Spotify - Chrome Web Store

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spotify-music-for-every-m/cnkjkdjlofllcpbemipjbcpfnglbgieh

by jacobwg • 13 years ago

34 50 13 years ago

chrome.google.com

pokoleo• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something because I'm not in the US - what's so special about this?

It looks like merely a link to the Spotify website.

jacobwg• 13 years ago

For those in the Spotify web app beta, this is a link to an entirely web-based version of Spotify. If you have a Spotify account, but don't yet have access to the web version, check out http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57551372-285/enable-spot....

pvnick• 13 years ago

Good to see another groundbreaking Spotify "innovation."

I remember Grooveshark getting into the chrome web store almost two years ago.

Kylekramer2• 13 years ago

I don't remember anyone calling it innovation. How about a nice feature addition to a service? After all, Spotify also has many other "innovations" Grooveshark doesn't: a clear legality, accurate track and artist catalogues, and paying all of their artists (even if it isn't much, it is certainly more than Grooveshark).

markzuckerwho• 13 years ago

I definitely don't see Spotify parading around calling this a groundbreaking "innovation." It's convenient for people like me that use Spotify 24/7 and want the choice between web and desktop.

calinet6• 13 years ago

Seriously? Spotify and Grooveshark aren't even playing in the same league. Grooveshark's audio quality and music library are a wreck compared to Spotify's clean, consistent and reliable one. This is like people who decried the iPod and foresaw its doom because "Archos had the same thing available for 2 years." Not comparable.

bsimpson2• 13 years ago

Isn't this just a bookmark for http://play.spotify.com/ ?

Honzo• 13 years ago

Yeah, I think the point is that it's finally web based.

randomfool• 13 years ago

You need to visit a different link to enable it-

https://apps.facebook.com/get-spotify/?fb_source=notificatio...

Once you do that, then play.spotify.com will work. I believe it's still in beta and some weird bugs showed up for me about a week ago, but it's still sufficient.

mrinterweb3• 13 years ago

I has always bothered me that Google is branding a bookmark with an icon as an "app". Current app counts: Apple app store ~= 800K, Google Play ~= 900K, Chrome apps = number of URLs on the internet.

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

What exactly should they do, disallow all apps that don't use a chrome.* API?

earbitscom3• 13 years ago

There is a bunch of functionality that you can do with Chrome apps, such as desktray alerts, background music streaming, etc. Most of the "apps" in the store do not do this and are mostly just links to sites, but there are plenty of things you can do with Chrome as an app that go beyond regular browser capabilities.

fakeer• 13 years ago

Yes, but then most of those Chrome web apps are!

Extensions however add extra functionalities other than a web page! I never understood all those fancy names and screenshots for the Chrome Web Apps when in the end they are just bookmarks with a big pretty icon!

rguldener• 13 years ago

Note that it is still US only though, if you are based in a different country it will just forward you to the Spotify homepage.

On a different note, does anybody know why they started with native clients instead of one web client? I can think of some advantages of native clients (P2P streaming as the have it, better OS integration etc.) but when compared to the big disadvantage of having to maintain two codebases (Win + OS X) and deliver updates to both I would expect it to require more resources for them than one web client for all.

earbitscom3• 13 years ago

They were leveraging p2p streaming to reduce their costs.

ralphc• 13 years ago

So the web version definitely doesn't do p2p? This would be good for work where there are usage agreements that specifically prohibit p2p

mkuhn• 13 years ago

Robin, the tutorial behind this link will enable it for you if you haven't got it yet: http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57551372-285/enable-spot...

jasonquinn• 13 years ago

I'm in the UK and it is working for me so its definitely not US only.

qnk• 13 years ago

Besides the P2P, I think that with the native client they went after iTunes at that time. Their first versions of the client (not sure if current ones), scanned your hard drive to organize your music library, allowed you to purchase individual songs and also to sync your iPod. Now iTunes is not their main competitor, but Rdio and Pandora are, that's why I think the strategy shift.

Having a native client was the feature that caught my attention and made me try Spotify in the first place. I was tired of implementations that used to hang my web browser or consumed lot of memory. But that was back in the time. Their latest Mac OS client is very memory hungry, almost every time on my top 3 of applications consuming the most memory.

rdouble• 13 years ago

Their team came from Skype and Joost so they had more P2P/native client engineering talent.

criley• 13 years ago

The webplayer seems to take more memory in total and offer a still significantly worse UI than the desktop counterpart.

