Spotify gets app happy – reveals its new direction

30 Nov 2011

Spotify has revealed its ‘new direction’ – it’s going to be a purveyor of apps that complement your favourite tunes. The music service,which last week revealed 2.5m paying subscribers in the US, has struck key deals with media firms Rolling Stone, The Guardian and Last.fm, to name a few.

Third party developers can create apps for Spotify that will sync in with the millions of tracks on its website, including things like playlists, editorial content, lyrics, concert-related memorabilia, you name it.

CEO Daniel Ek said this evening that since its launch in the US the global Spotify community now stands at 10m listeners – its partnership with Facebook brought in 7m users alone.

Describing Spotify as the world’s greatest jukebox Ek said that Spotify is unveiling the Spotify Platform that integrates music with “innovative, integrated apps.”

Ek said that playlists are the new mixtapes and its users have generated some 500m playlists so far.

The company tweeted: “We’ve turned our client into an interactive platform where third-party developers can easily build HTML5 Spotify Apps via JavaScript API.”

The company’s new Spotify Platform allows sites like Last.fm to integrate editorial content and discovery tools within Spotify page.

The company tweeted: “We want to power the soundtrack in every musical scenario you can imagine — and now, #SpotifyPlatform is your gateway

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com