45 ms·

A Note about Spotify Transfers

402 points by davidbarker 6y ago

cafed00d 6y ago
Unsurprising, for core business reasons, for sure. But, it is still customer-unfriendly behavior from Spotify. And probably anti-competitive too. Boy, as one of the very few people who switched over from Spotify to Apple Music, I’m hoping that the Spotify vs. Apple lawsuit turns on Spotify’s head over this
- actuator 6y ago
  I still wish Spotify wins the Apple lawsuit but Spotify needs to change their stance here. They curate some really good playlists, so they can restrict them but they should allow user created playlists to be exported.
  - cafed00d 6y ago
    Yaaaassss! Spotify has such a good recommendation system! I loved every new artist I discovered through Spotify. I only wish they’d let me port all that over to Apple Music. Oh well. Fingers crossed, I guess.
lxe 6y ago
Keep in mind this doesn't actually "copy the files" but creates songs and playlist entries in another service, so nothing nefarious is happening. Spotify is just salty there's a service that allows to quickly find the same songs elsewhere.
- madbkarim 6y ago
  Playing devil’s advocate here. But, I think it can be bad for Spotify if the user copies the playlist that’s being curated by Spotify to another streaming service. It’s good for them if they could add some friction to it by, you know—manually copy it and doesn’t let it update automatically every time they make a change to the playlist—by shutting down the API for this kind of request altogether. It’s not about “allows user to quickly find the same songs elsewhere”, because if you’re not ready for that then you shouldn’t probably be in this business in the first place.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    This is exactly what I use SongShift for :D Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst. Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months. BUT I do love how Apple Music integrates with my iOS devices and I think the sound quality is better. So I just use Songshift to sync the discovery playlists to AM (semi)automatically.
    - tpmx 6y ago
      Btw, I wish Spotify would expand further on Discover Weekly/Release Radar: - a builtin weekly personal archive of DW/RR - a "get me more more interesting music in this style based on other peoples recommendations" button etc.
      - sbarre 6y ago
        It's not exactly what you're asking for, but a few years ago I started creating a new playlist at the start of each month, naming it "<Month> <Year>", and I add any songs I'm enjoying that month.. Most of them come from Discover Weekly or Release Radar, but sometimes for other sources. It's an easy and interesting way to go back in time and see what I was listening to etc.. I have a "house rule" where I never remove any songs from them after the fact. If I added it, then it stays. At the end of the year, I try to pick 2 songs from each month to make a curated "Best of <Year>" and then compare that to the algorithmic one that Spotify sends me. Anyways, it's been a really fun thing and a reasonable substitute for DW/RR archives.
        Fnoord 6y ago
        Although this probably doesn't work for me (see entire post) I really like this idea. I still got my Starred playlist from back when you couldn't like. Been using dual like and Starred ever since they added like list. Since Starred playlist still contains dates, I could retroactively do what you did. However there would be some months with a lot and some with (almost) none and I have a tendency to hyperfocus on certain genres/artists for a while which might split but not on exact start of month.
- BlueGh0st 6y ago
  Somewhat bemusingly, Spotify has an IFTTT applet that does nearly the same thing called "Automatically add your saved tracks in Spotify to a Google spreadsheet". https://ifttt.com/applets/n6RGLXBf https://ifttt.com/applets/n6RGLXBf
  - theturtletalks 6y ago
    Songshift could allow users to add their own API keys to allow transfers at their own risk.
    - digdigdag 6y ago
      ...and spotify would then sue SongShift. Because why not? Even if you can empirically prove that SongShift is in the right and the API keys belong to the end users, Spotify would only need to litigate long enough for SongShift to give in, settle and disable such a feature again. That's how this game works.
      - edanm 6y ago
        I mean, wouldn't this worldview imply that literally any company with cash will be able to cause any company with less cash to do whatever they wanted?
        vr46 6y ago
        The golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.
      - r-w 6y ago
        Anti-SLAPP is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
        sjwright 6y ago
        Not everywhere.
tpmx 6y ago
Seems like an obvious and sane target for antitrust legislation - compare with e.g. the mobile number portability directive in the EU way back in 2002. Related opinion piece: > Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018) http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-portability-an-antitrust-weapon-for-the-digital-economy/ http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-... > In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we could easily transfer our playlists between online music platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), our files between cloud service providers (Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.), our purchase records between online retailers (Amazon, CDiscount, Zalando, etc.) or our social graph between social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc). By limiting platform lock-in, such measures would significantly intensify competition within these market segments.
- actuator 6y ago
  Also, it runs afoul of sections of GDPR. I don't agree that Spotify has to let users transfer Spotify curated playlists as that is a business strength. Songshift seems to show Spotify curated playlists on their homepage like Discover Weekly so I can see why Spotify won't like this. But if my understanding of GDPR is right they have to allow users to transfer playlists created by themselves.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Right. Forgot that. Regarding GDPR and data portability: In practise you can expect to receive a (link to a) zip file via email with a bunch of XML documents after going through a convoluted dance. Also, it often takes some time (days) to receive the data. Basically, nothing that can easily be automated by a third part service - you need user auth of the requesting user to access the data.) "You must comply with a request for data portability without undue delay and at the latest within one month of receipt of the request" I guess it's because data portability isn't trivial, and it was wasn't the key aspect of GDPR. As a contrast: The EU mobile number portability legislation says: max 1 working day.
    - 6y ago
loxs 6y ago
This, among many questionable practices is why I don't empathize with Spotify in their fight with Apple, where Apple slowly dismantles their presence on iOS.
- realmod 6y ago
  What other questionable practices?
  - NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    Particularly, paying per song versus paying per seconds of song delivered is bullshit
trisiak 6y ago
Practices like that are directly against the spirit of data portability under GDPR and CCPA. What's protecting Spotify here is that the user's data is accessed through an API not considered for that privacy control use case. In principle, a tool for transferring of user's data could be operating on a GDPR/CCPA data export that has to be available for all Spotify users in California and EU. Those are just not exposes as easy-to-use APIs (yet).
- londons_explore 6y ago
