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Spotify Platform announced: Rolling Stone, TuneWiki and Songkick and more announced as app partners

Spotify has just officially pulled the latest ace out of its sleeve; Spotify Platform is a forthcoming app ecosystem that sees Spotify move way beyond streaming music and putting playlists together.

Announced jointly in New York and at a press-packed London event, the new yet-to-be named app store will allow developers to make HTML5 apps through a Javascript API for use on the web.

A forthcoming version of the Spotify desktop app will feature a new App Finder in the left hand column. This will allow you to search for gig tickets, lyrics and music reviews.

Partners announced include Last.fm, We Are Hunted, TuneWiki, SongKick, The Guardian, Pitchfork, Top10, and Rolling Stone.

The Rolling Stone app will integrate news features and reviews into the main Spotify field; clicking on songs featured in an article will start playing the song. It’s kind of like an equivalent to a Soundcloud upload of a tracks that you might see on a music blog like The Quietus.

The TuneWiki app, as you might have guessed, brings up lyrics as a song is playing, allowing you to turn Spotify into a karaoke machine. Likewise, the Songkick app allows you to search for and track local gig listings for whoever you’re listening to at the time.

We think this would look great on tablets, but sadly there was no mention of an iPad app – or any other kind of mobile app for that matter.

When asked about mobile apps, co-founder Daniel Ek said that they’re in the pipeline but first and foremost, the emphasis is on the forthcoming desktop app. He added that Spotify is “agnostic” in its outlook, meaning we ought to be seeing iOS, Android and Windows Phone equivalents in the future.

Along with the announcement of Spotify Platform comes some interesting figures that highlight Spotify’s meteoric rise since it’s launch three years ago.

The service has a catalogue of over 15 million songs,10 million active users, 2.5 million of which are paying subscribers. Spotify has paid out over $150 million (£955,364,940) to labels and is the second-highest digital music revenue stream in Europe after iTunes.

“You have to create something better than piracy for people to want to pay [for music online],” says Ek. This is certainly an interesting move, practically turning Spotify into Facebook for music. Since the f8 conference, both companies have enjoyed a cosy relationship, which has seen 7 million of the 10 users logging in with their Facebook accounts.

With the Guardian Facebook app now sharing the articles you read with your friends, it’s easy to see where Spotify is going with this. Whether this new level of social integration becomes a draw for more paying subscribers remains to be seen; we’re certainly interested in seeing how the new apps take shape over the coming months and await their transition to mobiles.

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