Spotify Adds Free Music Play Button For Web Sites, Blogs &Tumblr

Spotify has added a Play Button that, when placed on any site, blog or Tumblr, enables play of any song, album or playlist. The button provides sites free access to millions of songs and Spotify a beachhead on what is sure to be tens of thousands of sites.  But it would be a mistake to think of the Spotify Play Button as just another music delivery widget.

"Crucially the Play Button is not an audio embed but instead a link that will play music from Spotify’s servers, via a user’s Spotify app via the site," analyst Mark Mulligan points out. "Which means that if you don’t have Spotify you don’t get to listen to the music".

As Robert Andrews of paidContent points out, the implementation is somewhat jarring. When users click the Spotify Play button, it opens a thier Spotify desktop application to play the some. "In this sense, the Play button is little more than a standard link to a Spotify URL," says Andrews. Since Spotfy, has no web based player, they really had not choice but to link back to the desktop.

Despite some shortcomings, the Spotify Play Button may well become the music player of choice across much of the web. 

Launch partners include Tumblr, The Huffington Post, Time Out Group (New York City, Paris, London), GQ UK, VOGUE.COM UK, MSN UK, the Guardian, Virgin Media, The Independent, NME, Rolling Stone, ShareMyPlaylists.com, FanRx, Popdust, Mashable, FanBridge, Wonderwall, The Fader, Pitchfork, and Noisey.com.  Any site can grab the widget here.