  In general, GDPR data dumps are provided in "as hard to parse as possible" file formats to discourage exactly that... Imagine things like Facebook messenger chats being indexed by a person name rather than an account ID or phone number so there is a high chance "Chat with Dave" is ambiguous... Not the kind of thing you could start a lawsuit over, but it is enough of a barrier that re-importing exported data is near impossible.
aloknnikhil 6y ago
If anyone is looking for an alternative, I have had a good experience using https://github.com/SathyaBhat/spotify-dl https://github.com/SathyaBhat/spotify-dl Really unfortunate that Spotify dictates what you do with your own playlist when you're not even ripping the songs off of their service.
- actuator 6y ago
  That is not exactly what this is doing. A service to service playlist transfer service is what Songshift seems to does, I think it will be worth having an open source alternative to it.
  - tsujp 6y ago
    I've started work on one now in Ruby (something I've been meaning to brush up my skills on) just out of spite for not letting users export their playlists. Will ping back here and on HN when I have a working prototype.
    - WildGreenLeave 6y ago
      You should do a 'Show HN' :-) I would love to use something like that and move away from Spotify.
    - chewz 6y ago
      I did something like that - tool for transfering Spotify playlists to Apple Music [1] - 3 years ago. It was fun project. Not sure if it still works as I am staying as far from Apple software as I can... And there was more projects like mine on Github at the time. Spotify2AM was good [2]... [1] https://github.com/chew-z/Eumenes https://github.com/chew-z/Eumenes [2] https://github.com/simonschellaert/spotify2am https://github.com/simonschellaert/spotify2am
  - aloknnikhil 6y ago
    That's fair. But for lack of a better alternative, I suggested this. I think just exporting a playlist should be the bare minimum that any service should allow. And this project seems to enable that
pgt 6y ago
I just used a similar service to move from Apple Music to Spotify. Now I'm thinking I should move back before Spotify tries to hold my playlists hostage. Spotify Developer Platform Team, if you're listening: you're imbeciles for doing this and you're putting customers back in a buying position when they were happy to keep giving you money forever. starts looking at alternatives
- avolcano 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, Spotify doesn't really have a Developer Platform team, just a legal department enforcing their ToS. All of their various SDKs are poorly maintained with zero points of contact. I think it's just a handful of engineers who care, working in their spare time at an organization that doesn't have any interest in giving them actual resources. For example: their web playback SDK has a provision about "contact us to use for noncommercial purposes," and there's a long-standing GitHub issue specifically about how no one has ever gotten a reply back when they email about this. Meanwhile, when I had a problem with MusicKit JS - the Apple Music equivalent - I actually got a reply back within a few weeks from an Apple engineer about it that helped me resolve it. Obviously not the shortest timescale, but at least there's clearly some effort being put into it. It helps that they actually are using MusicKit JS to power their own Apple Music web player, while Spotify's playback SDK is a separate codebase, which is why it's missing features like Safari playback that are present in the web player. Spotify's new mobile SDKs are also unusably awful, and can't do basic functions like "playing a single song and stopping instead of autoplaying onwards." They also have deprecated and killed off several past mobile SDKs that were far more feature-filled. I saw a new Spotify-powered radio app that launched recently (Station Rotation) appears to be using the legacy undocumented SDK for playback because of this - can't imagine that app will have much of a future if Spotify ever decides to finally break that SDK. Honestly, I expect Spotify to completely kill their public APIs and SDKs within the next two years. They clearly see no value in them, or they would have invested in maintaining them.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Time to fall back to scraping. In the event scraping is prevented, notify regulators (GDPR, CCPA).
sascha_sl 6y ago
I was already on the verge of switching because Spotify was handing millions to a Joe Rogan so he can keep poisoning the discussions around trans people we apparently must have. This sealed the deal. This is just Spotify outright saying that if someone is not fully convinced Spotify is the right place for them, it needs to to be much much less convenient for them to leave.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
kbos87 6y ago
This is so anti-user. A similar service offered by Spotify is how I moved from Apple Music to Spotify. The playlists belong to the user - this is vendor lock in of the worst sort.
mb7733 6y ago
What part of the TOS was violated, according to Spotify?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pitermach 6y ago
  I'm guessing it was this paragraph in Section IV.1.H of the API terms of service found here: https://developer.spotify.com/terms/#iv https://developer.spotify.com/terms/#iv > h. Do not transfer Spotify Content to unauthorized third parties, including (i) directly or indirectly transferring any data (including aggregate, anonymous or derivative data) received from Spotify to, or use such data in connection with, any ad network, ad exchange, data broker, or other advertising or monetization-related toolset, even if a user consents to such transfer or use; or (ii) to another music service that competes with Spotify or the Spotify Service. Interestingly enough it says these were last updated over 2 years ago, so they must have been not clamping down on this paragraph until now, or they added it recently and didn't bother to update the document version to hide it. Either way, this is very disappointing.
  - mb7733 6y ago
    Ah yes, it looks like you're right. The corresponding definition of Spotify Content is: > Spotify Content” means any content, data, information or material made available through the Spotify Platform, Spotify Service or by Spotify. This may include, among other things, sound recordings, short-form videos, cover art, musical works, artist biographies, song lyrics, metadata, playlists, and user data So it seems that the list of songs that the user "likes" is considered Spotify Content. Does any body know how far this goes? What if one tool accesses the API to extract the list of user's songs into a CSV file, and then a separate tool is used to automatically "like" a list of songs from a CSV file in a competing platform? Does Spotify really own the (Artist, Song) tuples that make up a list of songs?
enlyth 6y ago
It makes sense for Spotify to do this from a business perspective. I've been paying for six years now for Spotify Premium and it's just hands down the best music service, and I will gladly continue to give them my money. The Discord integration, cross device interoperability, UX are simply unmatched on all other music platforms.
- Firehawke 6y ago
  Yes, their service IS great in a lot of areas... but between what they're doing with podcasts and now this bit with playlists, you have to ask yourself if you want to support a company that's pushing vendor lock-in so hard.
bencollier49 6y ago
I switched to Napster when Spotify started to try hoovering up the podcast market. They've been getting increasingly poisonous, it seems.
- rconti 6y ago
