party mode voting for premium and day pass

@ibbles Yeah that's one way of doing it. Easier to use for the participants for sure. Using spotify indentities gives people an incentive to sign up though. I guess it's user friendliness vs. "marketing"/pushing people to sign up

@Connor i think you misunderstood the idea somewhat and I may have misunderstood your response. I tried to be brief so people would read it and I suppose that made it a bit harder to get. I can get wordy here in the comments though.

You say it's boring to interupt a party to add songs to a playlist, and that instead of this voting stuff just ask the host to put on a song you request. With the voting system, if you don't want to interrupt the party to add your requests in, others will add theirs and you have nothing to worry about! Also, instead of the host being hassled to change the music and possibly cutting another song short that someone else wants to hear, people add their requests and the party mode will play them in due time.

Here is an example: The guests are about to arrive, the host locks Spotify in partymode and chooses a backup playlist. If no songs are requested, partymode picks a random song from the backup playlist. The host votes for 3 songs and they are queued. In comes the first guest. While the first song by the host is playing, he logs in with his spotify username (or not - see ibbles's idea) and votes for 5 songs. Party mode now tries to mix up the play order based on what user put the request in and when the request was made. simple! when it has played all requests it goes back to the backuplist.

That's just one way to do it though. It's also possible to have just one user who votes for songs and the same song can't be voted for again until 5min or so has passed. The drawback with this is less varied music and a higher probability of people crowding the pc (boring party).

Main advantages: no song interruption, more varied music (every guest gets to hear something they like at one point or another), less hassle to change playlists etc. As long as those key points are kept in mind when party mode is created the solution will be ok.

I know it works well, a buddy of mine made a similar program from scratch with a pretty large mp3 collection. He had 2 terminals up at the party where people could vote = great success. He had another voting scheme more similar to the last one i described, I can detail it later if anyone is interested.

Mbj123,

I appreciate your long and detailed response to my point. I apologize for the way I seemed to come across - I like to get my point heard and occasionally my comments can seem slightly offensive.

Continuing on your idea, I thought maybe if you don't have enough computers to meet the large demand of people at the party, you could have an SMS request system.

Basically, you could set Spotify to 'Party Mode' as you suggested, and Spotify would have a dedicated phone number to text for requests.

You could type the host's username, followed by the artist and track name, and it would add that song to the queue.

Just an idea.

By the way, yes I am interested in the other voting scheme.

Good ideas so far! SMS voting could be another source of income for spotify and throwing away the keyboard will keep people away from the computer. Besides they might give more thought to their votes when they cost money. Personally I would use the computer, but more alternatives are always good (especially those that make extra money for spotify). A genre limitation algorithm might be hard to implement (without using last.fm-ish tags), but an option to only have users vote on songs from a specified playlist as ibbles suggested is an easy fix. For instance if you host an 80s party a large playlist with songs from the 80s should cause people to pick appropriate songs. As Connor said it should be optional though. I suspect it would mainly be used openly.

To the voting scheme my buddy used: The interface had 3 main areas, all were visible at all time. one area was for selecting artist (sorted alphabetically), one area had a list of songs by the selected artist and the last area had the name of the current song and the list of songs who were queued to play. The top two songs on the list of the queued songs were "locked in" so to speak. Voting for songs only changed the order of the songs further down in the list of queued songs. When the current song finished, the first song in the queued list started playing and the third song got "locked in" on the second "safe spot". Not the best explanation but I hope it suffices. There were no user names and unlimited votes. It was on a web site so you could vote from any computer with internet and a browser. When one song was voted for it could not be voted for again in 5min or so. The queued list were sorted by the number of votes for each song (most votes on top naturally) It would not play songs from the same artist twice in a row. Songs that were in the queued list for 2 hours without being played were removed. It worked ok, but if many people wants to control the music the computers might get a bit too much focus.. voting limit/user authentication/sms voting etc. can reduce this. It was never a big problem though.