Spotify is pleased to announce great success with their new desktop apps. Their director of platforms, Sten Garmark revealed some statistics on their success at the Beyond the Hype conference in London. One striking figure was the amount of time users spent inside Spotify apps overall; total hours used sums to 1500 years! With about 10 million users, that rounds-out to about 1.3 hours per listener.

Let’s take a look at their specific apps and some numbers for users:

SoundDrop app:

SoundDrop is a virtual room where users can create and listen to collaborative playlists. Here people listened to 15 million songs together.

Moodagent app:

Moodagent generates over 3.5 million playlists per week. Impressive!

TuneWiki app:

Tunewiki is a place where users transcribe and edit lyrics so others can view them as they listen to content. Over 100,000 songs have been synchronized.

Garmark comments on the apps and user’s overwhelming demand for them:

“They are important so we can cater to all those needs. And since people are asking us to provide these features, when we do, music will be more valuable to them. They will be more likely to pay, and that makes more money for artists.”

“We have to turn ourselves into the OS of music,”

“We are in the middle of a transformation from being an app ourselves to being a platform.”

“Everyone has their individual idea for what Spotify should do next, which is why we love music apps,”

“Users are telling us it’s like Pandora but better,”

With all of this interaction and collaboration taking place it really takes listeners back to the visceral experience people had with the recording industry back when records were first introduced. It was about imagination; who the artist was, what they were trying to say, how they lived their life. The art and the packaging really gave some substance to the recording. There was an element of mystery around recordings and music in general.

Garmark hits on these sentiments with his comments:

“In this digital age of music, the experience in some ways got reduced to just a track or a playlist. But with these apps, it can start getting back to the old way of immersing yourself in the album cover, or reading about the music while listening to it. And artists can use it to connect with their audience.”

“It’s a really interesting platform for artists and labels to really enhance the experience around the music,”

In case you were wondering about their eagerness to expand overtaking their creative artistry, Garmark offers an explanation:

“It’s a curated platform: we want to make sure the content is great, so we’re not just letting anyone release anything. We’re working with them to make sure it’s good. We don’t want our users to have crappy experiences with apps.”

I like what I hear, Spotify seems to be onto something with their apps and overall musical platform. I would like to see a renewed interest in digesting music as a meal as opposed to a bite sized candy for the ear.