Spotify has acquired Tunigo, a music discovery and playlist sharing service that’s available through the native Spotify app and as a dedicated experience for iOS devices.
The deal, spotted by All Things D, means that all employees at the Swedish company will move to Spotify’s offices in either Stockholm and New York.
“We’re excited to announce that we acquired music discovery service and long-time partner Tunigo,” a Spotify spokesperson told TNW. “Tunigo has been one of the most popular apps on the Spotify platform and the team share our vision of bringing more amazing music to people to soundtrack their lives.”
Unlike Twitter’s recent acquisition of We Are Hunted – which caused the curated music discovery blog to close – Tunigo will continue to operate as a standalone Spotify app. Our guess it that the team will be contributing to new or existing Spotify features, however, so updates to the Tunigo apps may slow down moving forward.
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Tunigo is one of many apps that has given the Spotify experience a new dimension and feature set on the desktop. The company’s on-demand music streaming service is pretty robust ‘straight out of the box’ but apps such as Soundrop and Last.fm have given it a much-needed social and collaborative edge.
Tunigo is still available from the App Finder in Spotify, and offers curated playlists based on specific music genres, including pop, rock and country, as well as specific moods or activities such as ‘workout’, ‘travel’ and ‘romance’.
Hitting any of these selections will bring up a menu of pre-generated playlists which users can subscribe to at anytime. Some have been created by Tunigo themselves, but there’s also mixes made by users and the Spotify team.
Chosen playlists are then added to the left-hand pane alongside any other user-created, shared or prescribed mixes. Tunigo also offers image-drive news stories and a section for news releases, giving the appearance of an online music magazine similar to Drowned In Sound.
Spotify competes with a whole bunch of different streaming services including Rdio, Deezer, Xbox Music and Nokia Music+. Twitter is the latest entrant with its standalone #Music app, following the aforementioned acquisition of We Are Hunted.
Tunigo is an interesting addition to the Spotify portfolio. We’ve reached out to Tunigo to find out more and will update this post if and when we hear back.
Image Credit: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images
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