  100% love Spotify, was one of my favorite services. Family plan, wife and I get our own accounts, works with Sonos (each of us separately logged into different Spotify accounts on the Sonos so it remembers our playlists!) Now with Tesla adding spotify, I've got a 3rd user that is only used on the car, only problem is manually syncing playlists from one user to another, but you can 'follow' another user now at least. But, this podcasts business is madness. Their podcast integration has always been awful (you can't auto-download new episodes for example), and now they're shoveling millions into content I have less than 0 interest in.
  - bencollier49 6y ago
    Well there you are - I enjoyed Spotify too, but I wasn't going to carry on giving them my money while they tried to disrupt an industry which I dearly love in its current form.
jnurmine 6y ago
I'm happy with Spotify and tried to figure out what this story was about. I saw "SongShift Pro starting at 4.99 USD/month". Do people go for a monthly pricing for this kind of service? I mean transferring playlists from an old service to a new service sounds like a one-off thing. Does someone really need it continuously?
- navels 6y ago
  Until Spotify releases a proper Apple Watch app, yes. I really need to get myself off Spotify, but I have too much automation in place.
  - chance_state 6y ago
    What kind of Spotify automations do you have?
    - navels 6y ago
      The main thing is a cron job that scrapes a private music blog that I'm a member of and updates a playlist. Then another script that can tell when I've listened to a song on that playlist. If I favorited the song, it gets moved to another playlist (bands to further investigate). If I didn't favorite the song, it is deleted.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Both Apple Music and Spotify have a bunch of curated playlists, which are pretty good.
- jon-wood 6y ago
  I’m not sure what the reasons for continuous sync would be, but SongShift will do a manual sync between services for free, and it sounds like I did so to move from Spotify to Apple Music just in time.
fossuser 6y ago
I think this will push me to finally just jump to Apple Music (even though it’s worse and will now be harder to do, plus I’ll miss discover weekly). Spotify’s attack on podcasts with exclusivity and trying to destroy the open standard really bothers me: https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ Now with this I just don’t have much respect for them. When paired with their complaining about Apple’s policies being unfair it makes me really dislike them, they don’t care about their users or what’s best for them. It wouldn’t surprise me if soon I have to call and beg them to cancel my subscription like Sirius XM. FreeYourMusic also still works, so if you want to do this download it quickly before Spotify forces them to break the feature.
- actuator 6y ago
  Amusingly enough, I think the podcast move was a realisation that like Netflix they will need their own content to prosper in the long run when faced against goliaths like Apple, as big players will just throw money and platform advantages at their services. It doesn't help Spotify's image though.
  - jtbayly 6y ago
    No. It was an attempt to coop free content and profit off of it at the expense of the destruction of the ecosystem.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      So yes but also private podcast feeds are a thing. There are plenty of podcasts where you can get credentials to a private feed (maybe it’s ad free, maybe it has bonus content, etc.) by paying them money. Having podcasts that you have to pay to access entirely isn’t that weird.
      - jtbayly 6y ago
        Nothing wrong with that. The problem is that Spotify is doing its best to break the creator-consumer relationship in order to rent seek in the middle. And you literally cannot do what you described with Spotify if you are a podcaster. Spotify can decide to do it, but you can’t.
input_sh 6y ago
I've used similar services multiple times (Spotify to Deezer to Tidal to back to Spotify) and was fascinated by the results. Not 100% able to transfer the entire library, but always in the 90% range. Overall I think that music streaming services were probably the best services for switching platforms, and this is a blow that is surely gonna damage that reputation for me. Compare that to other markets that offer something similar (like ebooks or video streaming) where there's absolutely no chance for you to retain even 10% of your library if you decide to switch, so services like Songshift make no sense in those fields. Having just three major music publishing conglomerates is both a blessing and a curse.
- novok 6y ago
  'Switching' in ebooks involves dumping them into drm-removed epubs or getting an equivalent from libgen. I'm not very aware of a 'spotify for books' that hasn't gone out of business. I think that's because books are far bigger investments than music or even TV.
  - input_sh 6y ago
    > I'm not very aware of a 'spotify for books' that hasn't gone out of business. How about libraries?
jtbayly 6y ago
That’s it. I’m cancelling my Spotify subscription today.
throwawaysea 6y ago
Blatantly anticompetitive. It’s sad to see the once underdog services you love turn into the “evil side”. I hope the US DOJ and EU competition commission go after them hard.
jopsen 6y ago
For once, I'm starting to wonder if I can't just buy a music subscription somewhere else..? I imported my playlist to spotify, it's mine, why shouldn't I be able to export it? I hope to see a response from spotify, because I would prefer not to leave.
unstatusthequo 6y ago
Super happy I already left Spotify then. Nothing worse than being held hostage to a service that doesn’t believe in making things easy for users. Maybe some users would come back if it was easy in/out?
hellotomyrars 6y ago
It's bad for Apple to take a cut of our money and to compete with our service and it's best for the users if they can't do that. We don't want the users to be able to easily shift from our platform to anyone else's, though. That's bad! (Obviously the corporate interests only align with the consumer interest when it serves the bottom line of the corporation.)
- rtsil 6y ago
  I'm on Google Play Music and won't move to Youtube music because it's awful, and Shopify was my preferred destination until today. But seeing how hard they make it for users to move out, I'm not interested anymore. At least Google Takeout allows me to export my GPM data very easily.
  - MonaroVXR 6y ago
    I use iBroadcast instead of Google play music.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    What's wrong with YouTube Music in your opinion? I haven't tried it out much but YouTube has a really good video player and an extensive library of music videos and music in general so I'm surprised you'd say it's awful.
    - physicsguy 6y ago
      It hides all the songs you had in GPM behind another menu for a start.
    - agentdrtran 6y ago
      the app and overall design of the service is, like many Google entertainment products, half-baked at best
NickKampe 6y ago
they could open source the tool now that it's essentially worthless behind their wall.
baxtr 6y ago
But of course it’s Apple who is evil in Spotify’s eyes...
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  Last time I used apple music I did not see any options for exporting playlists.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    The publicly-documented Apple Music API lets you export playlists and does not, as far as we know, have a provision legally prohibiting you from moving to another service. SongShift still lets you get data both in and out of Apple Music.
novok 6y ago
So what is good that is not spotify and not apple music and would have homepod integration soon once audioOS 14 is officially released on the homepod?
grufkork 6y ago
