Apple Music embeddable web player widget now lets users log in and listen to full songs in the browser

The Apple Music service has always provided an online tool to generate widgets, that can be used by artists to promote their music on their own websites and blogs. An eagle-eyed Reddit user has spotted that this widget has recently received an interface upgrade … and the ability to log in to your Apple Music account. Once signed in, you can play full songs, albums and playlists from within the web browser, no longer limited to just 30-90 second previews …

This change has led to some speculation that Apple is readying a full online Apple Music client, where users could log in to applemusic.com, for example, and access the same library as the Music app on iOS.

Here’s an example of the new widget, embedded into this blog post:

If you press the ‘Sign In’ button in the top right corner, you can log in to Apple Music with your account name and password. (This seems to work best from a Mac machine right now, iOS prefers deep-linking to the native app.)

Logging in upgrades the widget to allow playback of full songs and albums. You can press the ••• button and add the playlist to your library directly, all from the browser without opening a native app.

The widget features pause/play, progress scrubber and next track controls, so it’s already a significant step towards Apple providing a full music experience in the browser. They’d need to add things like a browsable library and For You tabs to match the native iTunes and Music app offerings.  However, there is no evidence that Apple actually plans to do this.

Clearly, they have the infrastructure for web-based Apple Music playback available … but there aren’t any obvious signs that this codebase is intended to expand beyond embeddable widgets at this time. Maybe we’ll be hearing more about this at the WWDC keynote tomorrow.