This is the big news that followers of Spotify have been waiting for for a little while. The revolutionary music service is launching an API “sometime this week”. It’ll give developers access to the raw workings behind the software, including its streaming facilities.

I don’t need to tell you that this is *fantastic* news. Freeing up the vast catalogue that Spotify has built up will energize developers and you’re going to suddenly see the service appearing everywhere – from phones to set-top-boxes and games consoles, but also on the web. The mobile aspect will be most interesting – anyone will be able to build their own mobile client for the service for any platform – BlackBerry, Symbian, iPhone, Android – whatever.

Also revealed by Spotify – 40,000 new users sign up each day, and users are spending on average 70 minutes listening to the service every day! That’s three lots of ads served to every user every day. Not bad!

When the API is out, we’ll scan the nascent developers scene and bring you the best of the user-built applications.

(via Guardian)