Shazam, the magic mobile app that identifies music playing in the room you’re in, has added a new option for interacting with a song it’s identified: listen in Spotify.
Spotify, a killer desktop and mobile music app that’s not yet available but to a few thousand testers in the United States, is widely loved in Europe. It’s a great way to discover new music, listen to an artist’s full or nearly full body of work and just generally get your groove on. I’m lucky to be listening to the band Bassnectar on Spotify as I write this post. I used Shazam earlier tonight to identify several songs, however, and did not have the option to fire those artists up in Spotify. I wish I could have. Along with creating a Pandora or Last.fm channel based on an identified artist, watching that artist’s YouTube videos, searching for their nearby tour dates and buying their music by MP3 – Spotify subscribers are now going to have a great new way to start listening to new music they discover on Shazam.
The advantage of using Spotify, instead of Pandora or Last.fm, is that Spotify users can easily listen to entire albums and navigate among related artists much more freely than on most other services.
According to the Spotify blog, this feature is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers at launch, but will be made available to free account holders soon. If you live in the United States and have not been fortunate enough to get one of relatively few Spotify preview accounts, prior to what everyone hopes are pending US licensing agreements with the major record labels here – well, don’t hold your breath. ReadWriteWeb cannot be held responsible if you burst while waiting.
As a happy new subscriber to the similar service Rdio, I hope that Shazam will integrate listening in Rdio as well.
A seamless ability to listen to entire albums of whatever musician or group is playing on the speakers in a room you’re in, with just a click or two and some awesome music identification technology, is truly incredible. Thank goodness for bandwidth, smartphones and streaming mobile music.