It seems Spotify are tightening up on multiple fronts. In June I believe they cut support for DJ:ing apps, which really sucks (especially for beginners who don’t want to invest too much, which those apps are generally geared towards). Apparently it was something about buffering multiple tracks at the same time. Possibly an understandable anti-piracy move, but stopping something like songshift is really just worsening the experience for the users. People have mentioned the curated playlists being an important part of their product, but people must anyways pay to get those. Strangely, Spotify have also made their API a lot more powerful, even with embedable players on webpages. Kind of seems like a step in the opposite direction, although they might have tightened up that as well since last time I checked.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
They should just start web-scraping then. Have the user open the playlist and copy & paste, or use an extension, user script or bookmarklet, to extract the information. And of course post a warning against maintaining your playlist in Spotify, prominently recommending competing services instead. Is there something that will let me convert a Spotify playlist into a list of e.g. YouTube videos without having a Spotify account?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ofisboy 6y ago
spotify early this year pulled out of all dj apps. as a user, i hate spotify for this. why wouldn't you let me dj with the music? it's not like i'm david gueatta, playing to 5000 people.
ghego1 6y ago
I use Tidal and I'm very satisfied, the catalog is huge, and the playlist are really well curated, plus their music suggestions are always spot on. I would suggest anyone using Spotify to switch. On the plus side, Tidal also pays musicians a four times what Spotify does (last time I checked, I can't find the link), which I think is in itself a good reason to prefer it.
- kingosticks 6y ago
  Last time I checked, Tidal had absolutely no public API. In this regard they are way behind Spotify so keep that in mind if thinking of switching.
  - nxc18 6y ago
    They seem to have a developer program but it requires an application (according to the site). I used a website to transfer my Spotify playlist to Tidal before this recent change. I hope Tidal is prepared to take advantage of Spotify’s customer loyalty bonfire. Not having a strong developer offering isn’t a great look.
    - kingosticks 6y ago
      I applied a few years ago when it became available in my country but I'm still waiting for them to contact me with the outcome. So they failed the trial I gave their service. Perhaps you have to post some money along with your application. It's a shame, there used to be support in mpd for Tidal but since they won't share their API documentation it's now "defunct". I don't understand the game these streaming companies are playing. Is it some kind of security through obscurity or have they crunched the numbers and the costs outweigh the gains. They've had years to take advantage of Spotify's mis-steps so I won't hold my breath. There are some reverse engineered API packages out there for Tidal. They might work but that's not what I'm looking for as a paying customer.
- siquick 6y ago
  I also switched to Tidal after 12 years as a Spotify user. The sound quality is far superior and I much prefer the UI of both the mobile and desktop apps. The only reason I still have the Spotify app installed is to share links to friends as most are still using Spotify.
miki123211 6y ago
Songshift should get around this restriction by providing users a nice tutorial on how to become a Spotify developer and request an API key and secret themselves. This would be pretty much impossible to ban and detect. Even better, make a tool that accepts your login and password and does that for you. It's quite funny that tools like Deemix[1] let you download songs from Spotify[2], but there's no way to actually export them. [1] I won't provide a link because of piracy. [2] Deemix internally converts to Deezer, and then downloads from that.
- avolcano 6y ago
  Sadly, if they tried your first suggestion, Spotify would almost certainly lock down developer access like Twitter has for their new API, requiring an application and manual approval. Login/password and scraping is a more interesting alternative, but then Spotify would presumedly block any server-side scraping. Really, best option I can come up with is browser automation that is entirely client-side (whether a browser extension or maybe wrapping Puppeteer).
whoisjuan 6y ago
Spotify doesn't want Apple to squeeze them with App Store fees and a competing service, but when it comes to restricting the free flow of data out of their service to other services then is fine to be anti-competitive. I'm a happy Spotify user but this is plain hypocrite. You cannot claim to be against the power of larger corps while you as a big corp are doing the same to smaller companies.
punnerud 6y ago
In EU the almost only thing that stop you from building up other software is copyright. Legal restrictions (as Spotify terms) to stop you is null and void, as the Database directive states: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:31996L0009&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... Reevaluation of the directive (2018): http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8466-2018-INIT/en/pdf http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8466-2018-IN... To count as copyright there have to be a substantial manual effort into production of the data. Also byproduct of your ordinary business is not copyright (called “sui generis”). On page 15 there is also about the “horse race” case taken to the court, that state the same.
twirlock 6y ago
Apple Music is great, for anyone curious.
dgaudet 6y ago
well i guess i won't be moving my music to spotify: i'm on google play music right now, and so i'm in the market.
gumby 6y ago
Isn’t the playlist the ussr‘s product, not Spotify’s?
theantonym 6y ago
Sounds like Spotify is trying to make is as hard as possible for the coming exodus to Apple One as there is more perceived value in the Apple bundles than just paying for a single Spotify music subscription.
mehdim 6y ago
This is why, according to GDPR and CCPA principles (it is not written as is in the text) we need to include API neutrality for users, as the right to have an API access to 3rd party applications to exercise users' data portability regulations. All of this without the possibility of the company to revoke API access. Like the net neutrality, but for APIs. https://api500.tumblr.com/post/31465739810/what-is-api-neutrality https://api500.tumblr.com/post/31465739810/what-is-api-neutr...
T3RMINATED 6y ago
Spotify cries when Apple Music fights vs them... they do the same thing to others... RIP Spotify
bentpins 6y ago
Another playlist migration service is https://soundiiz.com/ https://soundiiz.com/ I've been really happy with it. They haven't implemented any restrictions around exporting from Spotify yet. Might be helpful if you'd like to jump ship
- xmprt 6y ago
  I don't see Spotify on that page.
  - bentpins 6y ago
    Hm right. I am fairly sure it was on the homepage. It's still inside the app and I managed to do a transfer out no worries. I would guess they are in the process of removing it? https://soundiiz.com/tutorial/spotify-to-apple-music https://soundiiz.com/tutorial/spotify-to-apple-music
jarbus 6y ago
This just gave me the incentive to switch off of Spotify now, that way it’s less of a pain 5+ years into the future. Thanks for showing your true colors, Spotify.
mavidser 6y ago
I started self-hosting most of my stuff for a while and had been putting off moving to MP3s and AirSonic for a while because Spotify seemed pretty good, and it always had the escape route. Looks like this is what forces my move now :(

