (on a last-generation iPhone 3G), so I wouldn’t be too confident of using it for the duration of a long train journey. There’s not a great deal Spotify can do about it – although the offline playlist option should reduce the effect by quite a bit.

These are certainly drawbacks, and they must be considered when the cost is a significant £10 a month. But all in all it’s a hugely impressive debut. A few features of the desktop client haven’t made it across – the radio channels and top lists, for example – but as a standalone player for specifically selected tracks and playlists it’s a very tempting proposition.

A far greater issue has arisen, though. On a short 20-minute walk from Charing Cross to Soho, my 3G connection dropped out no fewer than six times, each time for around 15 seconds. One of those six times the Spotify app was even kind enough to close itself automatically. It’s annoying enough to put me off, so I guess the offline mode is going to be the major way I’ll be using Spotify from now on.

Although the Spotify software itself doesn’t support streaming to other devices, it’s perfectly possible to do so with the third-party software, Jamcast. What’s more, the Jamcast software is completely free of charge and (unlike the iPhone/Android software) you don’t need a premium Spotify account to take advantage.

I set this up on my Xbox 360 over the weekend and the process could barely be easier:

1. Download the Jamcast software and install it on your PC.

2. Open Jamcast, click the devices tab and check that your Xbox, PlayStation or digital radio/receiver appears in the list. If not, click Find and it should appear.

3. Fire up Spotify. Jamcast essentially broadcasts the output from your PC’s sound card to other devices on the home network, so check you’ve got no applications such as email clients running in the background, or be prepared to have your listening interrupted by “you’ve got new mail” jingles.

4. Turn on your Xbox and choose Music from the My Xbox section. Select Jamcast from the list of networked devices, then select Playlists and Virtual Soundcard. Click play, and after a few seconds delay, you should hear Spotify streaming through your console’s speakers. (Note that the instructions may vary slightly for other consoles/devices).

JAMCAST CAVEATS

Jamcast is beta software and the streaming experience isn’t perfect. The stream suffered from the odd audio wibble and drop out during our tests. A post on the Jamcast support forums claims this is down to the PC struggling to sample the Spotify audio quickly enough, which could be a particular problem on low-powered laptops and netbooks.

There’s also a five to ten second delay between the sound emanating from your PC and the sound coming out of your console/digital radio, so don’t panic if it doesn’t kick in immediately.

We also struggled to get Jamcast running on our test digital radio (the Revo Pico RadioStation), which recognised the Jamcast Virtual Soundcard playlist, but flatly refused to play it. Others have had more success with digital radios, judging by the forums.

MAC STREAMING

And what about those of you in Apple land, who are unable to install Jamcast? Several online forums suggest it’s possible to stream Spotify using a combination of the $25 Airfoil software and Apple’s Airport Express devices. Note – I haven’t tested this, so proceed at your own risk.

Let me know on comments below if you’ve found any alternative/better ways to stream Spotify to non-PC devices.

A quick reminder of the rules: all the songs had to have some connection to computers and they had to be found in the Spotify library. 

The winners are:

12. It’s All About the Pentiums by irritating American “comedian” Weird Al Yankovic, as suggested by our very own (and now banned from Spotify) Darien Graham-Smith.

11. Electric Worm by rappers The Beastie Boys. Many thanks to Fat Trev.

10. Mr. Roboto by electro-rockers Styx. Included here partly for its obvious reference to brilliant Japanese robot technology, but also for the line “My true identity, I’m Kilroy, Kilroy, Kilroy“, which we can’t hear without thinking of the orange-faced Euro-sceptic dancing the robot. Now there’s an image for you. Suggested by Greg.

9. At number nine is Twisted Transistor by Korn, suggested by (erm) Steve Backley.

8. Technologic by Daft Punk follows at number eight, and is a song so incessantly annoying we only included it because if we have to suffer, so do you. Many “thanks” to Peter.

7. Naked in Front of the Computer by Faith No More is another gem suggested by Fat Trev, and gets a mention because it accurately describes the disturbing state of PC Pro’s hyperactive reviews team. This is why we don’t have a live webcam, folks.

6. Go Go Gadget Flow by Lupe Fiasco lands at number six, and gets a nod from Oliver for including a proper geek reference to the 16-bit Sega Genesis.

5. Steamy Windows by Tina Turner. Because the only logical follow-up to Chicago-born rapper Lupe Fiasco is Tina Turner. As suggested by 1980’s Olympian-turned-motivational-speaker Kriss Akabusi. Or someone using a fake name.

4. A Scanner Darkly by Primal Scream, as suggested by Richard George.

3. Left to My Own Devices by the Pet Shop Boys neatly describes the PC Pro team’s idea of heaven, and we’re grateful to Firewire Fred for the suggestion.

2. At number 2 is The Proxy by RJD2. If you haven’t mentally checked out of your office already this afternoon, this is the song that will be the final straw.

1. And finally, Return of the Mack by mid-nineties stun-gun enthusiast Mark Morrison was also suggested by our speedy new friend Kriss Akabusi. The eponymous album was released in 1997, pre-dating Apple’s massive revival by a couple of years. Silly man, funny voice, excellent IT industry prediction skills.

On that note, we’re going to give our new playlist a whirl. Thanks for all your suggestions and we’ll see you next week. If you’d like to inflict – sorry, share – PC Pro’s Spotify playlist with someone special, you can find it here.

Update: we’ve just noticed this status update on the Spotify site warning of intermittent issues with playlists. Best laid plans and all that… 

The rules are simple:

1. The song title or artist must have a computer connection. (Kraftwerk’s Computer Love, or anything by The Commodores, for example)

2. It must be in the Spotify library  

We’ll put the best 12 suggestions into the PC Pro Computer Playlist. Add your suggestions using the comments below. 

UPDATE: Voting has now closed. Thanks for all your suggestions. See the final PC Pro playlist here.