Streaming music service Spotify is bringing the Spotify Apps third-party ecosystem to its new web-based player and mobile apps in January, a move that should make it easier to discover music in Spotify’s many applications.

Spotify chief product officer Gustav Söderström told me today after Spotify’s New York event that the third-party apps that have been available inside Spotify’s desktop app — which includes great apps like Pitchfork, Soundrop, TuneWiki, and We Are Hunted — will indeed be moving to the web and mobile apps.

“We’ve been working on this for more than a year,” Söderström enthused. “I can’t wait for people to experience it.”

We’d heard previously that Spotify Apps would head to the iOS and Android platforms eventually, but we did not have a timeline. Now we know Spotify Apps should land on mobile and the web player early in 2013.

The first three apps integrated with the web player are Pitchfork, Songkick, and Tunigo,  Söderström said. Other apps should be announced soon. “We have convinced a bunch of others to get on board, but we don’t have timing yet,” he said.

As a big fan of Spotify Apps (check out five of the best Spotify Apps), I believe they are essential to the future of the service. The apps greatly simplify finding new music from a variety of publications and music labels. They also can help connect you with other people who like the same music. It will be exciting to see how these apps function inside web and mobile.

Spotify also used the event in New York today to announce that it now has 5 million paying subscribers and that its web app would be available to most users in January. The event also featured a lively back-and-forth between former adversaries — Metallica’s Lars Ulrich and Napster cofounder Sean Parker — talking about piracy and the future of music.

Streaming music service Spotify has plenty of nifty stats to share on its first year in the U.S., including the fact that U.S. listeners have jammed to more than 13 billion songs.

Spotify launched in the U.S. on July 14, 2011, joining a wave of other streaming music services like Rdio and Mog that familiarized Americans with the concept of streaming music. Since then, the service has amassed more than 3 million users in the U.S., about 20 percent of whom are paying customers, according to April figures from the New York Post.

If you’ve been living under a rock for a year, Spotify is a service that lets you stream millions of music tracks for free. For $5 a month, you get unlimited access to Spotify’s library and no advertisements. And for $10 a month (which I like to call music Nirvana), you unlock Spotify’s full mobile experience, which lets you listen to any track on the service from your phone and download playlists for offline listening.

Spotify users in the U.S. have shared 27,834,742 songs since launch, with 55.3 percent shared through Facebook and 41.5 percent within Spotify itself. Those hefty Facebook numbers are due to Spotify’s extensive integration with the social network, as well as the fact that Spotify started forcing new users to use their Facebook accounts last September. Surprisingly, only 2.7 percent of Spotify shares occurred through Facebook.

Spotify’s transformation into a music platform last November, with the announcement of Spotify apps, has also been a smashing success. The company says that U.S. users have spent around 2,700 years (or 23.7 million hours) within its apps. (Check out five of our favorite Spotify apps here.)

Rdio was actually my first taste of streaming music freedom, but Spotify quickly won me over with its social playlists and better music quality. The Spotify desktop app has become my go-to desktop music player (it’s even more useful now that I’m working across a Mac and Windows PC), and I’ve made a habit of pushing all my new music to an offline playlist on the Spotify iPhone app.

Spotify now sports more than 18 million tracks and 20 million active users globally (3 million of which are paying users).

The company is based in Sweden and has offices worldwide. So far Spotify has raised around $188 million in funding, and it’s reportedly seeking a massive new round that could value it  at up to $3.5 billion.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

An iOS application called Sonarflow for Spotify, which hooks into the streaming service for access to 15 million tracks and counting, promises to point you to artists and songs that you’re sure to love.

Sonarflow for Spotify, a brand new application from three-year-old, Austria-based music discovery startup Spectralmind, is one of 15 mobile products competing today for best in class in the Innovation Competition at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2012 conference in San Francisco, Calif.

“Spotify has a lot of content … you can literally play any song you wish in an instant,” Spectralmind CEO Thomas Lidy told me in an interview. “But the problem there is you have to know the name of the artist or the title of the songs. If you don’t know them, it’s really hard to find music.”