402 points by davidbarker 6y ago

Unsurprising, for core business reasons, for sure. But, it is still customer-unfriendly behavior from Spotify. And probably anti-competitive too. Boy, as one of the very few people who switched over from Spotify to Apple Music, I’m hoping that the Spotify vs. Apple lawsuit turns on Spotify’s head over this

actuator 6y ago
I still wish Spotify wins the Apple lawsuit but Spotify needs to change their stance here. They curate some really good playlists, so they can restrict them but they should allow user created playlists to be exported.
- cafed00d 6y ago
  Yaaaassss! Spotify has such a good recommendation system! I loved every new artist I discovered through Spotify. I only wish they’d let me port all that over to Apple Music. Oh well. Fingers crossed, I guess.

lxe 6y ago

Keep in mind this doesn't actually "copy the files" but creates songs and playlist entries in another service, so nothing nefarious is happening. Spotify is just salty there's a service that allows to quickly find the same songs elsewhere.

madbkarim 6y ago
Playing devil’s advocate here. But, I think it can be bad for Spotify if the user copies the playlist that’s being curated by Spotify to another streaming service. It’s good for them if they could add some friction to it by, you know—manually copy it and doesn’t let it update automatically every time they make a change to the playlist—by shutting down the API for this kind of request altogether. It’s not about “allows user to quickly find the same songs elsewhere”, because if you’re not ready for that then you shouldn’t probably be in this business in the first place.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  This is exactly what I use SongShift for :D Apple's "New Music Mix" is absolute shit compared to Spotify's "Discover Weekly". Most of the stuff Spotify suggests to me are either complete bangers or listen-worthy at worst. Apple's stuff though... It's like they don't have ANY intelligence in the system at all. I listen to 80's gangsta-rap once, then I get modern mumblerap shit for months and months. BUT I do love how Apple Music integrates with my iOS devices and I think the sound quality is better. So I just use Songshift to sync the discovery playlists to AM (semi)automatically.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Btw, I wish Spotify would expand further on Discover Weekly/Release Radar: - a builtin weekly personal archive of DW/RR - a "get me more more interesting music in this style based on other peoples recommendations" button etc.
    - sbarre 6y ago
      It's not exactly what you're asking for, but a few years ago I started creating a new playlist at the start of each month, naming it "<Month> <Year>", and I add any songs I'm enjoying that month.. Most of them come from Discover Weekly or Release Radar, but sometimes for other sources. It's an easy and interesting way to go back in time and see what I was listening to etc.. I have a "house rule" where I never remove any songs from them after the fact. If I added it, then it stays. At the end of the year, I try to pick 2 songs from each month to make a curated "Best of <Year>" and then compare that to the algorithmic one that Spotify sends me. Anyways, it's been a really fun thing and a reasonable substitute for DW/RR archives.
      - Fnoord 6y ago
        Although this probably doesn't work for me (see entire post) I really like this idea. I still got my Starred playlist from back when you couldn't like. Been using dual like and Starred ever since they added like list. Since Starred playlist still contains dates, I could retroactively do what you did. However there would be some months with a lot and some with (almost) none and I have a tendency to hyperfocus on certain genres/artists for a while which might split but not on exact start of month.
BlueGh0st 6y ago
Somewhat bemusingly, Spotify has an IFTTT applet that does nearly the same thing called "Automatically add your saved tracks in Spotify to a Google spreadsheet". https://ifttt.com/applets/n6RGLXBf https://ifttt.com/applets/n6RGLXBf
- theturtletalks 6y ago
  Songshift could allow users to add their own API keys to allow transfers at their own risk.
  - digdigdag 6y ago
    ...and spotify would then sue SongShift. Because why not? Even if you can empirically prove that SongShift is in the right and the API keys belong to the end users, Spotify would only need to litigate long enough for SongShift to give in, settle and disable such a feature again. That's how this game works.
    - edanm 6y ago
      I mean, wouldn't this worldview imply that literally any company with cash will be able to cause any company with less cash to do whatever they wanted?
      - vr46 6y ago
        The golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.
    - r-w 6y ago
      Anti-SLAPP is a thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_publ...
      - sjwright 6y ago
        Not everywhere.

tpmx 6y ago

Seems like an obvious and sane target for antitrust legislation - compare with e.g. the mobile number portability directive in the EU way back in 2002. Related opinion piece: > Data portability: An antitrust weapon for the digital economy? (Le Monde, 2018) http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-portability-an-antitrust-weapon-for-the-digital-economy/ http://www.fondapol.org/en/the-foundation/medias-en-en/data-... > In concrete terms, what would portability in the digital economy look like? Let us imagine we could easily transfer our playlists between online music platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music, etc.), our files between cloud service providers (Google Drive, DropBox, OneDrive, etc.), our purchase records between online retailers (Amazon, CDiscount, Zalando, etc.) or our social graph between social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc). By limiting platform lock-in, such measures would significantly intensify competition within these market segments.

actuator 6y ago
Also, it runs afoul of sections of GDPR. I don't agree that Spotify has to let users transfer Spotify curated playlists as that is a business strength. Songshift seems to show Spotify curated playlists on their homepage like Discover Weekly so I can see why Spotify won't like this. But if my understanding of GDPR is right they have to allow users to transfer playlists created by themselves.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Right. Forgot that. Regarding GDPR and data portability: In practise you can expect to receive a (link to a) zip file via email with a bunch of XML documents after going through a convoluted dance. Also, it often takes some time (days) to receive the data. Basically, nothing that can easily be automated by a third part service - you need user auth of the requesting user to access the data.) "You must comply with a request for data portability without undue delay and at the latest within one month of receipt of the request" I guess it's because data portability isn't trivial, and it was wasn't the key aspect of GDPR. As a contrast: The EU mobile number portability legislation says: max 1 working day.
  - 6y ago

loxs 6y ago

This, among many questionable practices is why I don't empathize with Spotify in their fight with Apple, where Apple slowly dismantles their presence on iOS.

realmod 6y ago
What other questionable practices?
- NikolaeVarius 6y ago
  Particularly, paying per song versus paying per seconds of song delivered is bullshit

trisiak 6y ago

Practices like that are directly against the spirit of data portability under GDPR and CCPA. What's protecting Spotify here is that the user's data is accessed through an API not considered for that privacy control use case. In principle, a tool for transferring of user's data could be operating on a GDPR/CCPA data export that has to be available for all Spotify users in California and EU. Those are just not exposes as easy-to-use APIs (yet).

