Brisbane start-up We Are Hunted has struck a partnership deal with online music giant Spotify that will see its technology rolled out on a global basis.

Perhaps the most beautiful of the new Spotify apps, We Are Hunted is a music recommendation engine that breaks music into several searchable categories:

1. Emerging Chart: The 99 most popular songs by emerging artists, ranked in terms of their popularity on We Are Hunted.
2. Mainstream Chart: The 99 most played songs by Mainstream Artists.
3. Genre Chart: The 99 most played songs in seven genres.
4. Instant Playlist: Enter an artist and have a custom 99-song-long We Are Hunted playlist made just for you. Above, a playlist based on my love of The Avalanches.

A great HTML5 design by the Australian team at We Are Hunted makes this app a rich and rewarding music discovery experience on Spotify.

We Are Hunted, perhaps the most intriguing app of the bunch, builds top song charts for you based on social media, P2P networks, message boards, iTunes downloads and Last.fm scrobbles. Aesthetically, it looks quite different from Billboard’s app with large pictures of the artists or bands in order of their popularity.

My favorite, though, is the app from We Are Hunted, which just gives you a grid of emerging artists (you can also choose mainstream artists, or a specific genre). Just click to play, and sample new music.

The launch line-up is fairly small, but that doesn’t mean that it’s weak. The list of apps already available in the beta version of the client include heavyweights like Last.fm, the Guardian, Songkick and Rolling Stone. But there are some smaller options too that are just as good. Here are the five Spotify apps that you need in your life.