Spotify announce new radio app [Live from LeWeb '11]

Daniel Ek has just announced at LeWeb, that they will soon be launching their first ever radio app. Spotify announced their developer platform last week, to allow developers to build apps on top of the Spotify network. The aim is to make Spotify into a platform, with a downloadable software developers kit.

Lots of new apps are being developed off the back of this, such as an app that allows you to identify songs by lyrics.  Building off of the new developer network, the Spotify New York engineering team developed an app for radio, that will run on top of the Spotify platform. The app will run similarly to Pandora, but will have unlimited skipping and unlimited channels, which is not currently offered on Pandora.

Ek explained that they wanted to offer a ‘leanback experience’ as opposed to ‘lean forward’ through the app.

Ek seems to have a fairly humble aim, that he simply wants to allow people as much access to music as possible, in the easiest way possible. Spotify didn’t set out to disrupt the music industry, but they just wanted to make a product that would make consumption of music easier, with a supreme user experience. Most importantly, they focused on the experience working cross-device. Ek explained: “We wanted it to work everywhere, like water really”.  And this approach has allowed Spotify to succeed where others have failed, particularly with U.S. expanstion.

It took two years after the company started, to enter the U.S. market, which has been massively bolstered by recent integration with Facebook. Indeed,  seven million new users joined Spotify after the f8 launch and integration with the new Facebook newstream. But more importantly, outside of supported growth from Facebook, Spotify has a product that Ek describes as ‘contagious’ and that people want to use.

He doesn’t see the fact that you need to download a client in order for it to run as a problem, because the product that they’re offering the problem that they’re solving, goes beyond that. Breaking into the U.S. wasn’t easy for Spotify, it took sheer persistence to show people that their product worked, consistently answering the question of why we should pay for this product.