Much-lauded music service Spotify is planning to launch a toolkit that could get it onto mobile phones, games consoles and elsewhere
We’ve got an interesting piece running today that covers the thoughts of Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek, who thinks plenty of fans are still prepared to pay for music – but here’s something else that might raise an eyebrow.
Sometime this week Spotify plans to launch an API that will give developers access to the service’s innards – even to the point of being able to bake their own Spotify clients.
The API will let third parties embed Spotify’s technology in a variety of gadgets: including mobile phones, TV set-top boxes and games consoles.
“This is the first step towards becoming more of a platform,” Ek told me on the phone from Sweden over the weekend. “There are lots of services that have APIs, but this is different because it lets anyone build a Spotify client.”
He mentioned companies like Sonos and Logitech (who already make music streaming systems) but also the Xbox, PS3 and others.
“If somebody wants to build it into media centre PCs, or if a company wants to integrate Spotify into TV screens, they can… several companies are working on stuff right now – we can’t announce anything at the moment, but it’s very interesting.”
Allowing other companies and independent developers to create services that link into Spotify would not only help the manufacturers, said Ek, but also allow Spotify itself to reach more people than is currently possible.
For example, while it’s known that the company is developing an app for the iPhone, the new APIs would enable anybody to build for their choice of mobile handset.
“There are lots of areas where we don’t have the resources to develop ourselves,” he said. “This takes a lot of workload off our backs, and we don’t know every way that people want to use the service.”
I also asked Ek how user figures had changed since the site opened up earlier this year. He said that around 40,000 new users were signing up every day; and also claimed that users spend an average of 70 minutes on the site each day – an astonishing figure that he said offered proof that the beleaguered music industry should be thinking about new ways to reach its audiences.
“People consume music all over the web today; you want to consume music on a wide variety of devices and the music business needs to adapt to that… it’s the only way to get people paying for music again.”
It’s not all been plain sailing for the Stockholm-based business, of course. The company has had some trouble with its music licenses, and has stepped back from launching in the United States because of concerns over the cost of online radio there.
And Spotify came in for plenty of criticism earlier this year when it revealed that a security breach meant that some users’ personal details could have been stolen.
After further investigation, however, Ek said that the company discovered only 40 accounts were potentially compromised – and that there was no evidence that any criminal activity took place as a result.
“Most of the users were Spotify employees,” he told me. “I think we took all the appropriate measures.”
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