In a time when it feels like there are no more new ideas, who challenges you to rethink music? We asked for the most original artists working today and you answered.

We also made a four-hour playlist! Dive in at Spotify and Rdio.

Here they are: All of our Best Music of 2012 lists in handy-dandy Spotify and Rdio playlist form!

• 100 Favorite Songs: Spotify | Rdio
• Favorite 50 Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• 10 Artists You Should Have Known In 2012: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Top 40: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Folk & Americana Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 World Music Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Electronic Dance Tracks: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Jazz Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Classical Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Outer Sound Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Metal Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Top 10 Latin Alternative Albums: Spotify | Rdio
• Bob Boilen’s Top 10 Albums Of 2012: Spotify | Rdio
• Ann Powers’ Top 10 Albums Of 2012: Spotify | Rdio
• Robin Hilton’s Top 10 Albums Of 2012: Spotify | Rdio
• Stephen Thompson’s Top 10 Albums Of 2012: Spotify | Rdio

Music-Streaming Services Hunt For Paying Customers

2012 has been a strange year for content creators — authors, producers, musicians. It was a year when the very idea of physical ownership of a book or CD or even a song file became almost passe.

It was also the year in which music-streaming services like Spotify and Pandora launched major efforts to convince people to pay for something they didn’t own. But it’s been slow going.

Whether you’re having turkey, turducken, tofurkey or fish tacos, Thanksgiving is about family, food and the soul-deadening stress of logistics. So here’s a mix designed to help you keep your mind on the bonding-fueled feast that justifies it all.

Subscribe to Songs For Stuffing on Spotify or Rdio.

Illustration: Paulo Lopez/NPR

We sure do listen to a lot of music at the office. Like, obsessively. So… culled from All Songs Considered, Alt.Latino, features from our blogs (The Record, Deceptive Cadence, A Blog Supreme), and stories heard on our air, we’ve started a Spotify playlist simply titled, “What NPR Music Is Listening To.” Right now, it’s got everything from Neil Young to KRS-One to Taylor Swift to Titus Andronicus to Miguel Zenon to Holly Herndon to Pig Destroyer. Subscribe now and we’ll be adding a slew of new tracks every week.

(Source: Spotify)

It’s Bond Week at NPR! Of the many stories we’ve reported on, the one near and dear to our hearts is an interview with the guitarist who played the iconic theme song (his name is Vick Flick, no joke). We’ve put together a Spotify playlist of every James Bond theme song we could find. What’s your favorite?

(Source: Spotify)

The independent musician Erin McKeown has her albums on Spotify, and because she doesn’t have a label, she gets all of the royalty money the service pays out every time someone plays one of her songs. McKeown asked her accountant to figure out how much money she was making. The result was .004 cents per play; not much at all.

— Laura Sydell breaks down streaming revenue, via How Musicians Make Money (By The Fraction Of A Cent) On Spotify

There comes a time in a jazz fan’s life when he or she realizes that the rabbit hole goes far, far deeper than previously imagined. The new Spotify app from Blue Note Records begins to make sense of the data jumble in which fans happily abandon themselves.

From Jelly Roll Morton to Miles Davis to Misfits to Lil Kim to Jay-Z to THEESatisfaction, the word “bitch,” it turns out, is as central to the popular music lexicon as are “rock” and “roll.”

As an auditory aid to her history of “bitch” in popular music, Ann Powers also put together a Spotify playlist of key tracks (audio NSFW, obvs).

What song would you want played at your funeral? It was just one of six questions recently posed by the British newspaper The Guardian and when we asked for just six songs, we got thousands of answers. Listen to a select playlist of your funeral songs via Spotify, then check out more responses at Deceptive Cadence.

(Source: Spotify)