First numbers: How successful are Spotify’s apps?

Are Spotify’s new apps the missing piece to the social music puzzle, or merely gimmicks that are ignored by the majority of the company’s users? It’s been a month this week since Spotify rolled out its app platform to all of its users, and we thought it might be worth to take a look at how successful the apps currently available through Spotify’s client actually are.

To recap, Spotify officially announced its app platform at a world-wide event in late November, and the company’s CEO Daniel Ek said at the time that the platform was “bringing music to where it should have been.” The apps themselves are essentially web applications that live within the Spotify client and offer functionalities such as playlist sharing, curated listening and data around music. I was initially pretty disappointed by the platform, but I’d be more than happy if the data proved me wrong.

So what kind of traction are Spotify’s apps seeing a month after the launch? The company itself wasn’t available for comment, with a spokesperson telling me that Spotify is still in the process of gathering relevant data. However, a few of the dozen or so third-party developers that already have their apps up and running within the Spotify client were more than willing to share their experiences, and this first data actually looks pretty promising:

Moodagent’s app, which offers instant mood-based playlists, has seen about 500,000 unique visitors since its launch on Spotify, according to the company’s head of communications Casper Falbe, who also gave me the following tidbits: “More than 60% of the visitors keep coming back to use Moodagent, but what’s most impressive is that 43% of the users have been active making playlists more than 200 times each.”
Soundrop’s genre-based chat room app has seen a total of 265,590 unique visitors since December 20. “We’ve had almost 32700 tracks added, 2.4 million tracks played,” Soundrop representative Thomas Ford told me via email, adding: “Soundrop users have played music for a total of 7453 days, 5 hours, 47 minutes and 20 seconds.” He also said that retention has been very good, with 30 percent of all users coming back within one day and 50 percent coming back within two days.
ShareMyPlaylists.com has seen between 6,000 and 10,000 unique visitors per day for its Spotify app. “This has resulted in a 200% increase in new members to our site and a huge 400% increase in playlists uploaded to ShareMyPlaylists.com,” according to the company’s CEO Kieron Donoghue, who also credits Spotify as as being a big contributor to a major milestone: “This week we’ve hit 1 million playlist generated by our Playlist Generator,” Donoghue told me.

This data is obviously just offers a glimpse at the initial performance of the Spotify app platform, but it’s definitely encouraging, as it seems to suggest that users who try out apps keep coming back to them. It remains to be seen how these numbers develop once the platform sees a lot more apps that the dozen currently available, and it’s still unclear how third-party developers will be able to eventually monetize the traffic within Spotify’s client. But one thing seems to be certain: Spotify users like the functionality provided by apps, and they’re eager to find new ways to explore Spotify’s catalog.

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