londons_explore 6y ago
In general, GDPR data dumps are provided in "as hard to parse as possible" file formats to discourage exactly that... Imagine things like Facebook messenger chats being indexed by a person name rather than an account ID or phone number so there is a high chance "Chat with Dave" is ambiguous... Not the kind of thing you could start a lawsuit over, but it is enough of a barrier that re-importing exported data is near impossible.

aloknnikhil 6y ago

If anyone is looking for an alternative, I have had a good experience using https://github.com/SathyaBhat/spotify-dl https://github.com/SathyaBhat/spotify-dl Really unfortunate that Spotify dictates what you do with your own playlist when you're not even ripping the songs off of their service.

actuator 6y ago
That is not exactly what this is doing. A service to service playlist transfer service is what Songshift seems to does, I think it will be worth having an open source alternative to it.
- tsujp 6y ago
  I've started work on one now in Ruby (something I've been meaning to brush up my skills on) just out of spite for not letting users export their playlists. Will ping back here and on HN when I have a working prototype.
  - WildGreenLeave 6y ago
    You should do a 'Show HN' :-) I would love to use something like that and move away from Spotify.
  - chewz 6y ago
    I did something like that - tool for transfering Spotify playlists to Apple Music [1] - 3 years ago. It was fun project. Not sure if it still works as I am staying as far from Apple software as I can... And there was more projects like mine on Github at the time. Spotify2AM was good [2]... [1] https://github.com/chew-z/Eumenes https://github.com/chew-z/Eumenes [2] https://github.com/simonschellaert/spotify2am https://github.com/simonschellaert/spotify2am
- aloknnikhil 6y ago
  That's fair. But for lack of a better alternative, I suggested this. I think just exporting a playlist should be the bare minimum that any service should allow. And this project seems to enable that

pgt 6y ago

I just used a similar service to move from Apple Music to Spotify. Now I'm thinking I should move back before Spotify tries to hold my playlists hostage. Spotify Developer Platform Team, if you're listening: you're imbeciles for doing this and you're putting customers back in a buying position when they were happy to keep giving you money forever. starts looking at alternatives

avolcano 6y ago
As far as I can tell, Spotify doesn't really have a Developer Platform team, just a legal department enforcing their ToS. All of their various SDKs are poorly maintained with zero points of contact. I think it's just a handful of engineers who care, working in their spare time at an organization that doesn't have any interest in giving them actual resources. For example: their web playback SDK has a provision about "contact us to use for noncommercial purposes," and there's a long-standing GitHub issue specifically about how no one has ever gotten a reply back when they email about this. Meanwhile, when I had a problem with MusicKit JS - the Apple Music equivalent - I actually got a reply back within a few weeks from an Apple engineer about it that helped me resolve it. Obviously not the shortest timescale, but at least there's clearly some effort being put into it. It helps that they actually are using MusicKit JS to power their own Apple Music web player, while Spotify's playback SDK is a separate codebase, which is why it's missing features like Safari playback that are present in the web player. Spotify's new mobile SDKs are also unusably awful, and can't do basic functions like "playing a single song and stopping instead of autoplaying onwards." They also have deprecated and killed off several past mobile SDKs that were far more feature-filled. I saw a new Spotify-powered radio app that launched recently (Station Rotation) appears to be using the legacy undocumented SDK for playback because of this - can't imagine that app will have much of a future if Spotify ever decides to finally break that SDK. Honestly, I expect Spotify to completely kill their public APIs and SDKs within the next two years. They clearly see no value in them, or they would have invested in maintaining them.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Time to fall back to scraping. In the event scraping is prevented, notify regulators (GDPR, CCPA).

sascha_sl 6y ago

I was already on the verge of switching because Spotify was handing millions to a Joe Rogan so he can keep poisoning the discussions around trans people we apparently must have. This sealed the deal. This is just Spotify outright saying that if someone is not fully convinced Spotify is the right place for them, it needs to to be much much less convenient for them to leave.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

kbos87 6y ago

This is so anti-user. A similar service offered by Spotify is how I moved from Apple Music to Spotify. The playlists belong to the user - this is vendor lock in of the worst sort.

mb7733 6y ago

What part of the TOS was violated, according to Spotify?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pitermach 6y ago
I'm guessing it was this paragraph in Section IV.1.H of the API terms of service found here: https://developer.spotify.com/terms/#iv https://developer.spotify.com/terms/#iv > h. Do not transfer Spotify Content to unauthorized third parties, including (i) directly or indirectly transferring any data (including aggregate, anonymous or derivative data) received from Spotify to, or use such data in connection with, any ad network, ad exchange, data broker, or other advertising or monetization-related toolset, even if a user consents to such transfer or use; or (ii) to another music service that competes with Spotify or the Spotify Service. Interestingly enough it says these were last updated over 2 years ago, so they must have been not clamping down on this paragraph until now, or they added it recently and didn't bother to update the document version to hide it. Either way, this is very disappointing.
- mb7733 6y ago
  Ah yes, it looks like you're right. The corresponding definition of Spotify Content is: > Spotify Content” means any content, data, information or material made available through the Spotify Platform, Spotify Service or by Spotify. This may include, among other things, sound recordings, short-form videos, cover art, musical works, artist biographies, song lyrics, metadata, playlists, and user data So it seems that the list of songs that the user "likes" is considered Spotify Content. Does any body know how far this goes? What if one tool accesses the API to extract the list of user's songs into a CSV file, and then a separate tool is used to automatically "like" a list of songs from a CSV file in a competing platform? Does Spotify really own the (Artist, Song) tuples that make up a list of songs?

enlyth 6y ago

It makes sense for Spotify to do this from a business perspective. I've been paying for six years now for Spotify Premium and it's just hands down the best music service, and I will gladly continue to give them my money. The Discord integration, cross device interoperability, UX are simply unmatched on all other music platforms.

