Spotify is opening up its streaming platform to more free users via Spotify Connect, the company’s Wi-Fi-enabled service that allows you to control music throughout your house from the Spotify app on a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.
Spotify Connect launched back in 2013, and it was a godsend for those who didn’t want to be tethered to the inherent limitations of Bluetooth. With Spotify Connect, users can control music that is being played on compatible Wi-Fi devices, such as wireless speakers, smart TVs, soundbars, and smart speakers.
This also helps democratize party playlists, as anyone who is connected to the same Wi-Fi network with their phone or tablet can assume control of the tunes.
Number Of Spotify Users
Premium benefits
The one downside to Spotify Connect on speakers so far is that it has been restricted to Premium subscribers, thought it has been available to free users on TVs for a while. Moving forward, however, Spotify revealed it’s launching a software development kit (SDK), called eSDK 3, that gives speaker manufacturers the opportunity to offer Spotify’s free users access to Spotify Connect.
- Free users around the world can also set up Spotify Connect with their Sonos speakers directly from the Spotify app. Spotify Connect works with all Sonos speakers, including the new Sonos Move, a durable, battery-powered smart speaker for great sound indoors, outdoors, and on the go.
- Spotify Free users can choose 160 kbps high quality while Premium users 320 kbps. If the high quality doesn't suit your needs on enjoying Spotify, then you can set the Spotify Equalizer to enhance the sound quality. How to Set Music Equalizer for Enjoying Spotify Music. Spotify equalizer is only available on mobile devices.
- Spotify Connect, which allows users to stream their favorite tunes to any Connect-enabled speaker, has long been one of the best premium-only features on the Swedish streaming service.
If they have a Spotify account, you could locate them with their username, by using the following technique - Type the following code into the Spotify search bar - spotify:user:username (replacing username with their Spotify username), and you should be able to locate their account. Spotify Connect allows users to use devices on the same WiFi network to play music. These devices can be games consoles, media set-top boxes, Windows PCs and more. The user can continue to select music using their phone or other devices through Connect. The feature has been limited to Spotify's premium subscribers to this point.
Of course, this will rely on manufacturers embracing the new SDK, but there is every reason to believe that most hardware makers will be willing to cater to Spotify’s legion of free users, given that it could incentivize more people to buy their hardware.
“The release of our new eSDK will change the game for Spotify’s free users who want to enjoy music on their connected speakers,” said Spotify senior product director Mikael Ericsson. “We look forward to supporting our partners over the coming months as they update existing speakers and bring new products to market.”
Spotify’s recent Q3 earnings revealed that while its paid user base growth is slowing, it is still growing and is edging ever closer to the magic 50 percent mark, a metric Spotify is keen to improve.
However, the fact remains that 55 percent of Spotify accounts currently belong to people who do not pay. On the surface, it would seem that opening Spotify Connect to those users gives them one less reason to upgrade, but it could actually have the opposite effect — it may encourage them to use Spotify more often and thus realize the benefits offered by a premium subscription. One of those benefits is being able to play any song on-demand via a mobile phone, rather than shuffling playlists, which is quite a big benefit.
In short, opening Spotify Connect to more free users gives the company a little more leverage as it seeks to convince them to upgrade their accounts to premium.
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Spotify released recently a set of endpoints in beta to fetch information of what is playing and send playback commands. This allows for a wide range of integrations and I wanted to hack a bit with it.
What is Spotify Connect
Spotify Connect is a way to transmit the playback from one device to another one without having to use a physical connection like a cable or bluetooth. You can send the music from your Spotify desktop client to a speaker, from the Spotify app on mobile to Spotify for PlayStation, from the Spotify web player to Chromecast… In short, you have controllers and devices that can play music.
Spotify’s Web Player (zoomed in). Clicking on the icon next to the volume we get a list of connected devices (FireTV, desktop client, speakers and the web player).
Your application can become a controller through the Web API endpoints, getting information about what is playing currently and from where, being able to transmit the playback to another connected device or interact with the current context (pausing, changing the volume, skipping, playing something else…).
How to use the endpoints
Before using the Connect endpoints we need to obtain an access token on behalf of the user with certain permissions. There is more information about what scopes are needed in the documentation for each endpoint.
You don’t need to have a premium account to get the playback status, a free account is alright. You will do need a premium one if you want to send commands to change the playback.
A caveat at the moment is that the endpoints don’t support any kind of web socket connection nor long polling. Thus, if you want to get updates on the position of the current playing track or any other change in the context, you need to poll every few seconds.
A small library to make it easier to use the endpoints
The trickiest part of using the Spotify Web API is to implement the authorization flow. The Authorization Guide does a good job explaining it, but I thought I could do something so developers wouldn’t need to worry about setting up the whole flow, hiding away the authentication and just getting.
That’s why I have created spotify-player. It’s both a server and a library that you use to communicate with it. To use it, you just need to include a script, call login() and subscribe to the updates:
You can forget about setting up a Spotify application and a server, carrying out the token exchange, token refresh, and persisting the current user, so you can focus on the fun part.
Other methods include a function to make calls to other Spotify endpoints reusing the same access token, so you can fetch other data that can help you creating a more complete visualisation.
Let’s have a look at this pen as an example of a basic visualisation:
And in case you can’t try it or don’t have a Spotify account this is pretty much what it looks like:
See the Pen on Codepen
I have kept the example very basic since the point is understanding the usage of the library. If you are into performance and UX you’ll see there is room for improvement, but as a front-end developer I know an example can get out of hand very easily when adding things.
I encourage you to fork it and start making your own visualisation. And once you do it, ping me so I include it in this Codepen collection.
Possible applications
Disclaimer: This is a list of some use cases. You still need to comply with Spotify’s terms of use when implementing an application that uses Spotify’sWeb API. This might mean adding certain messaging and link to the song in Spotify.
Dynamic visualisations
You could combine the playback position with the audio analysis of the track to generate dynamic visualisations using loudness, tempo, key, timbre or pitch of the segments that compose the track. You can also use the endpoint to fetch audio features of a track, which gives you high level information about characteristics of the song.
See the Pen on Codepen and Possan’s original visualisation on GitHub
Spotify Connect Speaker
Now playing view
Are you a coffee-shop owner and people always wonder what song is playing? You could have a TV showing a branded now playing view. You could even have a widget on your website, or a script posting to a social network what is currently playing so your customers know. Or a small browser extension showing what is playing and/or showing desktop notifications when the track changes.
See the Pen on Codepen. When the track changes the browser shows a Web Notification.
Or if you are at home hosting a dinner or party, show on the TV or computer what is playing.
Spotify User Search
You can combine other Spotify Web API endpoints too. Eg you could fetch the artists info to show the artist profile image in the background:
See the Pen on Codepen. A simple visualisation of what’s playing in Spotify rendering the artist profile image as the background.
You could use an API like Musixmatch’s and create an app or a website showing the lyrics for the current song, synchronised with the playback position.
And your imagination is the limit. Use Genius’ API to get annotations about a song, or search for trivia and more info about the song or artist using Wikipedia’s API. And if you don’t want to miss what’s happening in the world, implement a news ticker in your view using News API.
See the Pen on Codepen
MVP
The library is really small and it only supports reading the playback state and not send commands. Let’s call it an MVP. I might work on adding more features in the future.