Clickable Spotify URIs in Adium

We love when things work together! In particular, we want Spotify to be able to work together with other applications, both on the desktop and on the web.

One way we try to realize this goal, is to give every artist, album, track, playlist and search string in Spotify its very own URI. A URI is a unique text string that is used to identify something on the internet. The most common type of URI is http, for web addresses, like http://www.spotify.com/, but there are many others, like mailto for email addresses.

To get the URI of something in Spotify, right-click on it and select “Copy Spotify URI”. You can then put it in a blog post, an email, a chat message, or anywhere else you want. Anyone can then take the URI and paste it into the search field in Spotify.

Things get even better if you’re using the new version of Adium, the popular chat application for Mac OS X, which has built-in support for Spotify URIs. That means that if someone sends you a Spotify URI, it will turn into a link that you can click on, saving you the hassle of copying and pasting.

In the long run, we’d like the spotify URI type to be the way to link to music, and be supported everywhere, and this is a great first baby step towards that goal.

A big thanks to the Adium developers, and to our own Rasmus Andersson, who contributed the crucial piece of code.