Bringing music to Independent.co.uk: Our Spotify partnership

This morning we’ve partnered with Spotify for the launch of their new Play Button.

Spotify are a company on an incredible trajectory, now available in 13 countries (including the US) with over 10 million users and a catalogue of over 16 million songs. Though we’ve been using Spotify playlists for a few years now, our paths first crossed properly at F8, where we were both partnering with Facebook on our respective open graph integrations.

With the launch of the play button anyone with a website will be able to embed a streaming player on their sites so that users can stream songs without leaving the page (the Spotify desktop application opens in the background, or if you’re logged in starts playing the requested song automatically).

For The Independent this means we can add a new angle to our music journalism; as well as adding streamable albums to our album reviews (see Alabama Shakes here), we can embed setlists into our live reviews (Kylie) and singles into our weekly charts. We’ll also be using the player to illustrate features; this piece from Nick Hasted on jazz’s influence on pop music (via Radiohead) is a great example of how the player can really add something to the reading experience.

You can see all of the tracks we’ve used the play button on this page which also explains how the button works. We’re tweeting articles featuring the new functionality with the hashtag #listenwithspotify and results for that hashtag from us are displayed on that page.

Like everything in digital publishing this is a work in progress – let us know how you’d like us to bring music to Independent.co.uk and we’ll do our best to give you what you want (and have a listen to my launch playlist below)

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• http://davidnield.blogspot.com David Nield

  this would be much better if Spotify had a Web app and the tracks simply streamed whenever your browser recognised you were logged into Spotify (just as Facebook Likes or tweets work now), no separate program necessary.

• TheOnlyWayIsNorfolk

  Oh dear someone has no sense of humour or was the “police favour Indy” quip too close to home?

• VicTheBrit

  “…now available in 13 countries…”

  But not in the third largest economy, apparently. Spotify is still spottily available.