"Today, Spotify becomes a music platform," Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told an audience at a press conference in New York. "We're launching truly integrated apps from the best developers inside Spotify. We turn Spotify into this platform, and third-party developers can make HTML5 apps that are seamlessly integrated, beautiful apps."
What that means is essentially there will be a family of apps contained within the Spotify player. In fact, there are a total of 16 apps, and app development will be open to anyone. Spotify will have final approval however, which is a very good move on their and very Apple-like. This way the quality should stay high and you can be sure that any app that's released will work as advertised.
Here's a list of Spotify's global app partners at launch:
- Billboard
- Fuse
- The Guardian
- Last.fm
- Moodagent
- Pitchfork
- Rolling Stone
- Songkick
- Soundrop
- TuneWiki
- We Are Hunted
- Apps coming soon:
- Top10
- ShareMyPlaylists
- 3 Nordic regional partners launching soon:
- Tunigo, Sweden
- Gaffa, Denmark
- Dagbladet. Norway apps
A number of interesting statistics came out of today's conference. Spotify's subscribers have climbed to 10 million, up 7 million after being including in Facebook in September. And according to Ek, the service has already become the second biggest revenue source for all the labels in Europe, only behind iTunes, with more than $150 million in royalties paid to labels so far. Plus, Spotify is used by one-third of the Swedish population, and piracy there has decreased by 25 percent, supposedly as a result.
I'm not sure how much I buy into these figures, but even if they're in the ballpark they're impressive. One thing's for sure, Spotify has defied the popular wisdom and now seems here to stay.
3 comments:
What does it mean for Independent artists?
If there are more subscribers to Spotify as a result of the apps, there are more people that could potentially discover your songs, for one thing.
Potential discovery is about the only thing indie artists can expect from it, I reckon. My share (5-piece band) of nearly 30,000 streams on my latest statement was less than $2. We're out there in the long tail (our releases were early '80s), so nostalgia is likely more of a driving force than discovery...
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