Spotify ties itself closer to The Echo Nest's API in latest update

Spotify is trying to make it easier for developers to use both the Spotify platform and newly purchased The Echo Nest in a new update to its API rolling out today.

The Echo Nest gives music developers access to lots of music data-related services to build into their own applications, such as song recommendations, album meta data, and more. Spotify acquired Echo Nest back in March after deeming its technology invaluable to its own operations, which made a lot of competing music services (like Rhapsody and Rdio) uncomfortable with using Echo Nest.

But with today’s update those that aren’t directly competing with Spotify, however, now have an API that lets them do far more with both Echo Nest and Spotify together. Some of the other updates include being able to automatically create a playlist from outside of Spotify, grab track/album info from artists in Spotify’s library, add 30-second track previews to songs, and access a Spotify user’s profile details for third-party apps.

“Developers, marketers, ad agencies, music hacking gurus, product managers, design firms, and anyone else who wants to build a Spotify web app to further their goals now have a great new tool at their disposal, with more multimedia and baked-in smarts than ever before,” the company said in a statement. “It’s sort of like having your own personal Spotify, except instead of founding the company and growing it for eight years, you get to jump right in and start building stuff on day one using our music and metadata.”

The API update is available today to developers, but it might be a while before we start seeing improved third-party Spotify apps that utilize the new tools.