Microsoft is putting the keys to Xbox Music in the hand of developers with a new public facing system that’ll let app developers create their own Xbox Music clients.

Microsoft announced that it was unlocking the Xbox Music backend so that developers could plug into it earlier today in the first post on its Xbox Music for Developers blog. For app creators the technical jest is that Microsoft has created REST API’s so that you can create applications that fully use its service. Joining the deep linking functionality from the old Xbox Music API that Microsoft talked about at its BUILD 2014 developer conference is collection management, metadata look-up and Xbox Music Pass streaming & playback.

Users who aren’t developers don’t have much to be excited for just yet, but with any luck they will soon enough. This new API will let developers create apps that can stream Xbox Music Pass content, manage collections and more. Best of all, all the changes made in third-party apps made by developers will sync back to Microsoft-made Xbox Music apps.

By releasing this API it’s clear that Microsoft is hoping for a repeat of the developer community and ecosystem that allowed social networks, like Twitter, to flourish. In giving the developers the tools they need to create their own Xbox Music apps, Microsoft is ensuring that there’ll be more clients for users to choose from. That’s great because Microsoft has taken no end of criticism for the lack of progress on Xbox Music. Since launching Zune as Xbox Music, Microsoft has almost abandoned the service. The company has made small bug fixes available to users at a snail’s pace for each one of its clients, but that’s about it.

Don’t worry, enConnected will let you know the moment the first third-party Xbox Music client arrives.

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