Spotify, the popular music streaming service, announced today that it would be opening up its API’s to third party developers. The service, which is based in Sweden, has grown significantly in popularity since coming to the United States this summer.

The announcement came in the form of a keynote by Spotify CEO David Elk. While a transcript of the talk does not appear to be available, Spotify live-tweeted it via their Twitter page. The goal of Spotify, Elk said, is to provide a legal alternative to music piracy. It has proven remarkably successful at this in Sweden, where the service is immensely popular, and where piracy has dropped 25% since Spotify came online.

The addition of third party apps to the service – available today in the form of an update to Spotify’s desktop software – is intended to help users discover new music, to provide tighter integration between Spotify and other streaming music services, such as Last.fm, and provide a variety of other services and options. The initial offering of apps includes one from Rolling Stone, Last.fm, TuneWiki, and many others.

Here are some highlights of the company’s keynote, as found on Twitter:

The company also published a video to its YouTube channel to introduce the new features.

For more information, see Spotify’s new apps page, which went live while this article was being written.