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And that’s where Sonarflow for Spotify comes in. Sitting as a visual music discovery overlay on top of Spotify’s catalog, the application first presents the user with three different bubbles — starred, your top tracks, and top tracks — for touch-based music exploration. A person can then pinch to zoom into any of the circles, click on a artist for additional info, and double tap on tracks to listen to them.

“The visual aspect is really our strongest aspect here,” Lidy said. “We put a layer on top of Spotify where you can see what’s there … what you can find, and what you can discover.”

Sure, that sounds like a rudimentary, hierarchal approach to music discovery, and maybe it is. But where the application shines is in its ability to recommend new artists and send a Spotify listener down an unlimited number of musical paths. A click of the search button in the upper right-hand corner will display five new artists, denoted by white bubbles, around an artist the user already knows, and a tap on an artist will pull up all available tracks for playing. You can also star the new songs you discover in the app, which in turn saves them to your Spotify starred tracks collection.

In playing with Sonarflow for Spotify, I found the application to be a fantastic vehicle for musical enlightenment. Just a few clicks in and I was listening to pleasing tracks that I had forgotten, simply because I couldn’t remember the song title or artist name, and also unearthing several new favorite artists.

The application, however, isn’t yet ideal for a lean-back, automated listening experience, as Spotify’s own new radio feature proffers, unless you’re content playing straight through the tracks of one of the artists you discover.

That’s going to change in future releases, Lidy promised me. Two pending features, for instance, include an auto-playlist option and a way to create playlists by drawing a path on the screen, he said.

Still, we’re only seeing pieces of Spectralmind’s intelligence in this release, Lidy insisted. The company behind the application has been working on audio recognition technology since its earliest days and is capable of capturing the sound of music to make recommendations based on rhythm, melody, or voice matches. This proprietary software technology, which has yet to be baked into Sonarflow for Spotify, will make potentially infinitely more interesting recommendations in the way of fresh, obscure, and indie artists.

“Right now, very popular artists are popping up, but some people prefer to find music that nobody else is aware of,” Lidy said. “It’s not possible with typical music recommenders, because [they] work only if the music has been listened to by many, many people before. With audio-based recommendation technology, we can bring in any song from the 16 million songs on Spotify just by matching a user’s taste in terms of rhythm and melody.”

Vienna-based Spectralmind has 12 employees and has raised $1.175 million in seed and grant funding. The company, which started its life building products for media professionals, previously released a Sonarflow application for iPhone and iPad with similar functionality pivoting around a person’s individual music collection.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Since Spotify‘s U.S. launch a year ago, the startup has turned into one of the best streaming music services available today. And with the company’s transformation into a platform for music-focused apps, the service has gotten even better.

Spotify’s desktop and mobile applications give you access to a catalog of more than 16 million tracks. The company also has begun to offer Pandora-like radio that both free and paid users can access. But Spotify’s apps take the service a step further, fundamentally changing the experience of finding and listening to music.

As of this writing, 36 applications are accessible inside of Spotify’s desktop app, with big names like Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The Guardian providing their own apps. These desktop apps change the music-listening experiencing by providing music discovery, music reviews, social listening, lyrics, and even dating. Spotify has said it also intends to bring third-party apps inside its mobile apps, but it hasn’t said when.

We’re sure the app platform will continue to expand, but for now we’ve made a list of our five favorite Spotify apps.

1. We Are Hunted

Whether or not you follow popular music charts from Billboard, iTunes, or other sources, it’s great to be able to access popular and emerging songs. We Are Hunted is sort of a “cool Billboard” that tracks emerging music through blogs, social media, message boards, and P2P networks. It uses a well-designed, visual interface that lets you scroll through 99 trending songs with corresponding artist thumbnails. If you’re feeling like being turned on by artists you’ve never heard of, there’s the “Emerging Chart” tab. Or if you want more conventional picks, there’s the “Mainstream Chart” tab. Additionally, the app has seven different genre playlists to cycle through. You can also use the app to create a playlist based on an artist you like.

