Spotify, the music subscription service that has been so popular in Europe, is now available in the United States. Spotify offers users the ability to stream limited hours of music for free or stream unlimited songs for a small fee, from a library of over 15 million songs. And while it has a Spotify API out of the gate, it comes with a catch.
There’s been some great new music mashups coming down the pipe lately. We’ll highlight some of the better ones below, including a music search engine, local music events, lyrics lookup, a Spotify video playlist app (yes, there’s a Spotify API) and a fun “name that tune” game. The most popular music API, the Last.fm API, is featured multiple times, as is the YouTube API, which has become a favorite of music mashups.
Maestro.Fm wants to take your music experience to cloud nine, maybe even ten. Actually that could be a little overstated, but at least they are going to use cloud computing to do it. With a functionality similar to Google Music, a little application runs on your PC and uploads all your music to Maestro. Once it’s there, it’s augumented with album art, lyrics, and other lovely decorations. It’s kind of like a music library makeover. Google already has a thick collection of API services. Will they be interested in opening Google Music up for developer access? Don’t wait around and wonder, the Maestfo.fm API is already here.
We’ve all been there. We found a great song we love, but don’t know the lyrics. Instinctively, you hit the Google search and wade through a sea of misspelled, poorly translated, out-of-date, or poorly interpretted lyrics listings. Granted, some songs come tagged with the lyrics, which is helpful, but that’s not going to help the rest of your massive music collection of songs you’ve been singing along to. It’s frustrating and it’s messy, something the MusixMatch API could change.
In our writeup on Seevl, we mentioned that using the Seevl API to add context to Youtube videos would be ideal. Well, apparently, it was thinking along exactly those same lines. I talked briefly with Alexandre Passant, who is one of the main people at Seevl, and we talked about the company’s new mashup, and its future plans for the API.
Seevl is a new kind of music discovery engine. It allows you to find how artists are similar to each other and which artists are most similar to each other, among other things. It also allows you to comment on the notes about artists within the database. This is all well and good, but better yet, it has the Seevl API, allowing developers to integrate Seevi into their own applications.
The most popular API, in terms of mashup count, is far and away the Google Maps API, which accounts for 41% of all mashups. But when it comes to the most popular pair of APIs, Flickr and YouTube mashups are the most common. Not to be outdone, Google Maps joins Flickr in a near second place.
AudioBoo brings the familiar tape-recorder type interface to the web with all the fixings. Take your audio recording, add a picture, a location, put it in a social context, throw in popularity ratings and you have AudioBoo. The simplicity and social aspects of this service make a great platform for podcasters while providing another avenue of media discovery for users. But it’s new and still changing. If you’re feeling like an adventurous explorer, ready for twists, turns and surprises, jump on in to the AudioBoo API.
Major U.S. music festival Lollapalooza is catering to hackers with its new Lollapalooza API and a contest. Even though music may be of interest to those who program, music festivals normally don’t fall under our purview here at ProgrammableWeb. We’re excited that this acclaimed music festival is making its data available to the public this year so developers can build applications involving their scheduling and artist info.
Something awesome is happening in the world of music and the web. But first, some primer.
Rdio is one of the few music subscription services that do a tremendous amount of things right, including having its robust Rdio API. For $5 a month, you can get all of the music you want, have collaborative playlists, share content to Facebook and Twitter, and keep up with what your friends are listening to. For $10, you can do all that and store the music to your phone for offline or higher quality enjoyment.
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