I'm not impressed yet, and I know that better web experiences can be delivered.

However, now that I see this webplayer and recognize a few similarities with the desktop player, I can see why many of the horrifically terrible changes to the native player happened recently.

They were getting rid of native rendering and replacing it with rendering a webpage. No wonder people were so pissed and no wonder so much functionality was dropped.

EDIT: Okay, I'm going to say this. Webapps: USE MY RIGHT CLICK. You are NOT A WEBPAGE, so don't use a webpage right click!

Right click a song in native app: Play, Queue, Add To->Lists, Radio, Copy 3 Kinds of Links, Share, Delete from Playlist.

Right click on a song in web app: Back, Forward, Reload (breaks playback lol...), Save, Print, View Page Source, Reload Frame...

I love my right click menus and not having them in a webapp is very frustrating. Oh wait, this is supposed to also work for touch so I will never get a real alt-menu again, will I?

pifflesnort7• 13 years ago

> They were getting rid of native rendering and replacing it with rendering a webpage. No wonder people were so pissed and no wonder so much functionality was dropped.

I can confirm this, and have heard that this was politically driven by their web-focused engineering management and teams.

Netflix did the same thing, for the same reasons. People built up web fiefdoms and had the political clout to put their job security ahead of user experience.

pifflesnort7• 13 years ago

> ... but when compared to the big disadvantage of having to maintain two codebases ...

It's about your users, not your developers. Of course it costs more to provide a better product, which was the original reasoning behind providing native desktop applications.

What they're doing now has more to do with politics and skillsets amongst traditionally web-focused engineering management and teams, than it does with actually creating a great product. Spotify has a ridiculously hard time hiring outside their management's core competency of web-focused development, including both for mobile and desktop. That has more to do with their management than the job market, though.

As an aside, I can't say I understand why web developers find it so impossible to migrate to mobile/desktop. Time and time again we work with organizations who have built a large server-side web-focused team and somehow simply cannot manage to support the mobile/desktop. What kinds of engineers are they hiring that they can't learn a new platform?

untog2• 13 years ago

What kinds of engineers are they hiring that they can't learn a new platform?

Speaking as a web developer, I can tell you that I am perfectly able to transition to making desktop apps, I just have no incentive to. There are fewer and fewer desktop apps out there, so it's not a great use of my time to learn those skills.

Back to the Spotify player, the web client makes far more sense than a desktop one to me. All the music is stored in the cloud, so why do I have to download a desktop client on every machine I use to access it? It seems horribly backward to me.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

It's not US only. I've had access to it for a while now.

Dewie• 13 years ago

> Note that it is still US only though

I don't know about this specific extension, but if what another commenter said is right (that it's just a bookmark for play.spotify.com), then I've been able to use that site from here in Southern Europe since I found out about it (not that it wasn't a hassle to find or get going in the first place though).

I don't know why it would start out being US-only, as the native application seems to have arrived relatively late in the US.

PS: The Spotify home page is god-awful these days: a splash page plus auto-play music, I thought we as a species were over that stage...

EDIT: the fact that I can use it might have to do with that I have Premium.

therofler• 13 years ago

Why have Spotify decided to make a Chrome web app rather than just making a normal website, such as Grooveshark?

Kylekramer2• 13 years ago

It is a normal website if you have access: http://play.spotify.com/

myko• 13 years ago

The 'web app' is really just a bookmark for: http://play.spotify.com/

Hopefully they add some other features like storing music locally, which might require more Chrome integration (I don't really know).

lucid002• 13 years ago

They could store music locally using the File System API and Encrypted Media Extensions (to make the labels happy), but seeing as no one has done this before it probably won't happen for a while.

mase• 13 years ago

Finally! Web-based browser. It's actually pretty good. I like the interactions

Goopplesoft• 13 years ago

play.spotify.com has been around for a while.

steeve• 13 years ago

Am I the only one that actually prefers to use a desktop app for listening to music?

I mean, media keys integration, faster UI... The biggest selling point for Spotify to me was how _fast_ it would play songs...

nemof• 13 years ago

Seems really dumb to not mention that a) you need to be signed up to the web player beta and b) although they mention Collections, the collections feature still isn't live, and in fact is just a poor choice of wording on the chromestore page.

ra• 13 years ago

It downloads and installs something, but then clicking on it just send me to the Spotify homepage.

Not the experience I was expecting, Spotify.

Spotify - Chrome Web Store

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