Spring Mix: My April Spotify Playlist via ‘Spotify Play’ button

The Spotify Play Button

Spotify released a public embed code for streaming tracks from the service on any website. It’s called The Spotify Play Button and I’m testing it out here with the April playlist I created for the office. Check it out below and check out my other Spotify playlists here. (both those I’ve created and those I subscribe to). Some companies, such as FanRx have already begun incorporating the code into artists’ Facebook Pages. This reminds me of Yahoo! music player, which is a simple script that triggers a player to appear when an audio or video file was present in a blog post or more recent versions of similar, such as the Ex.fm extension. The main difference, of course, is that the music is streamed directly from Spotify, rather than an ambiguous (or non-accountable) URL ending in .mp3, which essentially locks in plays to a revenue stream for artists (however minute), assuming Spotify is in fact paying out based on number of plays and not just as a percentage of Spotify subscriptions.

Click here to create a customized Spotify Play embed code.

Google Updates Web Fonts Site, Adds Hundreds of Fonts

Google Web Fonts v2

One of my favorite Google features got a facelift and a major upgrade this week. Google Web Fonts makes it easy to stretch your typographic design far beyond the limitations of the basic, old school, web-friendly fonts of the world wide web.

Today the Web Fonts kit graduates from the Google codebase to the big G at google.com/webfonts/v2 and adds a suitcase for you to collect and easily reference your favorite fonts. And there are now 180 font families to choose from.

As I ecstatically posted last year:

Now we’ve got the quickest shortcut to open-licensed, cross-platform fonts since… well it’s only been a few months since a bunch of designers and typographers got together to develop the Web Open Font Format, a soon-to-be-standardized font specification that wraps core web fonts (including Apple’s TrueType and Microsoft’s OpenType) into an encoded, embeddable file. Google also partnered with TypeKit to offer the Web Font Loader, offering more flexibility.

That’s not all Google updated today — the new homepage top nav bar gives it a slick Android 3.0 look and feel. On top of that — the announcement of Google+, currently in closed beta.

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The National Go Live on Vevo / YouTube for Red Hot

And you were wondering just what D. A. Pennebaker‘s been up to, eh? I watched much of this live on Vevo’s YouTube channel specific to this show – great quality at 1080p and on-the-fly production. When I think Pennebaker, I think Don’t Look Back, most naturally, however, it turns out he has been somewhat active of late with his partner dating back to The War Room, Chris Hegedus and Pennebaker Hegedus Films.

It’s possible to embed each track (individually) from the 10-song set via Vevo.com, as well as YouTube. Anyway, here are a couple of my favorite The National cuts as performed live last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, benefiting Red Hot. Enjoy.

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