Spotify Takes Its Follow Button Outside Its Walled Garden, Lets Fans Follow Musicians And Others From Anywhere

Following the launch of its Play music-playing button last year, today Spotify took one more step outside of its walled garden: it has launched a new Follow button, a widget that can go on any desktop or mobile page, not just pages within Spotify itself (as the Follow button previously used to work), to let users follow other profiles within Spotify.

By clicking on it, a user can follow others on Spotify — be they artists, other users, music magazines or blogs or labels — and then get updates from them in their Spotify activity streams. Spotify’s Follow button will work much like those from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks, and is intended to sit alongside them on websites. That is not an accidental similarity, as Spotify further positions itself as the default platform for all social music interaction. That’s a position it has already been cultivating with its App Center, its Spotify Social feature, the pre-existing, in-Spotify Follow button, close Facebook integration and more.

The Follow button will serve a few other crucial purposes, too: for those who are not already using Spotify, it will encourage them to download it. For those who are already Spotify users, it will continue to bring the service front and center to their minds, and give them potentially more reasons to return to it again and again. And there is a B2B angle here, too: for the labels, artists and others who appear on Spotify, it places the music streaming service as a more effective marketing platform, highlighting how Spotify may choose to exploit that more commercially in the future.

All of these are essential for the company right now, as the company reportedly is working on raising a new round at a $5.3 billion valuation. It is still a loss-making service, so adding more users can help it either beef up numbers for better advertising revenues; or for potentially upselling unpaid users into its paid, premium tiers. Improving relationships with labels and artists by giving them more ways to promote themselves, meanwhile, makes the service more of a go-to platform for them as well.

Spotify says that the Follow button will start appearing everywhere beginning today, both on desktop and mobile, just as the Play widget is today.

The Follow button, Spotify notes on its developer pages, comes by way of a piece of code that a developer plugs into a website.

When visitors to that site are logged in to Spotify and click a Follow button, the artist or user is added to the profiles they already follow. If the user does not have a Spotify account, they get prompts to create one. If they do but it’s not launched, they get a prompt to launch it.

For those who are in regions where Spotify is not yet active (it’s currently in 39 countries), users will get a note saying that the service is not yet available in their market.

Spotify has created code for the button to appear with and without profile pictures. Here’s how the enhanced button looks (the pared-down version is illustrated above):

This becomes the second widget that Spotify has created to exist outside of its walled garden, adding to the Play feature that lets users listen to Spotify-based tracks anywhere on the web via an embeddable player. By launching it, it’s taking a step ahead of other rivals like Rdio, which also offers following features but not the ability for them to be added across other sites.