Introducing: Spotify Hard Mode

I for one miss the days of spending at least 30 minutes at every party going through the host’s CDs for the ones I knew, the ones I knew I wanted, and most of all; the ones I didn’t know I wanted.

The days when a friend would bring his newly purchased cd to your house so you could listen to it together. But only until he left and you’d have to wait?! until his next visit to hear that one genius track again.

I’m nostalgic, I know, but I’m not going to sit around and sob. I’m bringing it back:

With Spotify Hard Mode you can offer to lend out records in your Spotify collection to your friends — or request to borrow from theirs.

When one of you lend out a record it disappears from your collection and appears in the other’s. If it’s a record that you know you’re going to miss you can add a timed request for your friend to turn your record back.

This will not be automated.

Instead your friend will be pinged to turn back the record by themselves and in the process be asked to write a few words as a review. Not like a public facing, thumbs up or down, dreadful review like the internet is brimming with. But a short text based, personal review from one friend to another.

When a record comes back to your collection it will suddenly be at the top of the list again (because you sort your albums by date added like any reasonable person) and you will once again be reminded of how much you listened to this all summer, two years ago, and just how good it is. The best records will keep being on top of your collection pile.

If you cheat and manually re-add the record while it’s lent out, Spotify Hard Mode will punish you by removing two other random records from your collection plus add a few thousand plays of Smurf songs to wreak havoc on your Discover Weekly and Daily Mixes.