Firehawke 6y ago
Yes, their service IS great in a lot of areas... but between what they're doing with podcasts and now this bit with playlists, you have to ask yourself if you want to support a company that's pushing vendor lock-in so hard.

bencollier49 6y ago

I switched to Napster when Spotify started to try hoovering up the podcast market. They've been getting increasingly poisonous, it seems.

rconti 6y ago
100% love Spotify, was one of my favorite services. Family plan, wife and I get our own accounts, works with Sonos (each of us separately logged into different Spotify accounts on the Sonos so it remembers our playlists!) Now with Tesla adding spotify, I've got a 3rd user that is only used on the car, only problem is manually syncing playlists from one user to another, but you can 'follow' another user now at least. But, this podcasts business is madness. Their podcast integration has always been awful (you can't auto-download new episodes for example), and now they're shoveling millions into content I have less than 0 interest in.
- bencollier49 6y ago
  Well there you are - I enjoyed Spotify too, but I wasn't going to carry on giving them my money while they tried to disrupt an industry which I dearly love in its current form.

jnurmine 6y ago

I'm happy with Spotify and tried to figure out what this story was about. I saw "SongShift Pro starting at 4.99 USD/month". Do people go for a monthly pricing for this kind of service? I mean transferring playlists from an old service to a new service sounds like a one-off thing. Does someone really need it continuously?

navels 6y ago
Until Spotify releases a proper Apple Watch app, yes. I really need to get myself off Spotify, but I have too much automation in place.
- chance_state 6y ago
  What kind of Spotify automations do you have?
  - navels 6y ago
    The main thing is a cron job that scrapes a private music blog that I'm a member of and updates a playlist. Then another script that can tell when I've listened to a song on that playlist. If I favorited the song, it gets moved to another playlist (bands to further investigate). If I didn't favorite the song, it is deleted.
theshrike79 6y ago
Both Apple Music and Spotify have a bunch of curated playlists, which are pretty good.
jon-wood 6y ago
I’m not sure what the reasons for continuous sync would be, but SongShift will do a manual sync between services for free, and it sounds like I did so to move from Spotify to Apple Music just in time.

fossuser 6y ago

I think this will push me to finally just jump to Apple Music (even though it’s worse and will now be harder to do, plus I’ll miss discover weekly). Spotify’s attack on podcasts with exclusivity and trying to destroy the open standard really bothers me: https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ https://stratechery.com/2020/dithering-and-the-open-web/ Now with this I just don’t have much respect for them. When paired with their complaining about Apple’s policies being unfair it makes me really dislike them, they don’t care about their users or what’s best for them. It wouldn’t surprise me if soon I have to call and beg them to cancel my subscription like Sirius XM. FreeYourMusic also still works, so if you want to do this download it quickly before Spotify forces them to break the feature.

actuator 6y ago
Amusingly enough, I think the podcast move was a realisation that like Netflix they will need their own content to prosper in the long run when faced against goliaths like Apple, as big players will just throw money and platform advantages at their services. It doesn't help Spotify's image though.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  No. It was an attempt to coop free content and profit off of it at the expense of the destruction of the ecosystem.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    So yes but also private podcast feeds are a thing. There are plenty of podcasts where you can get credentials to a private feed (maybe it’s ad free, maybe it has bonus content, etc.) by paying them money. Having podcasts that you have to pay to access entirely isn’t that weird.
    - jtbayly 6y ago
      Nothing wrong with that. The problem is that Spotify is doing its best to break the creator-consumer relationship in order to rent seek in the middle. And you literally cannot do what you described with Spotify if you are a podcaster. Spotify can decide to do it, but you can’t.

input_sh 6y ago

I've used similar services multiple times (Spotify to Deezer to Tidal to back to Spotify) and was fascinated by the results. Not 100% able to transfer the entire library, but always in the 90% range. Overall I think that music streaming services were probably the best services for switching platforms, and this is a blow that is surely gonna damage that reputation for me. Compare that to other markets that offer something similar (like ebooks or video streaming) where there's absolutely no chance for you to retain even 10% of your library if you decide to switch, so services like Songshift make no sense in those fields. Having just three major music publishing conglomerates is both a blessing and a curse.

novok 6y ago
'Switching' in ebooks involves dumping them into drm-removed epubs or getting an equivalent from libgen. I'm not very aware of a 'spotify for books' that hasn't gone out of business. I think that's because books are far bigger investments than music or even TV.
- input_sh 6y ago
  > I'm not very aware of a 'spotify for books' that hasn't gone out of business. How about libraries?

jtbayly 6y ago

That’s it. I’m cancelling my Spotify subscription today.

throwawaysea 6y ago

Blatantly anticompetitive. It’s sad to see the once underdog services you love turn into the “evil side”. I hope the US DOJ and EU competition commission go after them hard.

jopsen 6y ago

For once, I'm starting to wonder if I can't just buy a music subscription somewhere else..? I imported my playlist to spotify, it's mine, why shouldn't I be able to export it? I hope to see a response from spotify, because I would prefer not to leave.

unstatusthequo 6y ago

Super happy I already left Spotify then. Nothing worse than being held hostage to a service that doesn’t believe in making things easy for users. Maybe some users would come back if it was easy in/out?

hellotomyrars 6y ago

It's bad for Apple to take a cut of our money and to compete with our service and it's best for the users if they can't do that. We don't want the users to be able to easily shift from our platform to anyone else's, though. That's bad! (Obviously the corporate interests only align with the consumer interest when it serves the bottom line of the corporation.)

rtsil 6y ago
I'm on Google Play Music and won't move to Youtube music because it's awful, and Shopify was my preferred destination until today. But seeing how hard they make it for users to move out, I'm not interested anymore. At least Google Takeout allows me to export my GPM data very easily.
- MonaroVXR 6y ago
  I use iBroadcast instead of Google play music.
- xmprt 6y ago
  What's wrong with YouTube Music in your opinion? I haven't tried it out much but YouTube has a really good video player and an extensive library of music videos and music in general so I'm surprised you'd say it's awful.
  - physicsguy 6y ago
    It hides all the songs you had in GPM behind another menu for a start.
  - agentdrtran 6y ago
    the app and overall design of the service is, like many Google entertainment products, half-baked at best

NickKampe 6y ago

they could open source the tool now that it's essentially worthless behind their wall.

baxtr 6y ago

But of course it’s Apple who is evil in Spotify’s eyes...

