Update May 9, 2011: Since Spotify 0.5.0 and upwards is shipping with a built in ‘Browse in Spotify’ service, the below information has been updated to reflect that you no longer need an external service to perform this task.

I guess you’ve all heard about this thing called internets by now? It’s kind of cool and all, containing thoughts and opinions from other human beings™ and not so intelligent content from spam bots, your best friend’s grandmother et al.

Regardless of source, some of these thoughts come in the form of record reviews. Like this - Best albums of 2010!!!.

When reading that post I realized that I’ve been doing way too much manual work in the past while digesting record reviews. Trying to summarize my actions, they would go something like this:

  1. Figure out that I want to listen to the record being reviewed
  2. Select some text in the page that represents the band and/or the title of the record
  3. Invoke the Copy command to have the selected text copied into the pasteboard
  4. Switch to Spotify.app. If I’m lucky, it’s already open - otherwise I have to open it manually first (sigh…)
  5. Set focus to the application’s search field
  6. Invoke the Paste command to have the previously copied text pasted into the search field
  7. Press enter
  8. Browse the search result

Wow. That’s kind of crazy. What about something like this instead?

  1. Figure out that I want to listen to the record being reviewed
  2. Select some text in the page that represents the band and/or the title of the record
  3. Invoke the Browse in Spotify service to have Mac OS X perform all the steps I had to do manually previously
  4. Browse the search result

Doesn’t this change everything, again? Just make sure to assign a keyboard shortcut to the service and you will be enjoying an ever smoother experience.

If you think that this is the shiznitz, you should be running Spotify 0.5.0 or higher. Just download the latest version, and make sure to map the built in service to some nifty keyboard shortcut.