Clearly there is a growing trend of bringing a little tangibility to our online experiences. Berg’s delightful Little Printer is already up for pre-order, and now the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design has unveiled a product that might change the way we listen to music.

Skube is a mobile player that makes the listening and sharing of music in communal spaces easy and effortless. It works in two modes, Playlist and Discover. The Skube loads music from your Last.fm account via a wireless connection to a computer, and then gets Spotify to play it. In Dicover mode it gets access to Last.fm API and uses their algorithm to find similar music.

Its design is not only intelligent but also playful. When multiple Skubes are put in a row, they connect to each other and act as a single player that shuffles between all the playlists. Tapping on a Skube will skip a track, flipping it will change the modes, and turning it on its front face will turn it off.

Although it is still in the prototype stage we are looking forward to a smart tuner in an online age.