Upon reading Spotify’s news of their embeddable player yesterday I must admit that I was initially really excited by the concept. After all, Spotify has aspirations to become “the OS of music” and on paper at least this move seems like a wise one. To some extent, it is. Digging a little deeper though, I found my view changing. For one thing, the player itself isn’t particularly impressive – rather than exist as an entirely web-driven experience it instead is forced to launch your Spotify player. Immediately that introduces a number of obstacles to adoption. Firstly, you need to be in a country where Spotify has launched. Secondly, you need to have Spotify installed and an active user account in order to stream. Compare this to, for example, YouTube or Soundcloud and immediately the issue becomes clear: as long as this embeddable player cannot be openly used by all, anywhere on the web, it falls down. If I was running a site with significant international reach, would I be better serving my userbase via an openly accessible embedded player, or would I rather run the risk of annoying certain sections of my visitors who won’t respond well to getting the [...]
Upon reading Spotify’s news of their embeddable player yesterday I must admit that I was initially really excited by the concept. After all, Spotify has aspirations to become “the OS of music” and on paper at least this move seems like a wise one. To some extent, it is. Digging a little deeper though, I found my view changing. For one thing, the player itself isn’t particularly impressive – rather than exist as an entirely web-driven experience it instead is forced to launch your Spotify player. Immediately that introduces a number of obstacles to adoption. Firstly, you need to be in a country where Spotify has launched. Secondly, you need to have Spotify installed and an active user account in order to stream. Compare this to, for example, YouTube or Soundcloud and immediately the issue becomes clear: as long as this embeddable player cannot be openly used by all, anywhere on the web, it falls down. If I was running a site with significant international reach, would I be better serving my userbase via an openly accessible embedded player, or would I rather run the risk of annoying certain sections of my visitors who won’t respond well to getting the [...]