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Last time I used apple music I did not see any options for exporting playlists.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  The publicly-documented Apple Music API lets you export playlists and does not, as far as we know, have a provision legally prohibiting you from moving to another service. SongShift still lets you get data both in and out of Apple Music.

novok 6y ago

So what is good that is not spotify and not apple music and would have homepod integration soon once audioOS 14 is officially released on the homepod?

grufkork 6y ago

It seems Spotify are tightening up on multiple fronts. In June I believe they cut support for DJ:ing apps, which really sucks (especially for beginners who don’t want to invest too much, which those apps are generally geared towards). Apparently it was something about buffering multiple tracks at the same time. Possibly an understandable anti-piracy move, but stopping something like songshift is really just worsening the experience for the users. People have mentioned the curated playlists being an important part of their product, but people must anyways pay to get those. Strangely, Spotify have also made their API a lot more powerful, even with embedable players on webpages. Kind of seems like a step in the opposite direction, although they might have tightened up that as well since last time I checked.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

They should just start web-scraping then. Have the user open the playlist and copy & paste, or use an extension, user script or bookmarklet, to extract the information. And of course post a warning against maintaining your playlist in Spotify, prominently recommending competing services instead. Is there something that will let me convert a Spotify playlist into a list of e.g. YouTube videos without having a Spotify account?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ofisboy 6y ago

spotify early this year pulled out of all dj apps. as a user, i hate spotify for this. why wouldn't you let me dj with the music? it's not like i'm david gueatta, playing to 5000 people.

ghego1 6y ago

I use Tidal and I'm very satisfied, the catalog is huge, and the playlist are really well curated, plus their music suggestions are always spot on. I would suggest anyone using Spotify to switch. On the plus side, Tidal also pays musicians a four times what Spotify does (last time I checked, I can't find the link), which I think is in itself a good reason to prefer it.

kingosticks 6y ago
Last time I checked, Tidal had absolutely no public API. In this regard they are way behind Spotify so keep that in mind if thinking of switching.
- nxc18 6y ago
  They seem to have a developer program but it requires an application (according to the site). I used a website to transfer my Spotify playlist to Tidal before this recent change. I hope Tidal is prepared to take advantage of Spotify’s customer loyalty bonfire. Not having a strong developer offering isn’t a great look.
  - kingosticks 6y ago
    I applied a few years ago when it became available in my country but I'm still waiting for them to contact me with the outcome. So they failed the trial I gave their service. Perhaps you have to post some money along with your application. It's a shame, there used to be support in mpd for Tidal but since they won't share their API documentation it's now "defunct". I don't understand the game these streaming companies are playing. Is it some kind of security through obscurity or have they crunched the numbers and the costs outweigh the gains. They've had years to take advantage of Spotify's mis-steps so I won't hold my breath. There are some reverse engineered API packages out there for Tidal. They might work but that's not what I'm looking for as a paying customer.
siquick 6y ago
I also switched to Tidal after 12 years as a Spotify user. The sound quality is far superior and I much prefer the UI of both the mobile and desktop apps. The only reason I still have the Spotify app installed is to share links to friends as most are still using Spotify.

miki123211 6y ago

Songshift should get around this restriction by providing users a nice tutorial on how to become a Spotify developer and request an API key and secret themselves. This would be pretty much impossible to ban and detect. Even better, make a tool that accepts your login and password and does that for you. It's quite funny that tools like Deemix[1] let you download songs from Spotify[2], but there's no way to actually export them. [1] I won't provide a link because of piracy. [2] Deemix internally converts to Deezer, and then downloads from that.

avolcano 6y ago
Sadly, if they tried your first suggestion, Spotify would almost certainly lock down developer access like Twitter has for their new API, requiring an application and manual approval. Login/password and scraping is a more interesting alternative, but then Spotify would presumedly block any server-side scraping. Really, best option I can come up with is browser automation that is entirely client-side (whether a browser extension or maybe wrapping Puppeteer).

whoisjuan 6y ago

Spotify doesn't want Apple to squeeze them with App Store fees and a competing service, but when it comes to restricting the free flow of data out of their service to other services then is fine to be anti-competitive. I'm a happy Spotify user but this is plain hypocrite. You cannot claim to be against the power of larger corps while you as a big corp are doing the same to smaller companies.

punnerud 6y ago

In EU the almost only thing that stop you from building up other software is copyright. Legal restrictions (as Spotify terms) to stop you is null and void, as the Database directive states: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:31996L0009&from=EN https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE... Reevaluation of the directive (2018): http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8466-2018-INIT/en/pdf http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8466-2018-IN... To count as copyright there have to be a substantial manual effort into production of the data. Also byproduct of your ordinary business is not copyright (called “sui generis”). On page 15 there is also about the “horse race” case taken to the court, that state the same.

twirlock 6y ago

Apple Music is great, for anyone curious.

dgaudet 6y ago

well i guess i won't be moving my music to spotify: i'm on google play music right now, and so i'm in the market.

gumby 6y ago

Isn’t the playlist the ussr‘s product, not Spotify’s?

theantonym 6y ago

Sounds like Spotify is trying to make is as hard as possible for the coming exodus to Apple One as there is more perceived value in the Apple bundles than just paying for a single Spotify music subscription.

mehdim 6y ago

This is why, according to GDPR and CCPA principles (it is not written as is in the text) we need to include API neutrality for users, as the right to have an API access to 3rd party applications to exercise users' data portability regulations. All of this without the possibility of the company to revoke API access. Like the net neutrality, but for APIs. https://api500.tumblr.com/post/31465739810/what-is-api-neutrality https://api500.tumblr.com/post/31465739810/what-is-api-neutr...

T3RMINATED 6y ago

Spotify cries when Apple Music fights vs them... they do the same thing to others... RIP Spotify

bentpins 6y ago

Another playlist migration service is https://soundiiz.com/ https://soundiiz.com/ I've been really happy with it. They haven't implemented any restrictions around exporting from Spotify yet. Might be helpful if you'd like to jump ship

xmprt 6y ago
I don't see Spotify on that page.
- bentpins 6y ago
  Hm right. I am fairly sure it was on the homepage. It's still inside the app and I managed to do a transfer out no worries. I would guess they are in the process of removing it? https://soundiiz.com/tutorial/spotify-to-apple-music https://soundiiz.com/tutorial/spotify-to-apple-music

jarbus 6y ago

This just gave me the incentive to switch off of Spotify now, that way it’s less of a pain 5+ years into the future. Thanks for showing your true colors, Spotify.

mavidser 6y ago

I started self-hosting most of my stuff for a while and had been putting off moving to MP3s and AirSonic for a while because Spotify seemed pretty good, and it always had the escape route. Looks like this is what forces my move now :(