How about adding an upload service to Spotify?

This is a good idea, but I don't think the labels would like this - what if someone upload music that they have downloaded illegaly?

If so, this should not be a great problem if the music are not possible to share with others. And also, the person who uploads are also trackable as well as responsible for the upload so it shouldn't be difficult to catch pirates.

Wicked idea, with the option of making it public would be a great way for new music to get recognised

Any music that is 'publicised' would naturally have to be filtered / vetted to ensure it's not copyright protected - but that's a potential legal minefield - and probably not one that Spotify could pursue as they'd likely need persmission from all the major labels to be in that position.

However, uploading your own music is a capital idea. Could you elaborate on your concept a little more? Would you, for instance, be able to re-download your music from Spotify once you've uploaded it? This could be a nice way of providing a form of basic online music storage (in the whole web 2.0-obsessed 'cloud' manner).

I think the idea has great potential, if executed well.

I also think it's a great idea, at least when it comes to what I want to do with it.

I play in an unisigned band, a Thrash Metal band if interested, and we were talking alot about Spotify as an oppurtunity to make our band seen on the web which really is a great thing.
I don't have anything to add about this feature as a whole, but I just wanted to make it clear that this WILL be an appreciated feature for almost all bands in the world.
Thanks for reading and hope you understand.

Best regards
// Richard - Drummer - Cyrus

Theoretically this sounds a good idea. I am just worried that Spotify are trying to keep things simple and adding things like uploading your own music and such like would introduce unnecessary complexities in terms of royalties to established and assigned artists. Even the uploading of unassigned musc presents particular problems in terms of bands/artists doing 'covers' of songs or what ever. I am NOT trying to be negative, but one of the things that so upsets the music industry is the fear that their music could eb ripped off by those intent on getting anything for free.

Where do they claim that?

Johan: Not really, you could just add to Spotify a way to read music files from disk. You could seamlessly integrate your local music collection with Spotify's library, and the world would be perfect :-)
Unfortunately, it seems the big labels are starting to dominate Spotify and they will probably put a stop to a concept like this (after all they love nothing more than control over your music and how you listen to it - enabling Spotify to play your mp3 files will make them lose that control.)

One interesting option would be to use the upcoming API for Dropbox, should work both on desktop and mobile clients. Dropbox has 2-3 GB of free online storage ideal for storing music files for integration with Spotify. There are also paid versions with 25, 50 or 100GB, leading to a massive music folder available both on desktop clients, on the iPhone etc. If Dropbox is already installed on the desktop client computer, the local folder should be used instead of remote access to the server.

I actually favour this idea, I have purchased certain albums such as "Bass Generation" which aren't available in my country, I have to use a low-down music application such as iTunes or WMP to listen to these tracks.