Music business

November 22, 2011 at 10:59 amby Eliot Van Buskirk
What’s Next For Spotify? Powering Music Apps

For whatever reason, some of the neatest announcements in digital music history have been surrounded by an air of mystery. Call it the iPod effect. The latest player in this game: Spotify, which is summoning reporters to a Nov. 30 “Global Press Conference” with the tantalizing teaser, “What’s next for Spotify?”

People are talking, which is of course the point. All Things Digital thinks Spotify will announce a digital music store. PC Magazine doesn’t know. VentureBeat agrees with All Things Digital: Spotify plans to launch an MP3 store.

We respectfully disagree, because we think we’ve already broken this story.

If our theory is correct, Spotify will announce a commercial API (application programming interface) on November 30 that lets app developers for iOS, Android, and other platforms build — and sell — music apps that draw on Spotify’s catalog of 15-million-plus songs.

That last bit is crucial. Developers can already build apps on top of Spotify – they just can’t sell them, removing a substantial incentive for making cool stuff, especially when so many other app developers have struck gold on the app stores.

Spotify will make its API available to commercial developers — even one-person operations operating on shoestring budgets — and we suspect that it will also announce big improvements to that API development tool.

Our guess: These "special guests" will be third-party app developers making stuff out of Spotify's music

Via Albin Serviant