Up until this point, Spotify had some kind of exclusivity deal with Sony's PlayStation, which proved a bit of a headache for Xbox fans who subscribe to the service. Well, now we have the first official acknowledgement of "Spotify Music - for Xbox One."
Originally leaked via a questionable-looking off-screen photo, Major Nelson has now shown off Spotify Music on Xbox One for a split second during his weekly Xbox news round-up show.
Spotted by reddit (via MSPU), at 9 minutes in, Major Nelson opens the guide to reveal "Spotify Music - for Xbox One" at the bottom of the page.
The real question now hangs over the nature of Spotify for Xbox. Spotify is the world's most popular streaming music service, and the company announced it would be coming to the Windows 10 Store ported via Project Centennial, which lets you take a traditional Win32 desktop program and wrap it for the Windows 10 Store. The Xbox One itself cannot run Centennial apps, which means this app is a completely separate project.
There's a few scenarios to consider. Either Spotify is building a full Universal Windows Platform (UWP) version of its app, for running across Xbox, Windows 10 PCs, tablets, phones, and Mixed Reality, or this will be some sort of quick-fix stripped down version, similar to Twitter for Xbox. Of course, we hope it's the former, but that would likely represent a significant engineering effort Spotify may not be ready to jump into.
It's leveraging the background audio API, at least, but it sounds as though it might just be a port of their HTML-based app for TVs. That's interesting, because the YouTube app for Xbox One is also a HTML-based app, indicating that it too could get background audio support without going full UWP.
Either way, it's awesome news that Spotify is finally coming to Xbox One, ending its exclusivity deal with Sony's PlayStation.
Download Spotify Music from the Windows Store
Update 06/08/2017: Clarification on the type of app Spotify could be.
