Spotify’s New API Allows Developers To Add Music Streaming Service To iOS Apps

Music streaming service Spotify is releasing a new API today, called ‘libspotify,’ which allows third party iOS developers to write applications for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad with Spotify inside the app.

And these apps can include Spotify’s catalogue of more than 15 million tracks. Libspotify for iOS is available to Spotify Premium users as of today. It’s unclear if the startup will be building a framework for Android. Unfortunately, the use of the API is for non-commercial use, so developers cannot make money off the apps that include the API (Spotify partners with certain developers for commercial use).

Spotify just launched in the U.S. a month and a half ago, and reportedly already has more than 1.4 million users. We’ve also been told that Spotify has over 15 million (“closer to 20 million”) users in total, across Europe and the U.S.

The company also hired Zynga executive Teymour Farman-Farmaian as “Chief Acquisition & [Ad Business] Retention Officer” and Andrew Mager (from SimpleGeo) as a developer evangelist.

Clearly, Mager will be working with developers to integrate this API into third-party apps. It should be interesting to see if developers begin to integrate the service into apps, especially considering the rapid adoption of Spotify in the U.S. and Europe.