Spotify announces apps

Spotify founder Daniel Ek this week announced that, in a further move towards the Apple core, the streaming site are opening up to apps from third party developers.

Free apps from major music brands including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Last.fm were revealed on-screen at a Spotify conference in New York yesterday (30 November). Spotify seem to be modelling this on Facebook style integration and the success of the social networking site with apps on an open platform.

Third-party developers will be able to build HTML5 apps that can take advantage of all of Spotify’s features and introduce further customisation to the service. For example, Songkick’s app will bring live music services such as tour dates and ticketing to Spotify, scanning people’s listening history and suggesting gigs that they might want to attend. No-one directly asked Ek if anyone was developing an app that would somehow make it financially worthwhile for artists to use the streaming site and perhaps get paid more than £10 for almost 100,000 plays.

However, he did address recent criticisms, artist anger and withdrawals from the service, stating: “We pay every time someone plays a song and we feel that's a great model because it adds value every time someone listens to a song. We don't feel those are onerous terms in any shape or form. We're actually very happy with how our model is performing."

Users will be able to find the apps via a new ‘App Finder’ section in Spotify’s software. For the time being at least, the apps will be available to free and premium subscribers. Spotify currently has 10 million active users, recently announcing that 2.5 million people have signed up to the premium paid version.

Ek said: “More than anything we really look forward to being surprised by developers. We really think they're going to deliver amazing apps within the Spotify platform”. It is thought that app functionality will be limited to the desktop platform at first and you can check out the beta here.