Spotify Now With Apps

Spotify, the music service announced today that they are going to be adding apps to their service. I downloaded the beta version to try it out and to see if this is something that is big news today, but will be forgotten by next week or is it a game changer. I say it depends on whether they can get developers to create apps for the platform. They released the Spotify Api for Apps which allows third-party developers to create applications that can then be added to Spotify. However it is my understanding that the developer is paid nothing for placing their apps on Spotify, (other than the publicity), So I am not sure how many developers will want to develop for Spotify. Right now in the beta version there are 9 applications

• Rolling Stone
• Last.fm
• Soundrop
• Billboard Top Charts
• Songkick
• TuneWiki
• Fuse
• Moodagent
• The Guardian
• Pitchfork
• We Are Hunted

Like Facebook when you click on the plus button next to an app it is added to your side bar under the Radio icon. Some like We are Hunted, Moodagent and Pitchfork are great for finding new songs and artist. Others like Tunewiki and Fuse give you information about the song or artist. The one that looked the most interesting to me is Sounddrop, you add a playlist to Soundrop and then share it with your friends, who can vote tracks up and down and add their own. I can see this becoming very popular, it reminds me a lot of Turntable FM. Although the fact it requires you to log into Facebook to use it is a definite negative, at least for me. Also at one point, Soundrop kept on asking me to log into Facebook, even though I was already logged in. I finally had to close and reopen Spotify to fix it. I not sure if the problem was with Spotify itself or Soundrop, this version of Spotify is still in beta and so problems like this are not unexpected. The one thing that was planned that did bothered me was with the Rolling Stone app. The Rolling Stone app recommends various albums, songs and playlists to play. There is also an option to read a review of the song or album, however if you want to read more than the first couple sentences of a review, you are taken out of Spotify and into the Rolling Stone Web site on a browser. I understand why Rolling Stone did it this way, but as a user I hate it.

I plan to use a lot of these apps within my Spotify account but I am not sure it is a game changer, like I said before it will depend on whether developers are willing to develop for the platform, but it has great potential.