Sten Garmark, Spotify’s director of platform, told The Telegraph: “We want to Spotify to be the operating system of music across every platform. We recently launched apps on service and have previously brought Spotify to mobile and to stereo equipment. Now we want to bring high quality music to the web. The ‘Play Button’ will spread music across the web.
“We think this is a valuable proposition to website owners and publishers. All too often people embed audio links illegally which play poor quality audio. This button ensures all artists will get paid and no links will need to be taken down.”
In order for people to listen to songs via the Play Button, people will have to have a Spotify account or sign up for one. The move is another aggressive one by the Swedish music company, to acquire more users.
Last year the service launched in the US and teamed up with Facebook in a bid to boost its membership and global footprint. Currently the company has 10 million active users – three million of which are paying subscribers.
Garmark refused to reveal how the deep partnership with Facebook had affected its user figures.
Launch partners for the Spotify Play Button include The Huffington Post, NME, Rolling Stone, technology site Mashable and Tumblr, one of the largest blogging networks in the world.
Spotify did not have to renegotiate its contract with the labels to make the Play Button available.
Publishers or bloggers wanting to add the Play Button to their site, need to copy the web address of an album or song of choice and visit the Spotify developer site and copy the embed link.
The Spotify client will also keep playing a song or an album after a user has closed down the article.
Garmark said that Spotify’s users were sick of reading about music and the accompanying links providing poor quality audio.
Spotify’s Play Button will encroach upon SoundCloud’s territory, a popular audio-sharing site. However, Garmark, said that the two audio start-ups had different goals.
“We are trying to put Spotify everywhere. There will be some overlap with SoundCloud – but they do not have the catalogue like us to offer the same service,” explained Garmark.