2. Digster

While Spotify offers a relatively new Pandora-like radio function to create playlists, Digster takes the notion of playlist building further with curated playlists from across the spectrum of music. You can choose from hip-hop, classical, Motown, classic rock, and everything in-between and experience classic hits and songs you’ve never heard side-by-side with more ease than ever. You can also check out Share My Playlists for more playlist options.

3. TuneWiki

The TuneWiki app doesn’t redefine the nature of listening to music, but it certainly is one of the most practical and helpful Spotify apps. The service makes it possible to see lyrics synced up in real-time with whatever song you’re listening to, making it easier than ever to figure out what the heck they’re singing about. What’s also cool is that lyrics are crowd-sourced, so if a song’s lyrics seem wrong, you can change them just as if you were editing Wikipedia.

4. Soundrop

Soundrop is easily the most unusual app on this list because it’s the only one to receive VC funding. Yes, even Spotify apps can raise money, which is a sign that the platform is strong and growing. Soundrop creates a social listening experience with “rooms” in which you can listen to music. You can browse through various artist rooms (the picture above shows the one for Sigur Ros) and talk to people about the artist. While in the room, you can also add songs to the room’s playlist and vote up songs other people have suggested. The company says its nearly 7,000 rooms have played more than 60 million songs to date.

5. Pitchfork

While Pitchfork has many loud fans and equally loud critics, the Chicago-based site is still in many ways the Internet age’s Rolling Stone. It provides a spotlight (and copious amounts of hype) for emerging artists, and the site’s aspect of picking “the next big thing” translates well to Spotify. Not only does the app provide an easy way to read Pitchfork’s sometimes long-winded reviews, it makes it easy to find new music that’s already been curated weekly by a staff of music writers. Rolling Stone also has a Spotify app with similar functionality, but it doesn’t update its selections as often as Pitchfork does.

Take a look at our gallery of other awesome Spotify apps below and let us know what your favorites are in the comments.

Woman listening to radio photo: sebilden/Flickr

Soundrop, a social app for streaming service Spotify’s music platform, has raised $3 million in its first round of funding, the company announced today.

Soundrop was among the first batch of apps that launched with Spotify’s new open-platform, which invites other developers to create apps that work with the streaming music service’s core functionality. The app allows users to set up virtual listening rooms based on a specific music type, which is similar to what Turntable.fm is doing. It has about 7,000 rooms that have played over 60 million songs, according to the company. Some music labels have started partnering with Soundrop to create artist-specific music rooms to help promote a new album or concert tour.

The funding is significant because it shows (on some level) that investors have faith in Spotify’s app platform. At the same time, the new funding round did come from one of Spotify’s original investors, Northzone. Soundrop plans to use the new capital to hire more employees, set up a new offices in Europe, and increase its mobile profile.

Founded in January 2012, the Oslo, Norway-based startup was previously bootstrapped prior to its recent funding round. As part of the investment deal, Northzone’s Torleif Ahlsand will become chairman of Soundrop’s board of directors.

Streaming music startup Spotify will soon launch branded applications from AT&T, Intel, McDonald’s, Reebok, and more. The move will help the company find greater revenue possibilities.

Adding apps from big brands presents a great opportunity for Spotify to make more money. Chief executive officer and founder Daniel Ek recently confirmed that his company had posted losses of about $96 million in its two years, and that it will continue to spend money to make money. The cost of licensing music for streaming is so expensive Spotify has to attract a huge number of paid users so it can eventually become profitable. The company has 3 million paid users across 13 countries, but many more free users that listen to advertising to get access to music.

Apps are one of the best things now offered inside Spotify’s platform, and I regularly use them to help find new music or re-visit old classics. Here’s hoping that these branded apps, which will also take a stab at curating music, will match the quality of other apps presently available.

The branded apps will appear inside Spotify’s PC and Mac programs in the coming weeks, with Ek planning to introduce them on stage at Ad Age’s Digital Conference in New York.

Spotify branded app image: AdAge