Spotify was probably the first big streaming / subscription music service that captured the interest of the general population, unlike some more niche services that came before it. With its cross-platform apps and significant library, at a fairly competitive price, users were understandably drawn to the service, and Spotify has doubtlessly done well from its popularity.
When Chromecast came along, and (at the beginning) didn’t have a lot of support across different apps and services, Spotify users were rightfully hopeful that Spotify might implement Chromecast support. However, without a public SDK, this might have been a bit tricky. We don’t know whether Spotify were approached by Google to work on a private SDK basis, but it would appear not.
It wasn’t a vain hope; lots of competing streaming services have already implemented Chromecast support, including Pandora, Rdio, Pandora, Google Play Music, YouTube, Rhapsody, Deezer, and Qq Music.
Some of these have libraries that rival Spotify in terms of content, and some adopted Chromecast support very early in the piece. I mean, why wouldn’t they? Listening to music on your computer or phone is one thing, but what if you want to cast it to your TV or home audio receiver? Sure, there are other ways you can listen to Spotify around the house … but none quite as cheap and convenient. Sonos speakers support Spotify (and vice versa), but unless you want to splash out a couple of hundred dollars for a Sonos speaker, you’re out of luck there.
With the release of the public Chromecast SDK in February 2014 though, there was little excuse for Spotify not to look at support. They support Apple’s AirPlay, so why not Chromecast too?
It isn’t as if its just a small handful of users that want the feature either, as this thread on Spotify’s community forums shows over 7,000 users have requested the feature. 7,000 might not be a big figure compared to millions of users, but that’s 7,000 people who use Spotify’s forums and have seen and flagged the feature request; you could imagine that there’s probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of Spotify users who own and use Chromecast devices, and would like to be able to stream their Spotify libraries through their loungerooms.
They’ve been asking for the feature for a while, too. The forum thread started in July 2013, and in the 18 months that have since passed, 1,826 people have commented on the thread. Users are frustrated with the perception that Spotify is ignoring them, and they’ve decided to vote with their wallets, moving to competing services that offer the features they want.
With Google’s announcement of Cast Audio it seems that the call for Spotify to get on board is getting even louder. I’m sure it would require a bit of development work, but let’s face it, Spotify is pretty big, and Chromecast isn’t (from what we understand) particularly difficult to implement, as hundreds of other apps and services have shown.
Ausdroid wrote to Spotify this morning to request comment on this issue before the story went live, and we have not as yet received a reply. If Spotify do come back to us, we’ll update this post accordingly.
So, what about it Spotify? How about some feedback on Chromecast support, and whether you are actually considering it?
