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PLejeck
This seems like a wonderfully pointless gimmick.

Plus, last I checked, Spotify is en route to implosion with so many people realizing it's hurting more than piracy is.

A very profitable collapse, by the looks of how much they pay out ;)

evjan
Implosion? How did you check that?

And how is it hurting?

PLejeck
A few independent musicians have noted that they make so little from Spotify (and the users don't get guilted into buying anything on iTunes) that it actually isn't worth it.

I think Spotify will slowly lose independent musicians and eventually lose market when they lose more artists (in fact, didn't a record label recently pull all tracks off Spotify?)

I can see a collapse approaching GroupOn proportions (let's face the inevitable there ;)) if things don't change soon, and for similar reasons (screwing over small business vs. screwing over independent musicians)

DrCatbox
You are probably right, spotify does not solve anything. It has not removed the middleman between music producers and music consumers. Spotify is the recording-labels, middleman, own transformation into a digital world. But it is still a middleman.

One beautiful day music will be free again like in the Napster and audiogalaxy days.

PLejeck
Or the days of Bittorre- oh wait, that's today :D
adyus
Music does not need to be free (as in beer). Artists need to make a living too. Mind you, a living shouldn't mean an episode on MTV Cribs, but still.

The solution could be to sell music directly to the listener, without middlemen and labels. But then, who handles promotion? Public Relations? Placement? Concert booking? Marketing? When all of these will become individually offered services, like most other web-related services have become, we may see the music revolution begin.

rdouble
Spotify has always operated at a loss. They lost 40 million dollars last year. If they implode it will be due to economics not sympathy for musicians.
PLejeck
Ouch, their record label contracts must be AWFUL.
rdouble
Not sure why you were downvoted. They are awful, that is why they are losing money.
mongol
With 2.5 million paying users, they should have revenues around 300 million USD per year. If they can not make money on this they should at least be close.
untog
This seems like a wonderfully pointless gimmick.

I'm sure people said the same about Facebook apps back when they first emerged. Being able to "music-ify" your app is pretty powerful- one of the reasons there are so few sites like turntable.fm out there is that each site has to license the music individually.

If you could just tap into a user's Spotify account then you bypass all that.

earbitscom
Facebook has hundreds of millions of users and no real barrier to entry. Spotify has 2.5M paying users. That's not enough to build a Turntable business off of.
untog
No, but it's enough to throw together a proof of concept, or a quick hack, maybe a small app. Over time, Spotify becomes known as the music account to have on the net, both parties benefit.

I'm not saying it will definitely happen, but I can see it.

JonnieCache
>This seems like a wonderfully pointless gimmick.

Remember how cool it was when tony hawks and GTA first had licensed soundtracks?

(It was really cool.)

EDIT: Oh, apparently you can only build your apps into spotify, not build spotify into your apps. Boo!

EDIT2: Or maybe you can. It's not very clear. But that would definitely be an excellent market for this, allowing indie browser or mobile game devs to license music easily through an intermediary. Or maybe that's already an easy process?

adamsmith
This sounds awesome! It reminds me of Winamp plugins from back in the day -- only hopefully with all of the advantages of modern technologies.
chrischen
Rdio has the same API, except it's web based so you can integrate into websites.
saturdaysaint
Awesome. It's starting to dawn on me that audio is increasingly powerful in an ever more "mobile" world. I take in more and more content via audio (audiobooks, The Economist, a widening array of podcasts, I'm even playing with text-to-speech apps for Twitter and web articles). It's more convenient while I'm on the move and I find it more conducive to actually focusing on long form, high-value content. A music service with a strong API really creates the opportunity for a platform to grow out of these disparate content sources.
growt
I tested it and I love it! The biggest deficit of spotify for me was that music discovery somehow lacked (compared to last.fm, etc.) Now I can use a bunch of services to help me discover music inside (!) of spotify. I don't know about the business and monetary aspects of this which are discussed here - but as a user I think its great (and maybe thats the best indication for a successfull product anyhow?)